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SEO Best Practices Every Site Should Follow

By  //  July 4, 2023

If you have a website and want it to be found in search engines, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must. It has been a marketing staple in the digital space since the rise of search engines.

In case you’re unfamiliar, SEO is a way of optimizing your site to increase visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive more traffic. The higher you are in the SERPs, the better. Different search engines have different criteria for what an optimum site is, but there are general guidelines that the best SEO marketers follow. From site structure and performance to off-site factors, there are so many things you can do to improve your site’s SEO. 

Here’s where to start.

  1. Get a good web host

SEO considerations can start before you even create your website. If you want search engines to favor your site, you need to host your site on fast servers with over 99% uptime. While there are other things you can do to ensure your site runs fast, such as compressing file sizes and only using good code, a good web host that prioritizes your site’s performance should make all the difference. Spaceship.com is an excellent choice. 

  1. The technical stuff

You can do endless things to optimize your site for search engines, so what you decide to implement will depend on your preferences, time, and resources. The technical stuff can fall by the wayside because it seems too complicated, but that would be a huge mistake. Here are some things you shouldn’t skip:

  • Simplify website navigation: You want your site to be easy to get around both for users and search engine crawlers (bots that crawl the web looking for new pages to index). Make sure every page is linked to another. And keep the URL structures short and simple. 
  • Remove dead links: People get frustrated when they click a link that leads nowhere. It also confuses crawlers. So make sure all links on your site are working. 
  • Create a sitemap and Robots.txt file: Make things even easier for crawlers to index your site by telling what is and isn’t for indexing! A sitemap is a guide to your site, while Robots.txt tells crawlers what you don’t want to appear in search engines. 

Other technical considerations include security, eliminating duplicate copy, and structuring your site’s data with Schema.

  1. Optimizing your content

This is probably the part you’re most familiar with. When someone thinks of SEO, the first thing they think of is likely keyword research. Keyword research involves identifying topics, keywords, and search terms relevant to your niche that will attract the right customer to your site. You can use these keywords to inform your site’s copy and content, but don’t go overboard and try to put one in every other sentence. 

Content isn’t just blog posts and articles, though.  You should be optimizing the page’s URL, H1 tag, image file names, and ALT tags, as well as meta-title and meta-description tags.

  1. Don’t neglect off-page SEO

It’s not just how your audience interacts with your content on your site that matters, but also how they do so elsewhere. Specifically, whether they share links to your content on other websites. This helps lend authority to your site and may boost your search engine rankings.