If you have a website, you know just how important the search engines are for traffic to your website along with website discovery.
As the Internet has grown, so has the number of ways in which to optimize a website to appear in search for your most important keywords.
There are absolutely steps you can take today to help improve your chances of showing up for those coveted keywords.
Brian Dean of Backlinko shared an extensive list of the 200 factors which play into Google’s ranking of websites on their search engine.
After reviewing all of the different points, we put together our TOP 7 which will be perfect for those beginners with SEO.
Top 7 SEO Tips for SEO Beginners
Top SEO Tips for Page-Level SEO
- Title Tag Starts with Your Keyword
As you know, you need to choose your top keywords you want to be found with on the search engine. Once you figure that out, you need to know the most important one.
Then….
You need to make sure your keyword is in your title tag. Not only does the word need to be in the main title tag of your website, the placement of that word in the title is even more important.
The keyword needs to be FIRST in your title tag. According to Moz, the websites with the keyword at the front of the title performs better than those with the keyword later in the title.
2. Content Length Matters
It’s recently been discovered that the longer an article, the better chance of an article appearing at the top of the search results page. It was found on average, word counts of 1900-2000 were found in the most blog posts in the first position.
3. Image Optimization
Without a doubt, you are using images in your blog posts. Did you know you could bring in so much more traffic with just images alone?
Images can be optimized for search too. Make sure every image has:
- A title
- Alt Tags
- Captions
If you use Google Images, the above three items are the way images are found. If you want to gain more exposure on Google, put the right words in the tags so you can be found on an image search too.
4. Content Recency
A recent update known as Google Caffeine put the spotlight on the recency of content on a website. This particularly plays strongly into blogs.
Now you can see Google is posting the date content is published on a website. The more recent the better.
Keep updating your website. If you have an article that could have more updated content, do that and the date will change.
5. Multimedia
Images and video add quite a bit to blog posts. With the way people consume information, they are doing this through different forms. Some are auditory, some are visual, some are read as text.
A study was able to show top positioning on google for blog posts had at least one image. You can see the proof below.
6. Broken Links
If you have a website, you know that broken links happen. However, if you have too many and aren’t checking regularly, this could signal to Google that your site is old or neglected.
There is a great tool I like to use to check for broken links.
Try the W3 Link Checker Validator to check your website for broken links.
7. Bullets and Numbered Lists
Readability and usability play an important role in how Google looks at a website. If you have paragraph upon paragraph of content, this actually could hurt.
By utilizing bullet points and numbered lists, it makes content easier to read.
The organization and display of the content placed so visitors can easily understand the article will optimize for search engines better.
Make your articles easier to read and see the results!
In Conclusion
That rounds out our top 7 SEO Tips for Google in 2018 to reach top positioning organically in the SERPs.
If you want to see all 200 Factors for Ranking on Google, check it out on Backlinko.