7 SEO Practices You Need To Implement Now!

In our latest post about B2B strategies, we mentioned 7 SEO practices we recommend you adopt ASAP.

In that post, we only mentioned them briefly but if you want to implement them, you need to know more: 

Front-loading your main keywords

In simple terms, it means to put the important terms first.

Every relevant detail and piece of information should be at the beginning of your titles, paragraphs, sentences, links, item lists, and calls to action. In short, whenever you can, lead with your keywords. 

Let’s see some examples where the keywords are not front-loaded:

Enter our competition and win a new iPad

• You can learn all you need to know about SEO today
• Download these templates to help you write better corporate e-mails

In these cases, the focus of the sentence, the reason why it even exists in the first place, is last or very near the back.

Keeping in mind that most people don’t really read, but mostly scan the text until something catches their eye, it makes no sense to leave the important stuff at the end.

Let’s turn those sentences into front-loaded ones:

• Win an iPad – Enter our competition
• SEO: Learn everything you need today
• Corporate e-mails 101: Download these templates

Optimise your page’s loading speed

Page speed can be defined by either “page load time” (how long it takes to fully display the page’s content) or by “time to first byte” (how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of information from the webserver).

In essence, this one is very straightforward, if your page is slow and your content takes forever to load, your audience won’t stay. In fact, research shows that when loading times go from one to three seconds, the bounce probability increases by 32%.

These are some of the recommended ways to improve a page’s loading speed:

• Compress your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files larger than 150 bytes
• Minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code
• Reduce your redirects
• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
• Cache your web pages
• Optimise images
• Use content distribution networks (CDNs)

Optimise your title tags

What are title tags?

When you use any search engine, what you see as a clickable headline is actually a title tag. In the HTML code, they will appear in the section between tags.

They are the first thing your audience sees. Ideally, you will want to front-load your keywords to grab your potential customer’s attention.

For that, you will need to have an appropriate length; in general, search engines display only the first 60-70 characters of a title in the search results, so you need to be mindful of this when writing your titles to avoid being cut off.

If you want to add your brand’s name to the title, make sure you do so at the end, so even if it gets chopped off by the SERP, users will still be able to recognise the keywords.

Use one keyword per title

You may think that using many keywords in the same title will improve its page rank.

Well, the truth is it’s quite the opposite. The practice of overusing the same keyword or variations of it is known as keyword stuffing.

It is often advised to avoid keyword stuffing because Google and other search engines can easily recognize keyword stuffing and may change your title if they consider you’re just throwing different variations of a keyword into it.

Quick tips to prevent keyword stuffing:

• Avoid words with the same root: book flights, booking flights
• Use synonyms: they act as a support to your main keyword
• Make a list of your keywords and long tails words you want to include in your texts so you don’t forget or fall into unnecessary repetitions
• Place them carefully, not only within your text but also on title tags and meta descriptions.

Use internal links

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website.

While both users and search engines use links to navigate your website, their purpose is slightly different. Your visitors use these links to navigate through your site and find the content they want or need. Meanwhile, search engines “read” it in such a way that they track your content and won’t find a page if there are no links to it.

Aside from the usual links on the homepage, menu, about us, etc. you also have contextual links that are embedded in your text and serve to signal search engines that certain texts or topics are related.

The more links a page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

Publish quality content

This one should go without saying, especially in the current day and age where traditional outbound marketing techniques are giving way to newer inbound strategies that shift the focus entirely.

You need to build trust with your audience before they care about you.

The best way to do it is to become a reliable source of information. If there is trust in the content you produce, then you will have sufficient authority and relevance for both users and search engines to consider you a reliable source of quality information and therefore place you closer to the top of the SERP.

Build backlinks 

Backlinks are links from other pages to your own.

For most search engines, they are a crucial factor for ranking because they denote the degree of trust, relevance, and authority you and your content have. The more authoritative websites that link to you, the better rankings and organic traffic you’ll get.

There are many ways to get quality backlinks, and we will see them in more detail in the future, but we can quickly mention these five for you to consider:

1. Broken-link building
2. Infographics
3. Guest-blogging
4. Content promotion
5. Get interviewed

Which practice was your favourite? Which one do you see yourself implementing more easily? Let us know in the comments below.

We are thrilled to receive any questions or enquiries you may have about your upcoming projects; we can’t wait to help you!