SEO Best Practices For Modern Marketers

seo best practices search engine optimization industry google searches

Everything is so fast and easy to find on the internet. Type few words, hit that search button and boom! You find your expected result in no time. This accurate and fast searching is possible due to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a process tool used by all search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are considered as the most accurate and fast search engines (not counting Google's own YouTube, the world's second largest search engine overall). Baidu and Yandex are gaining a little bit of search engine market share as well, especially outside of the US.

By reading this article, you will learn how SEO thing works and how you can use this game changer to your advantage. Most companies frown when they have to hire for SEO. But even they understand its importance and prefer professionals who have undergone SEO training course. Every online business wants to appear on the first page of Google search, and if possible to be the first three searches. You can also appear on the first page of search results by using the right type of SEO. If you are reading this then surely you are not a novice to SEO. 

Now let us dig deep into SEO and learn different SEO types, their usefulness and also disadvantages. 

TYPES OF SEO 

There are mainly two types of SEO. Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. As the color types suggest, there are stark differences in approach, applicability, and short-term and long-term effects. 

White Hat SEO follows and never conflicts with search engines’ guidelines and defined norms, mostly Google’s. This way using White Hat SEO improves the ranking of your website(s). Abiding the guidelines also makes your website clean and away from labeled as spam. But ranking high by White Hat approach is tedious and a long press. Your content should be of high quality and consistent. HTML reconstruction and optimization have to be there. Growth in White Hat SEO approach is gradual and steady but lasts longer. 

On the other hand, by using Black Hat approach, you may get a blast in ranking but that effect is very short and largely remains unpredictable. The reason being Black Hat SEO uses keyword stuffing, cloaking, and spam links to generate traffic. But as soon as visitors realize they leave the page which decreases “Dwell Time” (time spend by a visitor on a webpage) leading to lesser ranking and even getting blocked by search engines. 

Online businesses extensively use Google Analytics and customer feedbacks to reprogram their SEO tactics. Thanks to SEO, that online business is a success. 

Recent Trends And Updates In The SEO World 

Since Google has been on the top of the Search engine race, almost every online business keeps an eye on Google’s algorithm updates. Google has blacklisted some of the websites that use Black Hat SEO since they are in direct violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Google’s Penguin update is intended to decrease the search engine ranking of such websites. 

With the advent of AI integration with smart gadgets like Alexa and Siri based products, there has been a significant shift in search engine optimization and consumer interactions. Voice search is getting its place in the SEO world. 

Google SERP feature and snippets have also emerged a long way since the last few years. Many websites are now comparably more structured and well mapped than they used to be. Based on these trends and forecasting in SEO, here are some best practices in SEO that will help you grow your business and bloom in terms of visitors and revenue because, in the end, it’s all about how to leverage technology for earning few extra bucks. Opting for an SEO training program helps you to master the SEO skills in a short span of time. 

SEO BEST PRACTICES 

Let us now go through the best practices of SEO which can help you increase traffic to your website in a short span of time. 

Understand user intent It all comes down to a simple fact of how engaging and useful your content is to the visitors. You need to understand the purpose and preference of your audiences. Only this way you can improvise and make successful strategies for your business. Hear it straight from experts. 

“Tomorrow’s high-ranking website is all about the audience,” said Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers. 

“It will be more critical than ever for SEOs and content specialists to focus heavily on the user intent of the keywords they are targeting while creating content,” said Jesse McDonald, SEO specialist and director of operations for TopHatRank.com. 

Develop Quality Content 

Earlier Google used to analyze webpages for specific keywords and how extensively those keywords appear in HTML links, URL, title tag, and description tag, etc. Today Google has evolved to be more specific and smarter to lookup not only content but context as well. Google Hummingbird update is focused on the meaning of a phrase or keyword rather than individual keywords. So instead of stuffing keywords with no real connection to the content, work upon wide and meaningful context. Focusing on expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) in Google’s search quality rating guidelines will help you to increase your website’s ranking. 

For example, if you sell computers, why not put together content on protecting your data and surfing the web securely? The best free VPNs are reviewed at VPNGeeks.com, and you can use this to put together a piece on masking your IP address and how this can protect data. You could then do a piece on the best firewalls and anti-virus, and so on. All of this adds value and will make your site more relevant, therefore, boosting your SEO too.

Build Structured And Intuitive Hierarchical Data 

As per experts, no matter how smart AI becomes, if it takes too long to process the required information, it will never be great. You can make the process faster and smooth by developing a structured form. Data can be intuitively and manually structured into a hierarchy, making your website more insightful and engaging to the visitors. 

JP Sherman, enterprise search and findability expert at Red Hat search engine optimization, said: “Contextual relationships between topics and behaviors, supported by structured markup, is the critical trend we need to start understanding, testing, and implementing for upcoming years.” 

Kill Zombie Pages 

You got to admit that some of your pages are a way to slower than others. Kill these pages by setting your results pages to “no-index” and repurpose content as needed (such as combining three old blog posts into a single piece of long-form content). 

Work On E-A-T 

Focusing on Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness (EAT) in Google’s search quality rating guidelines was the new trend recently. Not all SEO experts agree that it is a specific ranking factor, but most do agree that it is a top priority. Now BERT is the new concern for SEOs.

Image And Video SEO 

Incorporating images in your content is advantageous. This will help to generate more traffic from Google image searches. Using videos on landing page increases dwell time by high user retention, longer time spent on-page, and lower bounce rates for your website and Google’s RankBrain & UX Signals will increase your website ranking. 

Optimizing your images can lead to a lot of additional organic traffic for your website and that can increase your rank for non-image traffic as well and boost sales. Just make sure you use your own unique images or generic images from Pixabay / Pexels / Unsplash / Canva so you don't get in trouble using other company's images that they can track with a Google reverse image search.

HTTPS and SEO-Friendly URLs 

Over a period of time, the search engines have grown faster. HTTPS websites help in building a more secure and fast web for all users. Also optimizing to a mobile-friendly website is another tactic being used by major businesses. 

Astute Keyword Research 

You can use a tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner which can help you to determine the competitiveness of your terms as well as derive keyword alternatives to use in your content. Keyword research is essential for overall search engine optimization success.

Sponsored Snippets And Google BRFP 

According to recent SEO research reports, you can almost double the click-through rates for your website with rich snippets. It also makes your search more engaging and intently designed. 

Moz Domain Update 

Moz.com just recently updated their domain authority (DA) measuring system for the first time in years. It really exposes websites that were part of Private Blog Networks (PBN) and those with other spammy backlink profiles. While domain authority doesn't affect Google PageRank, it is still a very influential search engine optimization industry measurement.

Google Core Update

Google also rolled out another core update recently. Speculation still abounds but it seems to be focused specifically on user intent. It also seems to reverse some of the damage done to millions of pages after their (medic) core update. These two measurement adjustments will have a profound impact for search engine optimization.

SEO Like A Pro 

It’s overwhelming that there are more tools than ever for effective SEO. But even with above-mentioned tools and insights, optimizing to rank on SERP will take time. Continuous effort is a must in today’s competitive marketing landscape and will be well paid in the long run. With the help of SEO training, you can learn the above-mentioned SEO tools and practices to build a revenue-generating online business.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post about SEO best practices to help make sure your websites rank high on Google searches and other major search engines.

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