7 SEO Practices That Everyone Should Follow in 2023

Search Engine Optimization is by far the most important factor to any writer online out there.

So, what does it entail exactly?

Well, put simply it’s about making small improvements and modifications on your websites to help search engines crawl, index, and understand your content. These are long-term SEO practices that pay off over time.

Implementing them from time to time has the direct benefit of ranking highly on Google. Read on as I unveil them bit by bit.

1. Ensure Your Pages Load First

Google values page speed as it guarantees a good user experience.

In July 2018 Google announced page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches.

With this in mind, it is important to optimize your page for speed. The best place to start is Google’s Pagespeed Insights Tool. Just paste in your URL and you’ll see a score. Google goes further to give you helpful advice on how to improve your page speed.

Below are tips to help improve page speed

Enable Caching: Caching is the process of storing data in a temporary area. It improves the page speed as most of the loading page content is all ready stored and does not need to be fetched to be displayed. Enable caching plugins on your WordPress website. If you are not using WordPress discuss options with your web host provider.

Use a Content Delivery Network(CDN); CDN is a worldwide group of servers that enables you to duplicate the website’s important elements such as HTML/CSS files. They can then be delivered to visitors from servers near the physical location. For example, if your website is hosted in the United Kingdom, your users will experience a relatively longer loading time. But with CDN, this time is reduced as the website statistics can be provided from a local server near them. Most web hosting providers have CDN options installed in their user panels.

Compress Images: Larger images tend to slow down the loading process considerably. Compressing the images reduces their size and so improves their loading time.

2. Optimize Your Title Tag For SEO

The title tag is your hook to grab the readers' attention. It tells the readers and search engines what your article is about.

As a good SEO practice, it is important to include your target keyword in your title tag. For example, this site is ranking for the keyword SEO Best Practices.

Including your main keyword in the title tag is not enough as google pays close attention to words and phrases appearing early in the title tag. It is important, therefore to include your keyword at the very beginning of the title tag.

Sometimes Google chooses and rewrites titles and descriptions for pages. But you shouldn’t depend on this fully though as a study by Ahrefs shows that Google only rewrites tags 33.4% of the time.

Most people tend to confuse title tags and H1 tags. In copy, they are often written the same way.

So, what is their main difference?

The title tag appears on the tab of your browser while the H1 tag appears on the actual page of your post.

It is different from the title tags

Finally, try to craft compelling title tags that push people to click without appearing like clickbait. Remember the more your post gets clicks the more Google pushes it to the top of the rank chain. Look at these examples of titles.

Fluffy and delicious are more likely to compel a hungry reader to go for this title.

This list above has an eye-catching title that will spark interest in the reader.

3. Target Long-Tail Keywords

When it comes to best SEO practices, long-tail keywords tend to play a very crucial role, especially for bloggers and writers with low Domain Authority.

So, what are long-tail keywords?

They are keywords or key phrases that are more specific than the main keywords. They are normally longer and tend to generate small amounts of traffic over time.

For example, a keyword like “Best laptops” will have long-tail keywords like

Best laptops for computer science students on a budget
Best laptops in the market in India under 30000
Best laptops with touch screen and a pen for gaming

It can be a hurdle trying to rank for competitive keywords against large brands with enormous amounts of backlinks and deep pockets. For instance, take a look at these numbers.

The top positions are dominated by big players like Nerdwallet, credit cards, and fool.The best way to go about it is to target words with low competition especially when you are starting out.

For example, ranking the term “dog food” would be impossible compared to a specific long tail keyword like” how to make dog food at home”

Some of the best places to get keywords for your articles are at the bottom of the google page in the related searches. For example, type in a keyword like “Digital Marketing”. Head to the bottom and here is what you will see

Scroll back up to the People ask section. Here you will find more sub-topics to categorize your main keyword. Most of these long-tail keywords contain untapped free organic traffic.

Ahrefs keyword explorer is another platform you can assess keywords to get the best long-tail keywords to aim for.

4. Use The Google Search Console

Nobody would want to move forward blindly without visual. One of the most important SEO practices is setting up Google Console to guide your steps.

Rolled out in January 2018,The Google Search console gives you a preview of what's happening in the SEO arena in regards to your website.

There are a few areas you need to give closer attention on regular basis

Notifications;

It is the area in the top right corner of your Google Search Console live dashboard.

Google uses this area to send all messages pertaining the performance of your site.It gives you a beehive of activities Google is working on to ensure good user experience on your site.

Any notifications on ‘errors’ need to be fixed ASAP because they will affect ranking and crawling.

Indexing;

This report gives you all the indexed and non-indexed pages.

For your page to show up in google search results it has to be visited by a Google crawler(“Google’s Bot”), which analyses meaning and content of ,the page and then stores the records in the Google index.

Put simply, If Google can’t index your pages, they cannot appear in the search results.

The good thing is that Google provides help on how to fix non indexed pages.

Keep in mind that indexing and ranking are two different things.

Take a race for example, for you to win, you must show up for the race.

Therefore indexing is showing up while ranking is actually winning. How can you tell if you are indexed in Google?

Simply go to Google Search and paste in your site URL.

This number is an approximate value of the pages indexed on your site

Incase there are no indexed pages then there will be no result

Sitemaps:

What are sitemaps?

A sitemap is a file that provides information about your pages,links, videos and any other data on your website. Google’s crawlers use this information to index your website effectively.

There are two types of sitemaps namely HTML(used for users to take a look at your website) and XML sitemaps(used by engine crawlers).

It is important to update your sitemaps regularly. Check your robot.txt files to get your site maps. Then add them to the Google Search Console.

5. The URL structure

There is a lot of hype and buzz around the URL element in many forums.

While it is important to optimize your URL properly, it should not take a crunch of your time working on it because Google has a long history of minimizing the importance of the URL.

In 2017, Google’s Webmaster, John Mueller had this to say.

6.Best Way to Use The Heading

In today’s modern world, the concentration span has gone low and low.

If you don’t grab a reader's attention within the first few seconds they will click away.

The heading is the perfect tool for this job.

All headings from H1 to H6 are organizational tools that guide readers and search engines through your content. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand and use them the right way in your blog post.

A study on how users read on the web shows that 79% of readers scan web pages while only 16% read word-by-word. With this in mind, optimize your articles to grab the attention of the two groups of readers.

Here is how to organize your blog content using H1 through H6

Here is what Casey Markee had to say about headings

Google Webmaster, John Mueller adds that

With all said and done, it is important to always ensure people are able to read and scan your content with a lot of ease. John Mueller puts emphasis on this point

7.Match Search Intent

Search intent is the main reason why a user types a query.

Nobody wants to find “types of laptops” in the search engines when they are clearly searching for “how to use laptops”

For example, take a look at the keyword, “image checker”

One clear thing about the results is that they are all tools.

They need a tool that will let them check their images.

On the other hand, take a look at the search results for "best image checker’

The results are populated by content showing best type of image searchers to satisfy user intent.

Categorically, there are 4 types of user intent namely:

Informational User Intent
Navigational User Intent
Commercial User Inent and
Transactional User Intent.

If your article falls in any of these categories its important to fully meet the users expectations through well written posts.

When many users feel satisfied with your piece of content, you are likely to get a significant rankings boost.

Remember,

Google’s number 1 goal is to satisfy Searchers intent.

So for you to succeed in your SEO efforts, your approach towards writing articles should be around this factor.

In fact, in the most recent Google’s Rater Guideliness, Search Intent takes the center stage and occupies the early topics.

Below are tips to ensure your Google users have a good experience with your content

Use keyword clues

Each type of user intent has pointers that give you a rough idea of what to include in your articles.Below are a few examples of these cues.

Transactional User Intent: buy, cheap, for sale online

Commercial User Intent: best, review, comparison

Navigational User Intent: any brand name

Informational User Intent: How, why,what,tutorial

Use Semrush’s Keyword Intent Solution

Semrush is an SEO tool designed to analyze SERPs and the language behind search intent.

Write With Multiple User Queries in Mind

The best way is to ensure your website is optimized for a variety of user queries and needs.

Start by gathering sub-topics and phrases related to your main keywords. Try to fully elaborate on them in your content.

Additionally, link informational articles in between your posts to help readers further understand the subject matter. This links can rank for other keyword phrases