Ultimate SEO Guide: Best Practices and Mistakes to Avoid

June 13, 2020June 13, 2020 skristen Seo, Technology

Do you know all the rules of so-called SEO optimization?

“Do you know how Google decides which the best answer to a question is?” Unfortunately, this is probably the only question that Google would not be able to answer.

The search engine maintains absolute confidentiality on the algorithms that determine the indexing of web pages. Instead, it makes no secret of the virtuous behavior to be emulated to offer users valuable content. And it is precisely on these that SEO experts have been working for years to refine techniques and strategies.

Valuable content, quality links, popularity, and reputation: these are the aspects to focus on in order to obtain good positioning. An SEO expert knows well, however, that to obtain lasting results it is not enough to apply some improvements here and there.

To be effective, an SEO strategy must become part of the marketing of the business and not be a simple accessory.

“Getting along” with Google is not easy. Someone will tell you that to get good results you will have to be faster than your opponents. SEO is a race where the rules of the game are constantly changing.

If you want to win, you need to have a strong ally from your own, capable of anticipating not only the moves of your opponents but also the new trends that will inevitably change SEO.

In other words, what you need is an SEO Expert, real flesh!

7 Practices to improve your SEO

Do you want to make your web presence stronger and stronger? To convince Google you must have all the credentials: let’s see some tips to make your website “Google-friendly”.

1. Optimize site speed

One of the most important ranking factors is the loading speed of the web pages. If you want to improve your positioning you must necessarily act on those elements that directly or indirectly cause a slowdown.

To measure the performance of your website you can use special tools, such as Google’s GT Metrix, Pingdom, or PageSpeed Insights; the latter also provides useful tips on which aspects to optimize to reduce the loading time of your web pages.

2. Provide timely answers

In 2014 featured snipped, small boxes at the top of the SERP that appeared in a summarized way to answer users’ questions, appeared on Google. The featured snipped teach us that if we want to aim high we have to structure the contents in the question-answer form.

Google’s intent is clear: to provide users with immediate answers. It is no coincidence that the search engine is giving more and more visibility to e-commerce sites such as Amazon when users ask for information on the prices of a product.

3. Update old content

“Content is king”, content is one of the main factors behind SEO. Google always needs the best, if you have content on your site that is outdated then make changes in it ASAP enriching them with the missing information is a good way to gain authority and rise in the rankings. Consult Google Trend to intercept user requests and complete your articles.

Do you want to push a particular product or service? Create specific sections within your site by focusing on the best performing keywords. Good content optimization is essential to increase your quality score and wink at Google.

4. Plan your local SEO strategy

Google tends to give more and more important to Google My Business, hence the importance of using this tool to obtain a better organic positioning. Implementing local SEO actions allows, in fact, to bypass traditional search results, obtaining great visibility.

What you need to do is optimize the profile of your business with correct and complete information, entice users to leave positive reviews and increase word of mouth online, so as to appear authoritative in the eyes of Google.

5. Use professional SEO tools

What we could define as the “zero advice”, taken for the most part for granted, is: equipped with professional analysis tools. This is to say that a good SEO strategy cannot be separated from an accurate preliminary and ongoing analysis.

There are many free and paid tools that you can use to plan your strategy: Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Majestic SEO, SEM Rush, SERP Lab, and SEO Zoom are among the most popular.

6. Increase click-through rate

Even if they do not have an actual value on the SEO side, the “title” and “meta description” tags are important for receiving clicks and increasing incoming traffic.

An increase in visitors to your site will certainly not go unnoticed by Google! To capture users’ attention, give preference to expressions that are attractive or with strong emotional value.

Advice? Use the CTR Magnet Technique: study the posts of your competitors on the first page of the Google results and think about how you could structure the title and description of your pages to distinguish yourself and also use a title generator tool to make your blog title catchy.

7. Optimize video content

If we type on Google “how to mount an electrical outlet” probably the first results will be video. Always in the same perspective to offer real answers to users’ needs, Google is giving more space to video content. It is therefore important to optimize these too: the rules are always the same (keyword, title and video description, quality backlink, popularity).

Don’t have a corporate video? Then maybe the time has come to create one! Videos are increasingly essential in modern marketing.

SEO management: the 10 mistakes to Avoid

To bring your website up, you must yes, implement all those actions aimed at improving its structure and navigability, but you must also be careful not to make mistakes or take shortcuts that could make your efforts null and void.

Don’t you want to risk ending up on Google’s blacklist disastrously ruining your reputation? We have compiled a list of errors to avoid in order not to be penalized.

Keep these in mind when planning your strategy!

Small content: even pages that have too short or insignificant texts (generally less than 250 words) are penalized by Google. Many e-commerce sites that presented their products without any description ran for cover.
Title Tags, H1 Tags, and Images not optimized. Doing an analysis of most websites it may surprise you that, however trivial, these aspects are too often overlooked.
Broken links or that lead to non-existent pages: periodically check that all the links on your website (internal/external) are correct and functional. Don’t wait for Google spiders to find the error before you, penalizing you.
Meta descriptions repeated over several pages: as you may have guessed, Google does not like repetitions, even more so if they have to do with the description of a web page that should identify unique content.
Keyword stuffing: it is still a common practice to repeat the keyword to be optimized up to exasperation. The reward is the logic of the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which considers the content and the correlation between the keywords on a global level.
Duplicate or copied content from the web: Google rewards fresh and updated content while penalizing duplicate or copied content from other websites. So, be inspired but committed to always do better than your competitors.
Hidden text and links: a trick used by many is to insert text or invisible links, the same color as the background of the page. A form of webspam that can go unnoticed by users but not by Google.
Buying links: Google discourages all those practices involving the exchange of links within blogs and websites, penalizing both the website that provides the link and the one that receives it. Never as in this case is the saying “better few but good”.
Chains and redirect loops: another factor that negatively affects the SEO performance of a website are the chains of redirects that inevitably lengthen the response time of the server and can lead to the occurrence of errors.
Cloaking: Google can only penalize cloaking, the technique that allows you to show search engines a different content from that proposed to users through the construction of an ad hoc code.

Conclusion

Knowing the most common SEO errors is the first step in avoiding them. As you may have seen, most of these have to do with optimizing on-page factors and technical aspects of building a website.

If you want to make your web presence stronger, you must, therefore, act on all those elements that affect the user experience. A website with a good structure and navigability, in addition to pleasing the search engines, will encourage users to spend more time on your web pages, with a positive effect on the page rank. In other words, quality value for users translates into value for your business.

Technical skills, analytical skills, experience, and continuous updating: good SEO optimization requires strategy and vision, planning and analysis of future scenarios. Again, the ability to adapt to change is the key to success.