17 Best Practices For SEO To Boost Your Ranking

There are many best practices for SEO, including those provided by Google.

Here are 17 tips that can help one develop a better search presence.

What Do Best Practices For SEO Even Mean?

Best practices for SEO are generally regarded as those that abide within Google’s evolving guidelines and are not explicitly listed by Google as manipulative.

But best practices are more than just what Google considers manipulative and what is not.

For example, Google’s guidelines don’t tell you how to choose to host, how to optimize a WordPress site, or whether a website builder makes the most sense for a specific situation.

Those are the kinds of best practices this guide will cover.

1. Choose The Best Platform For Your Situation

A good place to begin is at the point before any code is uploaded to the web.

Understanding the technology that underlies a web presence is important to making the best choice for SEO.

Get this part right, and the site will be well positioned for sprinting toward first place.

Why Choose Self-Hosted?

Today’s choices are between a CMS (content management system) hosted on a publisher’s server, and site builder platforms where the technology is hosted and managed by the provider.

Many people choose self-hosted open source solutions (like WordPress) because of the extensive support and development network, which provides complete freedom to build custom sites that users can optimize without limits other than their own skill level.

The downside of self-hosted solutions is the need for technical skills for optimizing templates, dealing with constant updates, and acquiring the necessary knowledge to create a strong security posture against hacking.

Examples of a self-hosted CMS:

• WordPress.
• Drupal.
• Joomla.
• Magento.
• phpBB.
• XenForo.

Why do SaaS Platforms Make Sense?

Many businesses prefer to focus on doing business, not maintaining website technology.

An attorney’s skill is litigating, not learning how to switch to a System Font Stack on their self-hosted CMS.

For businesses that prefer a high-performance website without having to deal with technology, the SaaS (software as a service) website builder platform is increasingly considered the best choice for many small to medium-sized businesses.

Examples of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms:

• Wix.
• Duda.
• Squarespace.
• Weebly.
• Shopify.

The best practice, then, is to audit what the company needs for transacting business online and then see which technology works best – a self-hosted CMS or a SaaS website builder platform.

2. WordPress SEO

There are many CMSs to choose from.

WordPress is arguably the most popular open-source, free system with a huge global community of developers supporting it, including for SEO.

It’s possible for anyone with a moderate understanding of how to use WordPress to create an entire website and pay almost nothing.

That includes free templates and free SEO plugins, plus any other plugins to extend the functionality, like the WooCommerce plugin for creating eCommerce stores on a $0 budget.

3. Website Builder Platforms For Easy SEO

Understanding how to choose the best way to create an online presence is a best practice for SEO.

One of the ways to create an online presence is with a SaaS website builder platform.

Not too long ago, SaaS website builder platforms were great for building attractive websites but not so great at site speed and SEO.

But that’s no longer the case.

Today, the major website builders match or surpass the traditional CMS in terms of site speed and SEO.

Over 14 million websites have been built using Duda’s technology, and Wix has over 200 million users worldwide.

Focusing on SEO, the main advantage of website builder platforms is that they take care of the technology, integrate directly with Google Business Profile, produce valid structured data, output on-page SEO that conforms to Google’s guidelines, and excel in site speed and performance.

A platform like Wix makes it easy for businesses to get online and start competing with excellent SEO.

A platform like Duda is easy to use for business owners. Still, it is designed to meet the needs of digital agencies and service providers who can leverage Duda’s platform to quickly roll out attractive and fast-performing websites that are flexible for customizations and SEO.

Duda’s platform handles the underlying technology, for example, optimizing the site for speed, integrating with a CDN (content delivery network), and semantic tagging such as in-section elements.

4. Fast Web Hosting

Using a fast web hosting environment is a top SEO best practice – as is choosing the most appropriate web hosting platform.

Examples of different kinds of web hosting:

• Shared Hosting.
• Premium Shared Hosting.
• Virtual Private Server.
• Managed WordPress Hosting.
• Cloud Hosting.
• Dedicated Server.

The SEO best practice for hosting is to choose the fastest web hosting possible that also makes sense economically.

Optimizing for site speed depends on at least four factors:

• Fast hosting.
• Fast website.
• Fast user Internet access.
• Fast user mobile device.

Of those four, the first two (hosting and a fast website) are under a business’ control.

And of those two, fast hosting is arguably the most important — because a slow web host can make even a fast website perform slowly.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the easiest way to deploy a website (or multiple websites).

The downside to shared hosting is that the least expensive plans place thousands of websites on a single server, so all of the sites have to share the limited resources of that one server.

That can result in slower websites, especially if any of the other sites on the server experience a heavy load.

Sites that are popular and use “too many resources” may have their traffic slowed down (a.k.a, “throttled”).

Some might say it’s a good way to begin, then scale up once the site becomes more popular.

I disagree.

Once a site becomes popular, the traffic will be throttled, which may slow a website’s popularity – because slow websites drive away site visitors who would have otherwise become customers or frequent visitors.

Many SEO pros may agree that a shared hosting environment is fine for a hobby site, but not for a site with monetary goals.

Premium Shared Hosting

Some premium shared hosting environments aren’t necessarily cheap, but are generally less expensive than renting an entire server.

The value of premium shared hosting is that it’s easy to deploy websites and access more server RAM and CPU resources.

Prices can range from $40 to over $100 per month.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is a specialized server environment specifically tuned for WordPress websites.

These hosting environments only run WordPress sites and offer features that offload tasks from the website, enabling the WordPress sites to perform at a higher level.

The benefits of managed WordPress hosting are faster performance, better security, and less effort managing the technology side of WordPress.

Website security is an SEO issue because website rankings begin to drop once a site is hacked.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

A VPS is the next step up that offers fast performance, but at significantly higher prices than shared servers.

The value of a VPS is more control over the server environment.

The downside is that many VPS hosting environments require more technical ability to manage successfully. However, some VPS offerings have a managed option where the hosting provider will manage the server at an extra cost.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a specialized form of hosting.

In general, a cloud hosting environment is one in which the hosted data and processes are spread across multiple servers and feature redundancy, so losing data is nearly impossible.

The benefit of cloud hosting is that it’s scalable and is priced according to the resources used.

A site that experiences a sudden surge of traffic can quickly scale through the cloud hosting environment at a higher cost.

One of the downsides of cloud hosting is that it can require more technical skills to manage.

Dedicated Server

Managing a dedicated server isn’t as difficult as it used to be, but there is still a learning curve.

Even with a relatively easy-to-use control panel like Plesk Onyx, while it’s intuitive to use, it helps to know about PHP settings, firewall settings, NGINX, and Apache.

In general, there are no guardrails to protect you from errors on a shared server, so one needs to know their way around.

5. Title Element (AKA Title Tags)

The title tag is widely regarded as an important ranking factor.

What’s in the title element is important because that’s what is (usually) shown as a Title Link in the search results.

As a result of that knowledge, SEO pros have often used the title tag as a place to write the targeted keyword. That’s a 20+ year SEO tradition.

But times have changed, and Google rewrites the title link if it’s not descriptive or contains a repetitive boilerplate.

That means the best practice for Title Tags has changed.

Today, the best practice for the title element is to be descriptive, concise, and non-boilerplate.

Adding a keyword phrase in there is still useful, but it’s important to be descriptive.

That means when someone reads the title tag, they should be able to know what the web page is about.

If the title tag doesn’t pass that test, it’s probably not good enough.

The best practice today is to target the user intent of the keyword phrase in the content and then target that user intent in the title tag.

For example, since 2000, the standard practice was that if you’re trying to rank for the keyword phrase “fishing flies,” you must use the phrase “fishing flies” in the title tag.

That’s no longer the case because that keyword phrase is vague, so Google will first identify the user intents behind that keyword phrase, and then rank sites that match the user intent – not the keyword in the title tag.

The best way to write a title tag is to understand the user intent of the keyword phrase and try to match the intent in your title tag.

What’s notable about the title links in the above search results is that none of the top four search results have the keyword phrase “fishing flies” by itself.

The phrase or partial phrase is always in the context of a phrase that signals the user’s intent.

The number one search result doesn’t even have an exact match to the keyword phrase.

What those search results – and pretty much any search result – will show is that it’s not just the keyword in the title that is important, but rather, it’s important to tell what the topic of the webpage is in a way that also signals the user intent.

That, in my opinion, is a best practice for title tags: Optimize the title tag for the user intent topic, and don’t just dump the exact-match keyword phrase in the title element.

6. Alt Text

The alt text (aka alt tag or alt image attribute) is an HTML attribute of the image HTML element.

The purpose of the alt text is to describe what the image is about.

• Screen readers read the alt text to site visitors with vision impairment.
• The text in the alt attribute becomes visible when the image doesn’t download.
• Google uses the alt text for understanding the image in the context of showing it in Google Images.

7. URL Structure

Many in the search industry mistakenly believe that Google uses the words in the URL structure to understand what a page is about.

But that’s not necessarily the case today.

The best practice for URLs is to keep them short but descriptive.

That will help signal to a potential site visitor what the webpage is about (if they can see the URL), and help them to decide whether to click through to the webpage.

When in doubt, you can’t lose by asking how it will impact a potential site visitor.

So if you have the two main words relevant to the topic in the URL structure, that’s going to be just fine.

If you return to the example of the “fishing flies” search results, you’ll see that the number one result doesn’t have the keywords in the URL.

However, at position number one, Google still ranked it as the most relevant for that keyword phrase.

8. Best Way To Use Headings For SEO

Headings are like the title tags in that the role they play is to describe what the web page is about and what a webpage section is about.

9. Google Discover

Cindy Krum, Founder & CEO of MobileMoxie – which offers tools for mobile SEO – is enthusiastic about Google Discover.

A common mistake I see people make about their featured image is to use one that’s too small, or that is not rectangular.

To ensure that Google surfaces your content in Google Discover, use an image at least 1200 pixels wide.

A rectangular image has the option to be displayed in its entirety. A square image will only be displayed as a smaller thumbnail, which won’t stand out as much.

Speaking of standing out, be sure to use featured images that are colorful.

Images with bright colors call attention to themselves in Google Discover and can help encourage clickthroughs.

Also, use the max image preview robots meta set to large:

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">

10. AI For Content

Marketers commonly think of AI as a way to produce a lot of content faster.

(And often not-so-good content.)

The SEO best practice for AI  is not in generating the content, but in using AI to automate the entire process of creating content.

11. SEO For Images

Images should ideally be colorful but also low weight, under 100kb (and ideally under 50kb).

I know that sounds unrealistic, but the truth is that image editing software like Photoshop can help create the smallest possible image that still looks great.

Images within the body of an article are great for breaking up the content and helping readers make it to the end of the article.

But make sure the image is relevant to the content because, in that way, it will help communicate the topic or message of the content.

12. SEO For Product Pages

Cindy Krum is also an expert on optimizing product pages for SEO and conversions on mobile-sized web pages.

13. Best Practices For Category Pages

There’s a longstanding idea in the search community that category pages aren’t useful, so they add a noindex, follow robots meta tag to the pages.

But that’s a big mistake — because then, Google will not index the category pages (as requested), and because of that, Google won’t follow the links, because the page is not indexed.

So, the best practice is always to allow search engines to crawl the product pages.

Another best practice is to use unique excerpts for every page.

Those excerpts are what will be shown on the category pages. Using a snippet from the first few sentences of a webpage for the excerpt is a missed opportunity.

Category pages are a great way to present a general page about a topic.

14. Best Practices For Review Websites

Google wants to rank product reviews that are real and not just product summaries; Familiarize yourself with Google’s product reviews content guidelines.

When writing reviews, make sure to show images of the product and use as many as a shopper may need.

If it’s useful, show images of the product used to illustrate a review section.

The key focus of Google’s guidelines is to encourage product reviews that are helpful to users.

15. Structured Data For SEO

Joost De Valk, Founder of Yoast SEO Plugin, shared his tip for structured data best practices.

16. Best Way To Do Internal Linking

Internal linking is a way to keep crawlers indexing content and to help Google better understand which content is important.

17. Read Patents Carefully

An important best practice for SEO is investigating every best practice to see if it holds true.

What sometimes happens is that patents and research papers are misunderstood, and subsequently, those misunderstandings become a false best practice.

Those kinds of false best practices are often based on a misinterpretation of what a Googler said, or of what was published in a patent or research paper.

For example, a common SEO myth is that Google uses “brand mentions” as some kind of ranking signal that is similar to a link.

This myth came about in a patent that was about using branded search queries as a type of citation signal, similar to a link.

The idea of the patent was that if users are searching with the name of a website plus keywords, then that could be considered as a form of a citation, though not as a link, but implied as one.

The entire patent, from the opening paragraphs to the end of the patent, was explicitly focused on search queries that contain a URL or website name plus the keyword phrase.

Somewhere smack in the middle of that patent was one paragraph that used the phrase “implied link.”

Understanding SEO

The understanding of SEO can be baroque or minimal, depending on the individual.

The most common error is focusing on what Google might be doing.

If there’s a golden rule for SEO best practices, whether researching keywords or evaluating competitors, it’s this: Develop your SEO strategy around how a site visitor or potential customer may react. 

Resource: searchenginejournal.com