Top Five SEO Best Practices

Gil Gruber, MBA

Gil Gruber, MBA

With over 20 years of diverse marketing and sales experience, Gil’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to serial success in various business ventures, recognized on the “Maverick of the Morning” CNN show and awarded with the “Best of the Web” from Forbes. Gil is a frequent speaker at conferences, associations, and international events about emerging trends in B2B marketing and business expansion. His book “Turn On Marketing” is available on Amazon.
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SEO tactics

 

Is it time for a better Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Google is constantly making drastic algorithm changes. Here are a few Google SEO directions:

    • Focusing less on individual keywords
    • Rewarding better quality and authentic content
    • Assessing web usability and performance
    • Relying on established online reputation

We chose the top 5 search engine optimization best practices to assist you in  achieving a higher rank for your site.

1. Ensure Proper Website Coding

Keywords no longer play as crucial a role in SEO as they used to. Regardless, your site must maintain a lexical correlation between the following:

    • Web page’s title
    • Meta description
    • Header (H1)

These elements need to be unique and should describe the page well. Make life easier for Google’s search engine when it is differentiating between content and code. The more you use structured data methodologies, the better your website will rank.

Additionally, ensure your coding is errorless to avoid search engine crawling failure.

This alone is not enough to achieve a high SEO ranking. All the same, these are mandatory prerequisites for all optimization efforts!

2. Post Unique Content

One of the top SEO practices is to write quality content. Google likes to index sites that offer valuable information in response to specific questions. As such, Google looks at pages to see if they provide a good answer to a frequently searched question.

This means that Google is now after long-tail keywords and highly readable content. For example, “What is SEO”  Long tail content consists of:

    • Short sentences
    • Words with two syllables

Google chooses to feed selected content into its Direct Answers box at the top of the search results or into its knowledge graph box on the top right (see examples below).

What is SEO Google Direct Answers Box

When searching “What is SEO”, a Google box appears on the top with a definition taken from a highly ranked page.

Google Knowledge Graph: when you search for a term such as “Direct Objective Consulting”, Google will display a box on the top right, providing all the key information about the company.

Direct Objective Consulting Google Search

3. Create a Positive User Experience

SEO ranking is no longer based only on your site’s design and content. Instead, Google is looking to understand how readers react to your website. The more positive experience your site is projected to offer users,  the more likely your efforts will further online lead generation.

Here are some things Google looks into:

    • Do readers spend a long time on your pages? (Time on site)
    • What links do users click on? (Click-through rate)
    • What is your website’s performance?
    • Is your site mobile-ready?

4. Integrate Social Media

Social media plays a major role in our life today. Google knows this and looks at how accepted a brand, product, or service is based on its social presence. It is essential to integrate social media into your website. Google will then be able to see traffic coming and going from your social channels.

5. Build Your Online Reputation

This is the most difficult practice to achieve. In a way, your online reputation will grow over time. However, this is only true if the other SEO best practices are well implemented.

In order to foster a strong online reputation, we should aim to constantly increase our authority in our fields. You can do so by:

    • Referring to domains with an established online reputation in your business area, or
    • Serving as a source of reliable information in a specific area of interest.
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Final Words

Here’s the bottom line: Strive to become the authoritative source in specific subject matters related to your business. As we have seen, SEO best practices have changed quite dramatically.

But as long as you keep these tips in mind, you will see results. Start by error-proofing your website code, then focus on creating original content.

Offer a rewarding user experience and incorporate social media. Over time, your online reputation will grow.

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Looking for guidelines, support or assistance? Contact us and speak to one of our experts.

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