How can you improve your SEO with best practices and standards?

1 Perform keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. It helps you understand what your target audience is searching for, how they phrase their queries, and what kind of content they prefer. Keyword research also helps you identify the gaps and opportunities in your niche, and optimize your content accordingly. To perform keyword research, you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, or SEMrush. These tools can help you generate keyword ideas, analyze the search volume, difficulty, and intent, and find related keywords and questions.

2 Optimize your site structure

Your site structure is vital for making it easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, as well as for users to navigate and find what they need. It also helps you distribute your page authority and rank for different keywords. To optimize your structure, create a clear and logical hierarchy of categories and subcategories, use descriptive and consistent URLs with keywords, and connect relevant pages and content with internal links. Additionally, breadcrumbs can help users understand where they are on your site, while sitemaps can inform search engines about your structure and updates.

3 Create quality content

Content is the foundation of SEO, as it is what attracts and engages your audience, provides value, and answers their questions. Quality content also helps you build credibility and authority, as well as earn links and shares from other sites. To create quality content, you should write for your audience rather than the search engines, use keywords naturally and strategically (avoiding keyword stuffing), incorporate headings, subheadings, lists, images, and other formatting elements to make your content readable and scannable, provide original, relevant, and useful information that matches the search intent, and update your content regularly while removing outdated or inaccurate information.

4 Improve your page speed

Page speed is a critical factor for SEO, as it impacts user experience, bounce rate, conversion rate, and ranking. Google's average mobile page speed is 22 seconds, but 53% of mobile users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. To improve your page speed, consider using a reliable and fast web hosting service, compressing and optimizing images and videos, minifying and combining CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, enabling caching, and utilizing a content delivery network (CDN). Additionally, reducing the number of redirects and external requests can help increase page speed.

5 Implement technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that your site meets the technical requirements and standards of the search engines. To achieve this, you should use HTTPS to secure your site, responsive design to make it mobile-friendly, schema markup to add structured data, canonical tags to prevent duplicate content, robots.txt and meta tags to control how the search engines crawl and index your site. Implementing Technical SEO can help you avoid errors, issues, and penalties that can harm your SEO performance.

6 Follow SEO ethics and guidelines

SEO ethics and guidelines are the principles and rules that govern the SEO industry, helping to avoid unethical and deceptive practices that can damage your reputation, violate user trust, and incur penalties from search engines. To follow SEO ethics and guidelines, you should avoid black hat SEO techniques such as cloaking, hidden text, spammy links, or keyword stuffing. Plagiarism, copyright infringement, and content scraping should also be avoided. Additionally, manipulating or falsifying reviews, ratings, or testimonials is prohibited. Furthermore, link schemes such as buying or selling links or exchanging links for favors or money are not allowed. Lastly, misleading or irrelevant keywords, titles, or meta descriptions should not be used.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?