8 Basic SEO Tips to Help You Get Started

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most vital components of audience building and website growth. Without employing effective SEO tactics, you’ll be left with a fully functional website but no visitors to take advantage of it.

Even though you can hire a certified SEO professional or visual assistants who are well-versed in the subject, it’s also important to learn some basic SEO tips and techniques to know how well your SEO team or VA is doing.

Here are 8 basic SEO tips to help you get started.

Always use concise, accurate page titles and meta descriptions.

Using page titles and meta descriptions that accurately describe the content on each particular page helps search engines quickly know what that page is about. This means that they can show these pages on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) as well.

Publish only quality content.

Search engines appreciate content that’s well written, so make sure you write for humans and not for crawlers. It’s alright to enrich content with commonly searched keywords, but make sure that they actually work well with the article. It’s a bad idea to stuff an article with keywords just to chase those rankings.

Target the right keywords.

There are plenty of keywords that could be related to your content, but not all of them are profitable. Make sure that your SEO team uses effective keyword research methods to guarantee that your content writers are putting the right keywords in their articles.

Don’t forget the importance of a good URL structure.

A good URL structure makes your website easier to navigate for search engines. When Google’s bots know how to easily crawl your website, you get a better chance of obtaining higher rankings on search engine results pages.

Create a sitemap to help spiders crawl your website faster.

Adding a sitemap is another way to help spiders crawl your site more easily. A sitemap is a page that lists down all the links to your site. By letting Google know about your sitemap, you make the crawling process move much faster and the pages of your website become recognized by the search engines more quickly as well.

Optimize your images.

Search engines can’t really “read” a picture, but using alt-tags to properly identify the content of an image allows them to do so. This means that your images can show up on image searches and link back to the related content on your web pages.

Make your site mobile-friendly.

With more and more mobile internet users by the day, it has become increasingly important for Google to give priority to websites that are optimized for mobile viewing. More recently, Google has actually begun penalizing websites that don’t look good on mobile devices.

Monitor your progress.

There’s no point in testing out different SEO tactics if you can’t see how they are affecting your website. Make sure that you’re monitoring the progress of each of your strategies on Google Analytics or a similar tool.

These are just some of the most basic SEO tactics to know about. There are plenty more to learn, and if you really want to ensure that your website gets the best SEO treatment, it’s advisable to seek an expert’s help.