10 SEO Best Practices to Rank Content Higher: Get Found Faster

1. Keyword Research to Rank High

Proper keyword research and keyword usage help you rank better in search engine results. Keywords are a combination of words that best describe the content of a webpage or article. It is a search term or query that people enter into a search engine, such as Google.

Search engines use these keywords to determine which words/phrases your website pages should rank for. So, if you want the search engine to understand what your website is about, use focus keywords that fall under the keyword density prohibition. 

Two other important factors to consider are Search volume, which refers to the frequency with which a keyword is searched on search engines, and Keyword difficulty, which indicates how challenging it is for a keyword to rank in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

For comprehensive keyword research, you can use free tools like Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, Moz, and Ubersuggest, among others.

2. Content Catering

Understanding your target audience’s search intent is another effective white-hat SEO technique. Matching search intent with the content is one of the best SEO practices to rank content higher. To follow SEO best practices to rank content higher, you need to check and match user intent to improve your ranking.

Search intent refers to the searcher’s purpose or reason for making a search query, such as finding information about a specific topic or making a purchase. If you serve quality content, you are more likely to generate leads for your business.

There are four types of user search intent

• Informational Intent

When a person searches for an informational term on search engines, they intend to learn something. For example, what is ‘A’? What is the definition? Give examples. Therefore, your blog articles, vocabulary terms, FAQs, and research papers should align with your content.

• Commercial Intent

Once the searcher understands the topic, they may choose to take action on it. Keywords with commercial intent are process-oriented and belong to the “do” group.

Searchers are now ready to determine how they want to proceed, and the content you prepare should address this exact search intent to help them discover you faster.

• Transactional Intent

A searcher who uses transactional keywords has a purchase intent. That means they are ready to make a purchase, so they are currently narrowing down their options and seeking confirmation, such as top brands for product ‘A’, its reviews, and a comparison of A and B products or brands.

Create content such as general landing pages, individual product and service pages, testimonials, and pricing pages to match this type of query.

• Navigational Intent

Navigational intent queries indicate that the searcher intends to visit a specific location, such as an online store or web page. When a person searches for a brand or option, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Searchers often have a brand in mind when using navigational keywords, so your brand/ content must appear at the top of the results when they enter the product.

3. Title Tag and Meta Description Mastery

In content marketing, creativity is a differentiator. Creative content consistently helps you rank higher in search results. Craft engaging titles, meta descriptions, and content that captivate and resonate with your target audience. Avoid using generic or duplicate content, as this can negatively impact your website’s authority and visibility in search engine rankings.

First, prevent duplicate content. Direct or indirect duplication makes the content look unimportant. Creating original and unique content, landing pages, descriptions, image alt text, category pages, and title tags will help increase website authority.

Ensure that all titles and meta descriptions accurately define the page content, include relevant keywords and following SEO best practices to rank content higher.

When engaging headlines and descriptions are written in an informative manner, they not only attract clicks but also provide visitors with the important information they need about the page’s content.

4. Avoid Grammatical Errors

Have you ever discovered spelling issues while reading a blog post?  Poor language and spelling can deteriorate the user experience and will harm your SERP positions. Hence, eliminating grammatical mistakes can make your content more credible and increase its ranking.

Therefore, Google is moving from the keyword space to the user space. Google’s current strategy is to move from KW-centric to user-centric. 

Hence, before you post your updated content, use the grammar and spell check features of the word-processing software to correct mistakes. Grammarly is very effective in detecting grammar and spelling errors.

5. Heading Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a vital point to consider when implementing content optimization. Your H1, H2, and H3 headings have become more important than ever, as Google is now more user-centric than keyword-centric.

Check how people search for a piece of content to understand how you should structure your headers. Here are some SEO tips for your headers:

Tip 1: The H1 tag is the most important, as it represents the page title. It would be helpful if you used it only once. This tag should be unique, and introducing the focus keyword naturally in the H1 tag is among the SEO best practices to rank content higher

Tip 2: Plan your header tags in a way that makes sense to the audience. For example, if your H2 is “How to Improve SEO Marketing,” then your H3s should be separate ways to achieve that goal.

Tip 3: Answer questions clearly under each header tag. You should know that you can pull up that content below header tags as featured snippets on Google search, which is the highest possible ranking for a keyword in search results.

6. Image Optimization

Image optimization is an important factor in content optimization. Search engines use crawlers to crawl a website’s content, but they cannot “crawl” the images you added to your post.

That’s why a content writer must add image titles and alt texts to help search engines crawl the images. Here are a few tips on optimizing images for SEO.

• Filename

Make sure your image has a proper filename. As discussed, a crawler cannot crawl an image, so naming the image, let’s say IMG0001, helps the crawler and users understand the meaning of that added picture.

• Alt text

Using alt text, you can provide the image with additional context. Keep the alt text short, ideally a few words. In one of the pictures, you can also include the focus keyword to improve SEO and content rankings.

• Image size and type

For complete optimization, ensure that your images don’t compromise your website’s speed. Website speed is an essential ranking factor for Google. Therefore, compress the Image size to avoid any future compliance issues.

7. Build Backlinks

Backlinks are links placed on other websites that lead to your website. They are among the most influential factors in Google, indicating a site’s popularity, level of authorization, and credibility.

Backlinks can help improve your SEO performance by bringing in traffic from other sites, increasing familiarity with your company, developing cooperation opportunities with other sites, generating more leads for your business, and enhancing the company’s online reputation.

To obtain backlinks, one needs to develop content that others would consider linking to, namely, high-quality, shareable content. Other strategies include guest posting on relevant, reputable websites within your niche, engaging with influencers and bloggers through reputable approaches, actively participating in forums and communities on social media, and creating specialized Online press, such as infographics, videos, podcasts, or other types of content.

By submitting your site to directories and review sites, you can be sure that people will come across it, and some may even consider it worthy of visiting. Ask your clients to provide you with testimonials and reviews. These are the SEO Best practices to rank content higher on the search engines.

8. Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the most fundamental and crucial elements of a website’s structure and search engine optimization. Thus, by outlining the links that connect the given pages on your site, you create a reasonable hierarchy of content and allow users to navigate the site conveniently.

Implement effective techniques for internal linking, including crafting credible link text and prioritizing relevance.

It involves creating content that relates to the user experience funnel, which means, based on the current page, which information or action will the user need or wish to proceed with? It is where the next page must be connected to ‘force’ the user to move to the next level of the funnel.

Exclude the preview or general information and specify exactly where the click will take you. Use proper and concise descriptive link texts. This is the most effective way to increase your content’s ranking.

9. Mobile Optimization to Rank on SERP’s

Optimizing your website’s speed is important because speed is one of the most significant signals Google uses in ranking, especially for mobile searches. Here are some ways to easily improve your website’s load speed, enhancing its ranking in both user experience and SEO.

Begin the process by analyzing how well your current site performs with Google’s PageSpeed Insights service. This will provide you with an overview of how your website appears when loading from Google Base, allowing you to make informed decisions about enhancing the website’s loading speed. Below are some guidelines to help improve a site’s loading speed.

Compress Images: Since Images typically contain a large amount of data, a tool like Kraken.io can optimize file sizes without compromising quality, significantly reducing load time.

Implement Lazy Loading: Lazy loading is a process that defers the loading of images until the user scrolls to them, thereby reducing the initial loading time by up to 50%. However, it can have some negative effects on performance, as images may be loaded every time they are needed rather than all at once.

Use a CDN: A content delivery system copies your website’s media on servers across the globe. This logic ensures that the content requested by a user is delivered from the server closest to the user, thereby achieving high availability.

10. Content is King

Last but not least, content is King in SEO. Google aims to present the most relevant hits for a specific search term.

Thus, to get the most out of your content, you have to post content that is superior to all others on that particular topic.

This means you should determine if your content is at the same level as other content online (1X), better than other content (2X), or the best content that can be provided to target an audience on the topic (10X). The higher the quality of the content, the more likely it is to remain at the top of the list.

Hence, three criteria should be considered to ensure that a specific item is ranked highly.

Quality: This has a good layout and structure, good font and font size, and relevant and useful content.

Uniqueness: Has the content you posted been updated? If so, does it have the ability to catch the eye of any normal visitor and offer something of interest to viewers?

Website Authority: The closer the values of DA and PA are to 100, the more trustworthy you appear.