SEO Basics 2023: 10 Ways To Improve Your SEO on Google

Antonio Cardenas -

Search engine optimization and SEO basics are essential for growing your business online.

When you optimize your web pages and blog posts, you increase your site authority, making your website more noticeable to people who are searching for keywords linked to your product or service through search engines like Google or Bing.

Extensive algorithm updates can make this challenging. Although it’s obvious high-quality content does contribute to your search engine optimization.

Today’s SEO basics practices are all about the SEO factors that you simply can’t ignore. SEO basics are essential to increase your site authority and discover how you can optimize your website, blog and get more traffic.

In this article, we’ll review some suggestions to optimize your blog posts for the keywords you need and we’ll include some other optimization strategies you should keep in mind.

Now, let’s have a look at these blog SEO suggestions to enhance your site authority in 2021.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research is the essence of SEO basics. Keyword research is about finding the keywords your audience uses when they’re searching for a product or service you offer. Keyword research is essential for search engine optimization.

Keyword research is not just about finding these keywords; it includes organizing and prioritizing them into logical, related groups, which would then inform how you may change existing pages on your site or make new content.

Proper keyword research will help you to:

  • Understand and reach your audience
  • Build awareness of your brand
  • Find relevant topics to write about
  • Improve ad campaigns, get clicks and impressions
  • Get qualified leads and increase sales

Concentrate on 1 or 2 long-tail keywords

A good practice is to focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post.

Don’t include as many keywords into your posts as possible, that could harm your SEO efforts because search engines see this as keyword stuffing and that isn’t perceived as a valuable reading experience which is a ranking factor that search engines prioritize.

In other words, you should use keywords in your content in a way that doesn’t seem manufactured or forced.

Potential customers typing long-tail keywords are more likely to read the whole post and then ask for more information from you.

This way, they’ll enable you to generate the right type of traffic: visitors who convert.

Incorporate these 1 or 2 long-tail keywords

Now that you know which long-tail keywords you’re going to be using, it’s time to include the keywords in your blog post.

There are four essential places where you should include your keywords in your post:

Title Tag

Including a keyword in your title tag is crucial. Is the first relevancy factor of your content for both the search engines and your potential customers. Make sure to insert your keyword within the 60 characters of your title tag, that’s where Google cuts titles off on the SERP.

Headers & Body

Introduce your 2 long-tail keywords throughout the body of your post and in the headers. This includes keywords in your copy, but don’t overdo it or exaggerate because you risk being penalized for keyword stuffing. Is always good to produce content with your audience in mind, always try to be educational, helpful, and answer whatever problem your consumer might’ve suggested arriving on your post. Doing that you’ll usually find it natural to optimize for important keywords, anyway.

URL

Search engines look at the URL, it’s one of the first items it’ll crawl on a page to understand what a post is about. You have a great opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish, as every post exists on its unique URL. Your URL should simply be your-domain/your-keyword and not the entire title of your article. Dates or Blog Categories in your URL are not recommended.

Meta Description

The meta description is intended to give information about your blog post’s content. The maximum length of this meta description is around 300 characters, it’s designed to give potential customers more insight into what each search result will provide to them. So, besides being reader-friendly, compelling, and relevant, your meta description should incorporate the long-tail keyword for which you are attempting to rank.

Ensure your blog is mobile-friendly

You can make your blog mobile-friendly by using responsive design. Websites that are responsive to mobile support blog pages to have just one URL instead of two, one for desktop and one for mobile.

This improves your post’s SEO because any inbound links that return to your site won’t be split between the separate URLs.

As a result, you’ll gather the SEO power you gain from these links, encouraging Google to easily recognize your post’s quality and rank it accordingly.

Backlinks are particularly valuable for SEO basics because they represent a “vote of confidence” and the more votes you get from sites with authority, the better ranking and search visibility your website will have.

Search engines can deduce that a piece of content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So, earning these backlinks can have a much better ranking and search visibility

Site owners need to make sure they follow Google Webmaster Guidelines on links to ensure they attract high-quality links that are not part of a link scheme.

If you’ve approached a topic that’s discussed in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or web page, a best practice is to link to that page.

Internal links to your content and inbound linking to other pages show search engines the efficacy or relevance of your content. Not only will inbound links keep visitors on your website, but it also reveals your other related and valid pages to search engines.

Use Google’s Search Console

It’s essential to discover which keywords people are using to find your blog content and the Search Analytics Report from Google’s Search Console that analyzes clicks from Google Search helps you with just that.

Produce evergreen content

Publishing evergreen content means that you publish content with topics that are certain to stay relevant and valuable over a long period, having only minor changes or updates.

Here are a few reasons why evergreen content is so valuable:

It Helps You Rank Over Time, Not Just In The Short-term.

It’s content that helps you rank for months or even years after you publish your post. The content needs to be relevant to the reader, it needs to be well written, useful, and has to address the needs of your potential customer. For example, an article explaining ‘how to make delicious pizza at home?’ gives you a solid recipe to make delicious pizza at home. it will still be relevant right now and in 10 years.

Provides A Constant Flow Of Traffic For Long Periods Of Time.

Evergreen content is fundamental to every great sales funnel. It typically achieves a high ranking in search engines, gets found more, which means it contributes a consistent and continuous amount of traffic to your blog and site, even long after it was first published. You need to invest in topics with consistent search traffic potential vs topics with dying potential to drive sales. When you start creating consistent evergreen content, basically you begin to layer the traffic from various pieces on top of each other. For instance, if you publish your first blog entry today, and it produces 100 views, overall blog traffic on day one equals 100. If you publish a post on day two, and it gets 100 views, and the original post also generates 100 views, traffic for day two is 200, and so it goes.

Generates Leads Over Time As A Result Of The Traffic That Produces.

Get your evergreen content strategy right and you’ll have a consistent flow of traffic for your business for years to come. As a result of the steady flow of continuous traffic, evergreen content is a good source of lead generation, it also has a powerful capacity to continually generate leads over time. Updating an existing piece of content can bring a flood of new traffic and leads—in a fraction of the time it would take to write a new piece. That is, they’re publishing content—liked articles, reports, social media updates, or in other formats—to bring in more leads and traffic. Your pages continue to receive traffic consistently over the years, rather than just providing a few weeks or months of value. Get this strategy right, and you’ll have content that continues to generate credibility, loyalty and leads for your business for years to come.

Update your content & remove outdated content

Updating content will help your site rank on the SERP faster than a new piece of content. It also needs less time and fewer resources to update and It will also improve your number of visitors and leads almost immediately.

Updating some of your strongest pieces of content increases its lifespan so you can obtain the best results over a longer period particularly if it's evergreen content.

The final part of this involves removing your outdated content that’s no longer important to your audience. Although your goal is to ensure your content is evergreen, some of it becomes outdated over time.

Conclusion

Blog posts won’t start ranking immediately, they take time to create search authority.

When you publish blog posts and keep them updated, you’ll get rewards in the form of traffic and leads for the long term.

We don’t assume that you will include each of these SEO best practices straight away but as your website develops, so should your goals on search engines.

Once you recognize the goals and intent of your potential customers, you are on track to deliver organically content that is always relevant to them.

By following these easy SEO suggestions, you can boost higher rankings in SERPS, enjoy increased web traffic, and have higher customer conversion rates.

For more information, check out the following guides: