Nataliya, The Semalt Expert, Presents Basic SEO Practices
SEO is an essential aspect of internet marketing, and it gets bigger and more complicated every day. No one can claim to know everything about SEO so don't worry about knowing little about it if you are just starting out. One thing is for sure though that the better you optimize your website, the better chance it has to be ranked highly by search engines and the greater the benefits of your business' online presence. So, what are the most basic SEO practices?
Nataliya, Semalt SEO Specialist, explains that meta tags describe your pages to searchers. They need to have the best possible keywords and description. Descriptive and optimized meta tags will not only get your site listed in search engine result pages (SERPs) but also make it easy for you to remember what your old sites were all about. However, it's good to note that search engines like Google don't use meta tags for indexing. Write the best meta tags for humans and not for search engines. Create tags that readers will click because it relates to what they are searching.
"Content is king." You've probably heard this famous SEO-related phrase. It's one of the earliest guidelines of creating great content for your audience. Great content for humans and search engines should be of high quality and unique. It attracts other sites to link to you, therefore giving you many backlinking opportunities.
Provide your readers with what they want in a precise, clear and accurate way. There's nothing that will stop them from flowing to your site and referring their friends to it. If you are selling products or services, getting as many people to your site is a crucial intermediate goal. When your site is always rich in content, that objective is never going to be one of your most pressing problems. As you create your content, make good use of keywords. Spread keywords in your titles, header tags, anchors, and other parts throughout the write-up.
You can invest more efforts in learning how to create high-quality, and you'll definitely reap greatly from those efforts.
.htaccess should be set properly. You can do the setting yourself or get a professional to do it for you. Once you have decided the way you want your URL to be, stick to that format. You can have only www or non-www URLs so that Google doesn't view your pages as having duplicates. In case you do have both URL formats, Google won't penalize you, but you will have to provide a redirect from www URLs to non-www URLs (which is easy to do). You can search something like "redirecting requests to non-www URLs" and learn all you need to do.
You also need to configure your robots.txt file properly. It can be surprising to hear that this small text file can cause your site's downfall. A robots.txt file guides Google's crawler and other robots on the pages that you don't want to be 'crawled.' If you don't want images to be listed by search engines, you use your robots.txt file to block them. Clearly, you don't want to make an error when configuring your robots.txt file. A simple mistake could block your most important web page and keep it out of the net.
These are the most essential SEO practices and all of them are classified as on-site SEO practices, and there are other off-site practices such as promotion and building backlinks. Normally, you start with on-site SEO and later build on to off-site practices to make a fully optimized website.