Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the main factor behind the success of any website. Your website can have the best design and best content, but unless its SEO factors are taken carefully and perfectly, the website will never get the unlimited organic traffic that it needs to be successful. SEO is a set of rules that must be followed to optimize a website for the search engines to understand your website better and rank higher. The higher it ranks on the search engine result pages, the greater will be the organic traffic coming to the website. When you optimize your website as per the SEO rules, it also automatically improves the user experience. The following is the list of the 15 simple rules for SEO in 2018.
Simple Rules for SEO in 2018 –
The set of rules for SEO has been made to, directly and indirectly; improve the user experience because the search engines want to serve its users with the most relevant website links.
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1. Page Speed – If your website or web page takes too much time to load completely, it hampers the user experience in today’s lightning-fast internet connectivity world. Therefore, you need to make sure that your page speed is better than most and make all the improvements required to enhance the loading speed. There are various tools available like Pingdom which shows you the loading speed and its comparison with the rest of the websites in the world. It also suggests steps to improve the speed.
2. Content Delivery Network (CDN) – To improve the speed of your content delivery to the users on their request, you need to get a CDN. CDN is a network of caching servers to deliver content faster to the users from the nearest CDN server. Some of the popular CDN services are Amazon CloudFront CDN, CloudFlare, MaxCDN and likewise.
3. Mobile-First Approach – There are more mobile users than desktop users. Therefore, search engines prefer those websites that are designed more for mobile users than desktop users. So, make your website mobile responsive and make sure it is working perfectly across all devices of different sizes and resolutions. Choosing a premium theme over a free theme will be a better choice as they have a mobile-first approach to their design.
4. Focus On User Experience – Since SEO is primarily focused on improving user experience, you need to consider user experience all the time. Starting from designing to writing content, everything should be user-friendly. For example, your website should have the minimal design and intuitive navigation. The content should not have bombastic words and complex sentence formation. Moreover, the availability of multi-lingual support can boost user experience. Using images and videos in the content as well as structuring the content better can improve the user experience. Besides, there should not be any errors on the page or missing links on the website.
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5. Minimal Ads – Advertisement segments are important for websites to generate revenue. However, nobody likes a website that has overused ads to such a limit that access to the website is very annoying. Therefore, understand the hotspots of your website and place ads only on those points and nowhere else. Keep the ad segments to a minimum.
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6. Quality Over Quantity – There is no point in getting too many of low-quality backlinks because low-quality backlinks are considered useless for link building. It also hampers your link profile that search engine crawlers check regularly. Instead, you should focus on getting high-quality backlinks from popular and relevant websites. High-quality backlinks can boost your search engine ranking the most. Therefore, you should hire an SEO expert to get the job done perfectly.
7. Outbound Links – It is better to include some outbound links in your content. But those outbound links should be relevant and of high-quality websites. Similarly, do leave relevant post links of your web pages that are related to the current web page content. This will strengthen the internal linking and help search engines index and rank your web pages better.
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8. Keyword Research – Before writing any content, you have to find out the best keywords to use according to the topic of the content. The list of keywords to use must have primary and secondary keywords, long-tail keywords, semantic keywords, and likewise for keyword diversity. This will help the search engine crawlers understand your content better and rank higher for the keywords used. You can hire an SEO expert to understand how to do perfect keyword research for content.
9. Keyword Usage – Use the main keywords in the title of the web page, headings, Meta description, and Meta tags. Spread all the keywords across the content and avoid keyword stuffing. Try to make the heading with long-tail keywords, and keep the density of each keyword less than 2% of the total content.
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10. Unique Content – Search engines love unique and informative content. Therefore, do your research on the content and include stats, facts, and figures. Moreover, structure the content perfectly so that it is totally user-friendly and they can spot any information instantly. Try to make medium to long content with interesting insights and less of filler sentences. You should have clear calls-to-action with a super guide layout.
11. Variety Content – Producing only text-based content can be boring for the users. Therefore, introduce elements of surprise such as infographics, creative images, original videos, podcasts, and likewise. Moreover, you can have various design elements such as highlighting the quotes, punch lines, and facts in different colors or boxes. This will attract a lot of users, and even websites in your niche will link back to your web page.
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12. Marketing Content – Every website needs an initial push to boost up the web traffic. Therefore, website owners invest in marketing their content. However, one should always use trusted domains and brands for marketing and advertisement such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and various search engine and social media brands. Moreover, there are many trusted content marketing services providers available that you get on the first page of SERPs.
13. Social Media Signals – These days the popularity of a website is determined by its followers count on the social media pages. Social media signals like the traffic coming from social media sites to your website, reviews on social media business pages, engagement of followers on the pages, and posts are taken into consideration for search engine ranking. Therefore, you should pay attention to your social media handles get followers to talk about you and post links that redirect back to your website.
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14. Get The Influencers – If you have the budget, you should contact the influencers in your niche to help you become word of mouth. There are many social media influencers available who can help you get noticed among your targeted audiences. Your social media signals will get a boost, and the web traffic from social media sites will increase exponentially which will be reflected in your search engine ranking.
15. Do Not Be Deceptive – All your efforts for optimizing your website can go in vain if you try to be deceptive and sneaky in your presentation. For example, making too many irrelevant clickbait titles to grab attention and disappoint the users, using deceptive means to get positive reviews, and dropping sneaky cookies and likewise are considered bad for the user experience. Therefore, your search engine ranking will suffer in the long run once the search engine crawlers discover your sneaky ways. Add value to the users and be honest in all your approaches.
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SEO rules keep on changing with the change in the search engine ranking algorithm. These 15 rules of SEO are valid for this year to boost your search engine ranking. Most of them are quite technical, and you should hire an SEO expert to take care of all these points in the best possible way. If you are looking for a freelancer SEO India , there is no one better than Dinesh who has over 6 years of experience working with online brands and businesses. Dinesh is an SEO Freelancer in Delhi, and by hiring him, you can get proven SEO strategies tailor-made for your website’s success as well as end-to-end SEO solutions along with digital marketing.