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SEO Tips You Need to Know in 2020

SEO Tips You Need to Know in 2020

SEO Blog Header ImageReading Time: 9 minutes

In today’s blog article we are going to be looking at SEO tips for 2020. This content is available as a podcast that can be listened too and downloaded or in a written article format, as shown below. 

When it comes to optimising your website and the amount of organic traffic that you get, using a good SEO tool is unavoidable and also very advisable. There are several different websites and tools that you can use to help improve the search engine optimisation of your website. This includes sites such as SEM Rush, Google Analytics and Ahrefs for example.

However, if you don’t have access to these various tools, you can still improve the SEO of your content, website, or other digital media by simply implementing some/all of the following ideas and techniques included in this article. 

If you’re someone who is new to owning a website or digital content, you may not fully understand how to optimise your website for SEO. This is understandable, which is why we’re going to provide you with our top SEO tips and techniques that you can use to improve the quality of your search engine optimisation for your website. 

What is SEO?

At its core, SEO is the practice of using specific keywords, phrases, and other variables hat are placed onto your website in an effort to increase the natural ranking of your website on major search engines such as Google. There are over 200 known variables that affect SEO and each search engines ranks websites slightly differently, depending on the specific type of search ranking metrics that are used on their platform.

SEO Blog Image

That is why it’s important to take into consideration the known variables that can affect your websites organic ranking. In the next section, we’re going to provide you with a list of our top free SEO tips that you can use to improve your natural ranking in search engines. 

Top SEO Tips for 2020 

As stated earlier, there are several different ways that you can approach optimising your website to improve the amount of organic traffic that you receive. Before implementing any SEO strategy, you need to write down all of the relevant information that is important to your business or operations. This includes things such as the location in which you offer specific goods or services, what you do and what your services provide.

Shown below is our comprehensive list of free SEO tips that you can use to improve the quality and ranking of your website with ease. 

#1 Optimise Meta Descriptions & Page Titles

Once you have created a list of premium keywords, you need to optimise your page title in order to bring in organic traffic. This is done by using an HTML <title> element which is hidden in the background of the page and it is usually editable in the website control panel, better known as the CMS or content management system. If you use a CMS website that is built using WordPress, then download and install the Yoast SEO plugin. This free plugin will guide you through how to add page titles, meta descriptions and can also be linked to your Google accounts. The keywords you use should contain important words and phrases that relate to your business and will likely be searched for by people online.

#2 Optimise Website Content

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The main content of your website or page is very important in determining how much organic traffic you get from visitors. There are several different elements to creating content on a page, some of the main ones being headers, body content, and images. Ensure that your content is fully optimised for your end-user and is displayed in a user friendly way.


Good examples of this would be writing in-depth product descriptions or a detailed explanation of your services. Do also consider using video and images of your products and services in use. 

#3 Web-Wide Distribution 

It’s important to create a comprehensive website that utilises the best white hat practices of SEO. Try to also create an entire presence across the web by sharing your content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media websites. This will allow search engines to gain a complete view of your business’s products and services. 

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#4 Link-Building 

Links are a very important factor in the process of creating and generating organic traffic for your website. This is the main reason why link-building is such an important part of the entire SEO process. When it comes to increasing the visibility of your website for certain keywords that are highly competitive, link-building is the best way for you to accomplish this. Links act as a vote of confidence of sorts and the more inbound, relevant and high-quality links that you have back to your site, the better your ranking will be. The two key points here are relevance and quality – bear this in mind when requesting links back to your site. Use the mantra, quality over quantity. 

This short video offers some useful hints and tips on SEO in 2020

#5 Analyze Your Competitor’s Statistics 

One of the best ways to improve your visitors’ statistics and engagement with your website is by analyzing your competitors and how their website is performing. By utilising platforms such as OpenSiteExplorer & AHrefs you will be able to get detailed information about your competitor’s websites. Both of these platforms will give you access to in-depth analytical information that you’ll be able to use to improve the results that you see from your search engine optimisation efforts. 

#6 Directory Credibility 

Online directories are one way to improve your website’s ranking and overall organic traffic flow with ease. They provide you with the opportunity to get your business and brand name promoted to thousands of different online companies who have established reputations in the industry. This is a great way to add credibility to your website overall and it can significantly increase your natural ranking within search engines. 

#7 Optimise Your Website Layout and Speed

One of the best ways to improve the potential effect that search engine optimisation has on your website is by removing all of the elements which cause it to function slowly. This can be anything from bad code, a broken website link, and using overly large images, which is why you need to put an immense amount of time into making sure that your website is fully functional and loads quickly. When your website fails to load correctly and / or slowly, it can really discourage a potential visitor from staying on your website and overall, it offers a bad UX (user experience). 

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Optimise Your Website Layout For Speed

By making sure that your website is responsive and reacts quickly, you will be significantly increasing the chances of a site visitor staying on and clicking on multiple different pages of your site at any given time. 

#8 Make the Content Natural 

One of the most important things to remember when configuring your website for SEO is that you need to write content for your audience as opposed to search engines. Many people who are configuring their website for search engine optimisation tend to use keywords/sentences that don’t grammatically make any real sense. This will not read well with your users and will have a negative affect on user experience (UX). This is why you want to make sure that you use your keywords as naturally as possible when creating your SEO-driven content. Create content people want to read that offers value and a good user experience.

#9 Link your content to other trustworthy websites 

One of the best ways to improve the natural ranking of your website is by ensuring that you link it to other trustworthy sources that have related content or similar themes to you. Once you have done this it is then possible to email these websites and advise them that you have added a link to their website in one of your articles. You could then even ask them for a reciprocal back to your site, thus helping to improve your SEO as well. The primary objective of content marketing is all about high-quality and engaging content and by linking to other credible sources, it tells the search engine that your content is both relevant and credible.

#10 Web Analytics 

Once you have configured your search engine optimisation parameters on your website, it’s important to use some sort of integrated tracking software to keep up with how it is performing and how much organic traffic you’re gaining regularly.

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Inside a Google Analytics Account

The Google Search Console is one platform that you can use to monitor the overall progress of your natural ranking easily. For a more analytical overview, you can also use Google Analytics to keep track of how website visitors visit your site and navigate/use it. Both of these tools are free and are vital in understanding how well your website is performing.

#11 Create A Unique Meta Description for Each Page 

Meta descriptions are located underneath each website that appears in a particular search result pages (SERP). Your meta description is the first content section that your website visitors see in the SERP when typing in and searching for a particular search term. Each web page on your website should have its own, unique meta description and you need to try and avoid creating duplicate content in your meta descriptions, as it can have a negative effect on your ranking. By adding a unique title and meta description, you will be helping to improve both the ranking of your website and also the click-through rate (CTR). 

(See earlier paragraph about using SEO Yoast plugin for WordPress sites)

#12 Try to keep your URLs as short as possible 

One of the best ways to improve your SEO all-around is by making sure that you use short and readable URLs. Depending on what platform your website is built on, there are several ways that you can automate and make this process easier. For example, within a WordPress website, it is advisable to use the ‘post name’ feature within >setting>permalinks. This feature allows new webpage URL’s to have the same name as the post or page that you are creating. 

WordPress Website

Remember, search engines are like spiders, they must crawl the web to locate your webpage or content so making it easier/quicker for them crawl will result in them indexing your website sooner. The sooner it is indexed, the sooner it will appear in the SERP. 


#13 Utilise the Power of Social Signals 

Social signals are a great way for you to improve your overall search engine optimisation configuration. A social signal is classified as any type of interaction on social media, this can be in the form of voting, sharing content, liking pages and posts and much more. These various types of interactions can help boost your overall engagement on social platforms and can also help with your organic search ranking. A good example of this is people sharing products, articles and videos on their own social media pages. These social shares can also help to create some deep backlinks, that have been known to also improve SEO

#14 Use Keywords for Your Images (Alt Tags)

Images play a very important role in determining the success and progress of your search engine optimisation efforts as they can help bring a webpage to life and will improve UX (user experience). We are all familiar with the saying ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’, and this is also true for websites. Break up your webpage content with captivating and emotive led images that may show your product or service in use. Do remember though, it is important to add what is known as an ‘Alt Tag’ to your images as images themselves don’t get read/crawled by search engines. 

#15 Create Unique Content 

One of the most effective ways to improve your search engine ranking is by making sure that you keep up with producing high-quality content that is related to the main subject of your website. One of the biggest challenges that digital marketers face is trying to consistently produce original content for their audience. If you’re someone who wants to maintain your natural ranking, you need to focus on creating premium content that will keep readers engaged with the message at hand. This will allow you to sustain relevance and potentially become a leader in your industry/sector. 

#16 Use Testimonials 

Testimonials can be used as a way to improve the search ranking of your website due to the fact that search engines index these special elements. This is known as schema mark-up and this is seen in the SEPR as yellow stars just above the meta description. It is not a guarantee that Google will index it or show this, however, it is worth having on your website if possible. Testimonials can also provide your website visitors with an accurate view of how good your products or services are and this can help improve conversion rates (CR). 

All of these tips can be utilised to substantially improve the overall ranking of your website and content fairly easily. If you have read or listened to this article and have any thoughts, comments or suggestions, please do comment in the box below. [/expander_maker]

 

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