Looking for the secret to landing your website at the top of Google every time? As it turns out, Google has about 200 SEO factors that influence your organic ranking on a Search Engine Results Page, aka an SERP. Taken together, all these variables will affect your overall SEO.
As the algorithm updates, search engines will alter their criteria. This means that not all factors are created equal.
To help you crack the code and make your mark on the Internet, we’ve put together a list of tips on how to build your natural SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to the process of improving your website’s ranking in search engine results. Your goal is to maximize your visibility and boost your website traffic.
Through a variety of methods, SEO is meant to attract the attention of web crawlers—these little robots will classify your website based on the info they detect from your content.
Ideally, they put you right at the top of the list for keyword searches in your activity.
Out of all of Google’s criteria, web experts agree that three main factors stand out. User behaviour, links, and content form the magical trio when it comes to boosting your SEO. Though they won’t all have the same impact on your strategy, each one plays an essential role in leading your company to your prospects.
Above all else, Google wants high-quality content. Your website needs to be original and creative—plagiarism is a big no-no. Google’s web crawlers will severely penalize any “duplicate content.”
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Come up with catchy titles
A good title needs to reflect your topic or landing page. But don’t just regurgitate a slew of keywords. Come up with something catchy—you want to inspire people to read your text. Don’t go over 65 characters. Hook your readers fast so you can increase the number of clicks and boost your page views.
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Update your website as much as possible
Regularly publish new content and/or update your current pages. There’s no substitute for keeping your website fresh. This will attract more traffic and place you higher in search results.
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Don’t overdo it with keywords
Too many keywords make your texts tedious to read and your SEO will suffer. Google prefers quality over quantity. Your website should sound like it was written by a human and not a robot.
Semantic analysis tools like Your Text or SEO Quantum can help you identify the best themes and keywords for integrating into your texts.
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Optimize your images for SEO
Your images need to reflect your content and inspire Internet users to click on your website and browse. Stick with royalty-free platforms and make sure your images aren’t too big for optimal loading times. (The ideal size is less than 100 KB, but make sure you don’t compromise on quality with tiny images)
To boost your SEO even more, you’ll also want to fill out the following fields:
- Title Attribute
- File Name
- Caption
- Image Size
- Indexing
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Build a strong “internal mesh” and optimize your backlinks
To win at SEO you need a solid netlinking strategy.
Netlinking refers to the network of links that connect different pages to a website. It allows search engines to access less visible pages while demonstrating coherence and cohesion between a website’s different sections.
Here are some points to look out for when optimizing your netlinking strategy:
- Coherent, relevent links—they need to add value for your Internet users
- Position—the page you link to should be accessible from the homepage (maximum three clicks away)
- Link Anchor—it’s a good idea to put the keyword or phrase where you embed the link in. Just make sure that you don’t “over-optimize” the same words and expressions. Less is more when it comes to SEO.
- Quality over quantity—for best results, include 2 to 3 well-positioned links in your article or web page
External links (backlinks) send visitors directly to another site when they click on a keyword. Since the year 2000, backlinks have been crucial to Google’s algorithms, acting as a key metric for determining your content’s popularity. More backlinks translate into a higher ranking on Google. So you want to get as many backlinks as you can.
A well-structured text will produce better SEO. To optimize your content’s hierarchy, you need to use the appropriate heading tags (<h1></h1> then <h2></h2>, <h3></h3> etc.)
The <Heading> tag is extremely important since its content is visible in Google search results. It is key to attracting website visitors to your page. Just to give you an idea, 80% of articles and pages without an H2 do not perform well.
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Include a compelling meta description
Your meta description is a 240-character text that introduces your web page content
This section is important because it is the first thing that appears under the title in search results.
If you don’t fill in your meta description, Google will automatically use the first lines from the page. This means that it won’t necessarily be optimized for your keywords.
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Keep your website accessible
Look out for 404 pages! Besides being annoying for visitors, they are also detrimental to your SEO.
Based on your CRM, the URLs for your web pages and articles are often generated automatically. It is best to rewrite them yourself—include keywords that match your content and titles while erasing any numbers or special characters that might have snuck in.
Important: Rewriting your URLs needs to happen BEFORE you launch your website. Once Google has already indexed your pages, we don’t recommend that you change your URLs.
💡 Your Next Step 👨💻
Ready to optimize your natural SEO? As you can see, the process is complex. For sure-fire success, your best bet is to hire a digital strategist or webmarketing agency At Linkeo, our experts have been helping small businesses make their digital leap for over 20 years.
*SERP : (Search Engine Result Page) the results page that appears below a keyword search