SEO techniques can change on a dime in today’s fast changing world. Hacks that might have given you a first-page result as recently as 2017 are not only obsolete now and could also damage the rankings of your website.

Certain fundamental values, however, remain unchanged.

Targeting keywords with the sole objective of improving organic rankings, for instance, no longer works for search engines, but keywords are still relevant.

Keywords say a lot more about users and what they are grappling with, beyond having SEO benefits.

B2B and B2C marketers both want more search leads because they have an 8.5X higher conversion probability than an outbound lead.

With so many SEO methods, deciding on which ones to stick to and which you can safely ignore has become almost impossible.

If you concentrate on some of the best SEO services, you can probably push more organic blog traffic and boost your search rankings without risking a penalty from Google.

Let’s get started:

Remove anything that slows down your site.

We are sure that everyone can relate to the past when businesses could get away with a slow-loading site. A time when we had to wait for about 5 minutes before a popular news site is fully loaded.

Gone are those days!!

Now, page speed is a critical factor in SEO.

Page loading time is one of the most crucial factors that decide the performance of your website. If you are still in doubt, then you should know that 40% of users leave a

webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A sluggish page can degrade the user experience and ultimately discourage people from buying your product.

Earlier this year Google has released some research in which they concluded:

“The average time to fully load the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds.”

However, research also shows that 53% of people would leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Also in 2010, Google included site speed as one of the all-important ranking factors.

This implies that you are fighting a losing battle for top organic listings, regardless of the quality of your content or your competent website design, if your WebPages are late.
On the other hand, loading pages faster decreases running costs and, among other advantages, gains improved user experience.

So getting rid of irrelevant and non-essential elements that make your website inactive is vital. Consider deactivating plugins that you don’t need at all if you’re a WordPress consumer.

Also, rebuild your sidebar and put only necessary widgets there.

Link to other websites with relevant content

To most people, linking out to relevant and authoritative content pages is bad because it takes people off your page.

However, it’s not true. Link building will always remain an elementary part of a smart search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

According to Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz,

“Linking out sends trackable traffic, it makes your website a more valuable and scalable resource.”

Within our website, you will find that linking out to other sites is our norm.

You can’t expect to get link from others if you are not willing to give first. For example, if you are looking to get inbound links from trustworthy blogs, one of the ways to do that is to show your readiness to link out to those blogs from your own content.

Remember, you should only link out to content pages that offer great value. It’s a good SEO practice.

More importantly, when you connect to them, you can tell an influencer and, if your post is beneficial, they can link back to you, retweet the post or even send it to their large subscriber list of emails or newsletters.

Link construction isn’t just about quantity, it’s about efficiency. If you have a few reliable links rather than a dozen low quality links, you’ll gain more trust in your industry or niche.

Humans first, search engines second

Here keywords are meant to drive search results and overshadowed the genuine qualities of engaging and helpful content.

Don’t let your content sound like an old story which signifies nothing. Instead, write with a strong voice, point of view, and descriptions. Write with the plan of prompting emotions in the mind of your reader and create a sense of wonder and urgency, and you see more engagement, social sharing, and conversions.

How do we do that? Well, it’s simple.

When you are writing any content, forget about any search engine and create content that will help someone. This is known as SEO copywriting.

Tip: Many people still aren’t using “long-tail keywords”; instead they are trying to manipulate search engines. For long-tail keywords, it is much easier to get a higher position than for more common keywords in both organic search results as well as paid ad results

Loot Your Competitors’ Backlinks

Do you think your competitors are performing better than you for your targeted keywords? Then most probably they have a solid backlink profile

“Inbound links” are the most crucial part of the SEO puzzle.

You get a natural link profile only when you have both do follow and no follow links, which will be eventually rewarded by Google.

But if your competitors have tons of backlinks, is it a bad thing?

Not exactly!!

Websites that link to your competitors are the same websites that could link to your website. Analyzing the structure of links of your competitors often reveals very helpful information.

By backlink analysis of competitors, the goal here is to identify links that we have talked about previously: “ Link to other websites with relevant content”.

You can structure a spreadsheet like this: which will eventually help in the later stages of your outreach campaign.

Try to analyze all of the websites linking to a specific topic.

If you have already had content on that topic or a similar one, that is great.

If you don’t have, then you may need to write a new post. But if you can get 10 links from it, then it’s completely worth it.

Try to target on exact links that your competitor is getting related to topics that you’ve posted about.

Once you have figured it out, repeat the process. Write guest posts, conduct outreach campaigns, or do anything you can do to get that link.

But always remember: Be natural and don’t beg for links.

Have Google analytics & Google Webmasters in place at the start

After deciding on your search engine optimization goals clearly, you will certainly need different software to track what is working and what is not.

A critical part of SEO is reporting and analytics, which are crucial to improving marketing strategies.

Establish real relationships that have a mutual benefit!!

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are some of the private web analytics software solutions which can help you track your online campaign success.

By setting up analytics to track both small and big changes, you can understand your customer’s journey from your sales and marketing funnel.

Even before you are sending the first visit to your site or landing page, you should have these web analytics in place.

Unique and well-crafted Meta descriptions for every page

Well-crafted Meta description is the most important SEO factor which most people neglect.

It’s not just all about the copy on the page when it comes to using material to promote the value of every website.

To give useful signs to both search engines and users, there are also many hidden HTML elements and metadata blurbs. SEO meta explanations are an important portion of such text snippets.

When Google serves up your page for search users, it is the first segment that people see.

Text from SEO Meta descriptions also appears on SERP. The blurb includes a:

• Title Tag: Page title which is added to the HTML which can be different from the headline that appears on the page.
• The URL for the page.

If you use WordPress, you can fix meta descriptions by installing the Yoast plugins.

Use readable and meaningful URLs only

A friendly URL is a website address which is easy to read and includes keywords that describe the content of the page. They are called friendly URL’s because 1) They can help visitors remember the website address, and 2) they can also describe the content of the page to search engines.

No doubt that the URL above is long, but it’s easy to understand, for both search engines and visitors. There are no numbers or characters, other than the words and dashes.

Stay away from page URLs with numbers or characters like;

https://www.abc.com/article/2896531

It is good to match the title of the page with a suitable URL.

Use the right keywords in your images

We’re living in an increasingly visual world. And in this world, the value of image optimization can’t be ignored.

Google has dedicated a whole section of its search results to images.

In addition to telling Google what your image is about, adding keywords and alt text to any image on your website increases user-friendliness on your website for those who are blind.

They’ll read an alt text to their screen, letting them know what’s on your tab.

Final Tips

Instead of writing a new piece of content from the start, if you have published a post in the past that you feel is no longer relevant to users, mostly because of some recent Google algorithm changes, then work to update that page.

Finally, SEO switches rapidly from one month to the next. Company owners and advertisers are changing rapidly, but your competition can still be outpaced.

Just remember to concentrate on the above-mentioned basics, deeply engage your audiences, and stay updated with technological trends such as backlinks, site pace, and analytics.

Even the basics of SEO will help your website achieve greater click-through rates, interaction, and, of course, rankings. A little bit of reading and researching will also go a really long way on your own.