This article will give you 81 fool-proof and effective ways to improve your website traffic, boost engagement and better your SERP ranking. I have been writing on the web for more than five years. During this time, I came across countless SEO optimization tips that helped me in my journey. Some were useful, some were not so useful.
SEO is a way to optimize your articles or content so that they can compete with other articles and content on similar topics and appear more aggressively at the top of search engine pages. For example, if you write about ‘dog-sitting’ and a potential reader searches Google for dog-sitting, it’s the phrases they use to search for what brings them to you. To these
follow these 81 SEO tips to improve your SEO ranking
- follow these 81 SEO tips to improve your SEO ranking
- 1. Focus on user intention
- 2. Start building your expertise, authority, and trust right away
- 3. Make your content user-friendly
- 4. Take advantage of customer reviews
- 5. Think about SEO right from the start
- 6. Meet customer expectations
- 7. Forget about exact match keywords
- 8. Customize your calls to action
- 9. Choose a short domain
- 10. Better a small keyword in first place than a big keyword in page 2
- 11. Learn as much as you can about SEO
- 12. Never stop doing SEO
- 13. Write about topics, not keywords
- 14. Avoid (or rewrite) thin content
- 15. Pay attention to the legibility of your texts
- 16. Clean up duplicate content
- 17. Check old content
- 18. Old content can hurt your rankings too
- 19. Create FAQ pages
- 20. Recycle your content
- 21. Syndicate your content
- 22. Use tools for new ideas
- 23. Use the Search Console
- 24. Write unique product descriptions
- 25. Write compelling page titles
- 26. Test different meta descriptions
- 27. Avoid meta-tag truncation
- 28. Avoid keyword cannibalization
- 29. Compare yourself to the competition
- 30. Link to other websites with relevant content
- 31. Find content gaps on your website and fill them in
- 32. Update your content regularly
- 33. Adopt a ‘mobile-first’ approach
- 34. Consider AMP & PWA
- 35. Use responsive web design
- 36. Customize Meta descriptions
- 37. Check the indexing of your pages
- 38. Use HTTPS
- 39. Change the internal links for HTTPS
- 40. Use rel = canonical
- 41. Keep the website loading time at 2-3 seconds
- 42. News + BERT = Top Stories Carousels
- 43. Use one H1 tag per page
- 44. Take the most important keyword in the page title
- 45. Add image alt attributes
- 46. Use multiple sitemaps if necessary
- 47. Use easy-to-read and meaningful URLs
- 48. Use url parameters
- 49. Use breadcrumbs
- 50. Check the redirects
- 51. Use 301 redirects
- 52. Use canonical tags for similar products
- 53. Use dedicated hosting
- 54. Use structured data
- 55. Make sure you have a clear internal link structure
- 56. Add internal links in useful places
- 57. Set outbound links to nofollow
- 58. Use the href tag
- 59. Use high quality original images
- 60. Optimize your pictures
- 61. Use images in vector format
- 62. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- 63. Invest in visual search
- 64. Care for link quality (not quantity)
- 65. No spam links
- 66. No paid links
- 67. Fix broken backlinks
- 68. No links from inferior directories
- 69. Focus on links that bring users
- 70. Use nofollow for forum or comment links
- 71. No guest posts for links
- 72. Find the links of the competition
- 73. Focus on local facts and issues
- 74. Use Google My Business
- 75. Keep your Google My Business profile up to date
- 76. Collect local reviews
- 77. Optimize for multiple locations
- 78. Use regional pages
- 79. Add photos to your local pages
- 80. Create travel guide
- 81. Rewrite the meta descriptions on local pages
1. Focus on user intention
When doing keyword research, focus on search queries with clear user intent in order to create the highest possible quality content.
Search engines still need linguistic expressions above all to define the content of a website.
More importantly, your users’ search queries provide you with incredibly important clues about their needs and intentions.
2. Start building your expertise, authority, and trust right away
Create great content and pages that document your expertise or particular positioning (regardless of whether you are an individual or a company).
3. Make your content user-friendly
SEO is always about the user. Virtually all Google updates are related to easy-to-use content.
Google now presented the so-called Core Web Vitals. These are key figures that evaluate the user experience of a website.
Learn more about the behavior of your users on your website. That is more important than technical optimization.
The usability of a page is made up of many different factors that add up to a convincing website and ensure an optimal user experience. In a nutshell, this means: The website visitor can get to the desired destination quickly and easily. He can find what he is looking for on the website.
But user-friendliness also creates trust. And trust is a great asset for business success on the Internet. If a user feels that they are in good hands with you, they are more willing to act – that is, to order in the shop, fill out the contact form or call.
4. Take advantage of customer reviews
Create a plan for soliciting product reviews or comments about your business from customers. Integrate the customer reviews on your website.
5. Think about SEO right from the start
Get an SEO professional on board early on when redesigning your website.
“Our website is ready, now we want to do SEO.” – That doesn’t make much sense.
6. Meet customer expectations
Make your customers happy.
Don’t promise more on your website than you can deliver.
This is how you build long-term trust.
This is perhaps the best SEO strategy of all.
7. Forget about exact match keywords
Google understands entities (things and concepts) and relationships.
So you don’t need to use exact matching keywords. Instead, focus on thematic search terms.
8. Customize your calls to action
Use call-to-action based on user intent.
e.g.
“Inquire now”
“For download”
“Chat with an expert now”
9. Choose a short domain
Use a domain with 16 characters or less.
Short domain names are easier for people to remember.
10. Better a small keyword in first place than a big keyword in page 2
It is better to rank high for a keyword with fewer searches than for a keyword with many searches on page 2.
11. Learn as much as you can about SEO
Better know-how can be your decisive competitive advantage.
So learn as much as you can about SEO.
In our SEO seminars you will learn how to elegantly pass your competitors without them even understanding how you do it.
Both SEO seminars are perfectly tailored to the new requirements for modern search engine optimization.
12. Never stop doing SEO
You cannot do SEO once.
Build all SEO-relevant processes deep into your marketing.
In our SEO seminars, you will learn how to elegantly pass your competitors without them even understanding how you do it.
Both SEO seminars are perfectly tailored to the new requirements for modern search engine optimization.
SEO tips for optimizing content
13. Write about topics, not keywords
Think in terms of topics, not just keywords, to better tailor content to your audience’s interests.
14. Avoid (or rewrite) thin content
Thin content lowers the quality of your website.
Extensive content has been shown to generate higher search results (although long content does not guarantee success).
Thin content is the term for digital content that offers the user little or no added value.
The term thin content first appeared in 2012 when Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines became known.
Since then, the word has stood for the URLs of a website that are being devalued by Google due to their clearly poor quality.
Here are some examples of sites that often have poor quality content with little or no added value:
Automatically generated content
Inferior quality affiliate or partner sites
Content from other sources, such as copied content or poor quality guest posts on blogs
Bridging sides
15. Pay attention to the legibility of your texts
A clean and clear layout can significantly improve the user experience and thus the ranking of your website.
16. Clean up duplicate content
Remove or avoid duplicate content.
Duplicate content causes problems for search engines like Google. This is why the content of the affected page is more difficult to find or even filtered out there. So that a website does not have ranking problems due to duplicate content, every indexed page must have enough “unique content”. “Unique content” is content that was only created for one page and only appears on that page.
17. Check old content
Often old content is still valuable.
A little overhaul makes it shine again.
18. Old content can hurt your rankings too
Conduct regular audits to determine whether old content should be refreshed or disposed of.
19. Create FAQ pages
FAQs are easy to read and mostly very helpful. This is good for readers and for your search results. FAQs are also a good way of getting more attention to long-tail keywords.
Use a W-Question tool to see which questions are often associated with your keywords. Then answer them with your content.
20. Recycle your content
Think about how your content can be reused in a video, e-book, slideshare, etc.
21. Syndicate your content
Content syndication is the exchange or multiple use of content.
If possible, make sure that the other website places the rel = canonical tag to mark your website as the original source.
22. Use tools for new ideas
Use tools like the Google Search Console, Keyword Planner, Google Trends or a W-Questions tool to find topics.
23. Use the Search Console
Use the Search Console to see the actual search queries and to tailor your content even better to user intentions.
24. Write unique product descriptions
When you run an ecommerce website, you create new and unique product descriptions.
Duplicating vendor content won’t help your ranking and can disappoint your users.
25. Write compelling page titles
Attractive page titles ensure more clicks.
26. Test different meta descriptions
If you have a lot of impressions but few clicks, try different meta descriptions to improve your click-through rate. Write individual and relevant meta descriptions for each page.
27. Avoid meta-tag truncation
Truncated page titles or descriptions usually reduce the click rate.
28. Avoid keyword cannibalization
If you have multiple pages competing for similar search terms, consider combining the content on one page to avoid keyword cannibalization.
29. Compare yourself to the competition
Why is your competition beating you in search results?
Find out if there are any missing topics that you could add to enhance your content.
30. Link to other websites with relevant content
It makes your website a more valuable and easier-to-understand resource.
31. Find content gaps on your website and fill them in
Optimize the content that is already ranking well by finding the last gaps in content and closing them with high-quality content.
32. Update your content regularly
Always keep your content up to date.
This will keep your entire website attractive and relevant.
Mobile SEO Tips
33. Adopt a ‘mobile-first’ approach
Use the Mobile Ease of Use test tool in the Google Search Console to see how Google’s mobile search agent rates your mobile website.
34. Consider AMP & PWA
Use Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) or Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to optimize your offer for mobile devices.
35. Use responsive web design
Responsive web design is a method in which the server sends the same HTML code to all devices and then uses CSS to adapt the display of the page on the respective device.
Google’s algorithms usually recognize this configuration automatically. The prerequisite is that all Googlebot user agents are authorized to crawl the page and its assets, i.e. CSS, JavaScript and images.
https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design
36. Customize Meta descriptions
Shorter Meta descriptions can increase click-through rates on mobile devices.
Technical SEO tips
37. Check the indexing of your pages
Use the Search Console to make sure your pages are indexed.
38. Use HTTPS
Since 2014, Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal and Google Chrome shows:
“The connection to this website is not secure”.
39. Change the internal links for HTTPS
Before migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, change the internal links to HTTPS.
40. Use rel = canonical
Make sure that all pages that can be reached via multiple URLs have the rel = canonical tag, which directs Google to the respective main page.
41. Keep the website loading time at 2-3 seconds
Work with a developer and use the Core Web Vitals report to identify where the page speed issues are.
42. News + BERT = Top Stories Carousels
The best way to appear in these results is by posting quality news, AMP pages, and submitting your website to Google News.
43. Use one H1 tag per page
Do not use multiple H1 tags on a single page.
44. Take the most important keyword in the page title
The page title is an important signal for users and search engines.
45. Add image alt attributes
Google is moving to a more visual search to compete with other sources.
46. Use multiple sitemaps if necessary
If you want Google to concentrate its crawling on certain sections of your website, create separate sitemaps e.g. for images, videos, profiles or blog posts.
47. Use easy-to-read and meaningful URLs
Users can easily remember simple and meaningful URLs, they are search engine friendly and easy to enter.
48. Use url parameters
The handling of URL parameters can be important in order not to clog the index with irrelevant pages and to prevent the crawler from working unnecessarily.
49. Use breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs can improve the usability of your website and this helps the ranking of the website.
50. Check the redirects
Avoid long, chained redirects so that Google can search your website faster.
51. Use 301 redirects
Use persistent (301) redirects for moved or deleted pages.
If you need to change the URL of a page displayed in the results of a search engine, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has been permanently moved to a new location.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=de
52. Use canonical tags for similar products
If you have products with very similar descriptions and names (e.g., discontinued products), use the canonical tag instead of redirecting the pages.
53. Use dedicated hosting
A dedicated hosted website has no direct influence on the ranking, but shared hosting can cause your website to be slower and that in turn has an influence on the ranking and the conversion rate.
54. Use structured data
Structured data helps Google better understand the content of your website.
Structured data websites are often given more space in search results.
55. Make sure you have a clear internal link structure
The most important content should be linked via the navigation or the text.
Footer and header links don’t carry much weight.
56. Add internal links in useful places
If you’re linking internally, it makes sense if the content surrounding the link is related to your top keywords.
57. Set outbound links to nofollow
Use nofollow when you link to a website that you don’t want to recommend or when you received something in return for the link.
58. Use the href tag
To put it simply, you tell Google by using the hreflang comment that the present content is also available in another language and that a URL is intended for those users with the language and region [X]. Google will then display the appropriate URL for users with the language [X] in the search results.
Basically, you are signaling that there is a connection between the individual content on your own website and that each URL is relevant for a different target group (language / region). This makes it easier for Google to understand the international website architecture.
SEO for images tips
59. Use high quality original images
Stock photos do not help your brand or your ranking.
60. Optimize your pictures
Images tend to be the biggest burden on loading times.
Make sure you optimize the images for page speed.
61. Use images in vector format
These file types are more scalable, which gives you better image quality on multiple devices.
62. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to host your images.
A CDN can go a long way towards speeding up your website.
63. Invest in visual search
Retailers and ecommerce brands should incorporate visual search into their marketing strategy. Use high quality and attractive images for image searches. Use these images on other platforms as well.
Link building tips
64. Care for link quality (not quantity)
Link building should be very targeted and strategic. Your links should be authentic and of high quality.
65. No spam links
Stay away from spam links and use the tool “invalidate links to your website”
If your website has been subjected to manual action against unnatural links or you fear such manual action, for example because of paid links or link exchange programs that violate our quality guidelines, please ask the owner of the other website to remove these links. If the links cannot be removed, use this tool to invalidate the relevant websites.
Link to the tool
66. No paid links
Don’t pay anyone for links.
Even if you donate exchange for a link to charitable and nonprofit organizations, it is against Google’s guidelines for webmasters.
67. Fix broken backlinks
Broken links are bad for users and bad for Google.
68. No links from inferior directories
Only use high quality business directories that are relevant to your brand.
69. Focus on links that bring users
Links that bring qualified users to your site are really valuable.
70. Use nofollow for forum or comment links
The same goes for sponsorship, advertising and press releases.
71. No guest posts for links
Guest posts are great, but not for creating links directly.
72. Find the links of the competition
Get inspiration for your link building from the links of the competition.
Tips for local SEO
73. Focus on local facts and issues
Focus your content on the highest possible local relevance.
74. Use Google My Business
Create a complete Google My Business profile for each location.
75. Keep your Google My Business profile up to date
Make use of all the features that GBM offers and publish new posts regularly.
76. Collect local reviews
Local reviews are particularly relevant.
77. Optimize for multiple locations
If you have multiple locations, make sure the name, address, and phone number (NAP) for each location are consistent across all of your local profiles.
More tips to optimize Google My Business
78. Use regional pages
If you have different locations, create a landing page for each location.
79. Add photos to your local pages
Use pictures of the local locations, including the interior, to make your company more attractive to customers
80. Create travel guide
Use e.g. Google Maps or Google Destinations to create an individual travel guide.
81. Rewrite the meta descriptions on local pages
If you notice low click rates in the Google Search Console, you should consider revising or supplementing your meta descriptions with local information.