Ten Search Engine Optimization (SEO) areas of focus, organized in two sections.
Section 1: Content
High quality, useful content provides a boost to Google rankings and provides a great experience for any users of the site. It’s a win-win! Key parts of this section are as follows.
Awesome keywords
Use keywords that your users will be searching for! This can either be by using Google’s suggested search, or looking at what competitors are doing.
In-depth content
Posts and pages should cover the entire topic on one page, instead of a quick generic list or paragraph that doesn’t satisfy user intent.
Great user experience
Help users help you by getting right to the point in introductions, and have easy to read content. This means short sentences, using alt-text, lots of subheadings, and 1-2 sentence paragraphs.
Internal Links
Having internal links in your pages helps Google understand what your content is, and having keyword rich text in the links helps Google and users scan your links.
Participation in other sites
Creating backlinks to your site is important for SEO, so why not post something in your field on another site? Whether it’s on a site that lies within your niche, or any site that will let you publish content will help.
Section 2: Technical
Mostly done by the developers, the technical part of SEO can seem a little daunting for outsiders, but when explained it’s not so scary. The main idea here is your website should be fast and accessible, which is something that we should be striving for anyways. Key parts of this section are as follows:
Mobile first indexing
Starting in 2018, Google considers the mobile version of your site as the one it will index for it’s search results. A well designed and optimized site for mobile reflects the shift of users to phones to browse the internet and will ensure your site remains competitive in rankings.
Image accessibility
Want a Google image search to be able to link to your website? When images have descriptive alt text, they help non-sighted users and search engines optimize your content and become even more searchable.
Fast loads
Google has been very clear about the impact of performance on their SEO. A fast-loading site will be placed in higher priority than a slow one, which among other things means that optimized images and speedy javascript are key.
Site Architecture
A site where you can read any page in 3-4 clicks is a great user experience, but also helps the flow of pages for google search rankings. We call this “flat architecture”.
Meta tags
These invisible tags help search engines understand what your content is! There’s six of them, which range from titles and descriptions of the page to canonical tags if you have similar content on a couple pages.