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

1. Keyword Magic 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 (Google).

Google uses 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. 

Other two important factors to consider are Search volume, which refers to how many times a keyword is searched on search engines, and Keyword difficulty, which indicates how difficult 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, Ubersuggest, etc.

2. Content Catering

Understanding your target audience’s search intent is another effective white-hat SEO technique. Matching search intent with the content you develop should be the top goal to rank your content higher.

You need to check and match user intent to rank. Search intent refers to the searcher’s purpose or reason for making a search query, such as finding information about something 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 puts an informational term into Google, he intends 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 be in line with your content.

• Commercial Intent

Once the searcher knows the topic, they may choose to act 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 get discovered faster.

• Transactional Intent

A searcher who uses transactional keywords has a purchase intent. The person has concluded that they are ready to make a purchase, so they are currently narrowing down their options and looking for confirmation, such as top brands for product ‘A’, its reviews, and 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 wants to go to a certain location, such as an online store or web page. When a person searches for a brand or option, the searcher is 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 always helps you rank content higher. Create catchy titles, meta descriptions, and content that attracts and resonates with your target audience. Avoid using generic or duplicate content, as this affects your website 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. Here are the steps: Make sure all titles and meta descriptions define the page content and contain relevant keywords.

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

4. Avoid Grammatical Errors

Have you ever discovered spelling issues while reading a blog post? Well, we are not their supporters either. Poor language and spelling can also deteriorate the experience of users and will obviously harm your SERP positions. Hence, eliminating grammatical mistakes can make your content more credible and rank higher.

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 to be used to detect grammar and spelling errors.

5. Heading Hierarchy

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

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

Tip 1: H1 is the most important tag, as it’s the page title. It would help if you only used it once. This tag should be unique, and introducing the focus keyword naturally in the H1 title can make a big difference in optimizing the content for SEO.

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 do that.

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 crawl the images. Here are a few tips on how to optimize 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 describe the image by giving it more context. Keep the alt text short, ideally a few words, and in one of the pictures, you could also include the focus keyword to improve SEO and content rankings.

• Image size and type

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

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 you improve your SEO performance by bringing in traffic from other sites, increasing familiarity with your company, developing cooperation opportunities with other sites, getting more leads for your business and boosting the company’s online reputation.

To get backlinks, one needs to develop content that others would consider linking, that is, quality, sharable materials. One can also remark that other strategies like Guest posting on other websites which are relevant to your niche and reputable, approaches to influencers and bloggers, active participation in forums, communities in some social media and specially created Internet media, production of infographics, videos, podcasts or any other type of media.

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. Tell your clients to give you 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 basic and significant elements of a website’s structure and search engine conformity. 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 appropriate techniques for internal linking, including creating credible link texts and focusing on relevancy.

It involves producing 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 state where exactly the click is taking you. Use proper and concise descriptive link texts. This is the best way to rank your content higher.

9. Mobile Optimization to Rank on SERP’s

Optimizing your website speed is important because speed is among the most important signals Google uses in ranking, especially for mobile searches. Here are the ways you can easily make your website load faster so that it can be ranked well in user experience and SEO.

Begin the process by analyzing how well your current site is working with Google’s Page Speed Insights service. This will give you an overview of how your website looks when loading from Google Base, enabling you to make very accurate decisions regarding enhancing the website’s loading speed. Below are some guidelines that can help in improving a site’s loading speed.

Compress Photos: Because photos usually involve a lot of data, a tool like Kraken.io can optimize file sizes without compromising on quality, dramatically cutting the load time.

Implement Lazy Loading: Lazy loading is a process of deferring the loading of images when the user scrolls to them, thus 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, only some at a time.

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 nearest server to the user, hence 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 identify if your content is at the level of other content online: the same (1X), better (2X), or the best content that can be provided to target an audience on the topic (10X). The better the content, the more likely it is to remain at the top of the list.

Hence, three criteria should be considered if you wish 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 yes, does it have the ability to meet the eye of any normal visitor and have something to offer viewers?

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

Conclusion

SEO is not a fixed but a constantly changing and developing area of activity. In light of that, SEO trends and methods are not constant because search engines continuously modify their algorithms, and so do users’ approaches.

Thus, one has to realize that one has to keep up with the newest SEO trends and apply them to one’s website to get found faster. In this blog post, we have explained to you the current 10 SEO best practices to rank content higher. 

This will help you enhance your website’s visibility, credibility, and sales. Of course, if you need help operating any of these strategies or do not have time for them, contact Tech Savy Crew Agency. We will provide you with our local SEO services at an affordable cost.

Feel free to contact us, and we will gladly assist you in getting your website to the highest ranking.