TOP 10 SEO TIPS FOR 2021

In this post, you’ll learn about the top 10 SEO best practices to follow in order to improve your search ranks in 2021.

  1. Make your website mobile-friendly
  2. Optimise the speed of your website
  3. Optimise your website images with alt tags using keywords
  4. Create a powerful title tag and meta description for your website
  5. Your URL should contain the important keywords.
  6. User Experience of your website is a priority
  7. Relate the website content with the Intent of Search
  8. Concentrate on increasing the number of quality backlinks
  9. Optimise the google business page to increase local engagement
  10. Build Google map citations  

 

  1. Make your website mobile-friendly

A positive user experience on your website shows that your target audience can easily locate it. Marketers must understand how critical it is to have a mobile-friendly website. A mobile-friendly website is extremely advantageous for search engine rankings.

According to SEMRush, “about 73 per cent of people will access the internet using mobile phones by 2025.” Google’s mobile-friendly optimizations caused a substantial shift in page rankings. Use Google’s free mobile-friendly test to see how successful your mobile website is. Also, check out the Google Search Console’s “mobile usability” report.

 

  1. Optimise the speed of your website

If your site takes longer to load, you’ll lose a lot of people and your rankings will drop as a result. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is one of the numerous free tools available to help you check your page load speed. GTMetrix is also a free application that analyses your page performance and suggests ways to improve it.

You can see all of the performance issues that are keeping your site from loading quicker and take action to resolve them. There are a few things you may do to speed up the loading of your websites.

  • Compressing the images
  • Allow caching in your browser
  • Remove any plugins that aren’t needed
  • Reduce the time it takes for a server to respond
  • Reducing the number of redirects 
  • Reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript files

 

  1. Optimise your website images with alt tags using keywords

Images are needed for enhancing the user experience of your site’s visitors. You probably spend a lot of time choosing the appropriate photos to complement your blog articles, product pages, and other key pages on your website. You need to dedicate the same amount of effort to optimising your website’s images. Images, when used correctly, may help your site’s overall SEO and enhance organic ranking.

The addition of alt text to images is a crucial step. Adding alt text to images enhances online accessibility and helps browsers comprehend your site’s visuals. Focus on generating valuable, relevant data content that employs keywords correctly and is in context with the page’s content when picking alt text. Also, avoid stuffing keywords into alt attributes since it creates a bad user experience and might make your site appear to spam.

 

  1. Create a powerful title tag and meta description for your website

Two of the most essential aspects of your website are the page title and meta description. 

From an SEO standpoint, title tags are clickable headings that show in search results and are highly important. Titles are crucial for giving consumers a brief overview of a result’s content and why it’s appropriate to their query. It’s crucial to utilise high-quality headlines on your web pages because they’re frequently the main piece of info used to determine which result to click on.

A meta description is a short explanation of a website that appears after the title tag in search engine results pages (SERPs). A meta description tag should provide a brief, relevant overview of what a page is about, to inform and attract people. They function as a sales presentation, persuading the visitor that the webpage is absolutely what they’re searching for. Although meta descriptions have no direct impact on search engine results, they do have an impact on CTR (Click Through Rates).

 

  1. Your URL should contain the important keywords

The structure of a URL is a component of SEO that is sometimes ignored. A proper URL structure informs both visitors and search engines about the content of the destination page. The URL structure of a website should be as basic as feasible. Consider structuring your information such that URLs are built properly and in a way that people can understand. Consider following the below points.

  • Short URLs outperform lengthy URLs in SERPs, therefore use them for your websites.
  • To improve your chances of appearing higher in search results, always include your goal keywords in the URL.
  • Consider eliminating stop words from your URL to make it seem cleaner and more concise.

 

  1. User Experience of your website is a priority

Google monitors how people interact with your content. As a result, one of the most important aspects in increasing your search rankings is user experience. The user experience of visitors to your site is greatly influenced by page speed. Here are a few more pointers to guarantee that visitors to your site have a positive experience.

  • Visuals, according to several studies, aid in the understanding of your information. To illustrate your ideas, include relevant photos, videos, and samples.
  • Subheadings (H1, H2, H3) help Google better comprehend your content and make your text more readable for users.
  • The use of white space is an important component of excellent design. Comprehension improves by 20% when there is white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins. So, to make your text more readable and attract users ’ attention, try adding white space.
  • Use popups carefully, as they are not only terrible for SEO but also irritate your visitors. So only use popups if they are required. Or show the popups to people who have stayed on your site for at least 4-5 minutes.

 

  1. Relate the website content with the Intent of Search

Every Google search query has a purpose, which is called search intent. Google’s first objective is to understand and match search intent. Pages that appear on Google’s first page have mostly satisfied Google’s search intent litmus test. 

If you search for “how to bake brownies,” for example, you’ll get blog entries or videos rather than e-commerce pages selling brownies in the results. Google recognises that people who conduct this search want to learn rather than buy anything. For a query like “buy chocolate brownies,” on the other hand, the top search results are e-commerce pages. Because Google recognises that individuals are searching for a place to buy in this situation. 

When developing content for your website, an SEO best practice is to keep the search intent in mind at all times.

 

  1. Concentrate on increasing the number of quality backlinks

Despite many modifications to Google’s search algorithm and ranking system, backlinks remain a significant ranking factor. Your chances of ranking better in search results improve if your web pages have a large number of backlinks. As a consequence, it’s critical that you concentrate on increasing the number of backlinks to your website.

Backlinks, however, are not all made equal. Some backlinks can drastically increase your position for specific search searches, while others might ruin your ranks, which is why high authority backlinks should be prioritised above other sorts of backlinks. You should concentrate all of your efforts on obtaining high-quality backlinks that will help you to increase the SERP ranks for your target keywords. Replicating your rivals’ link-building techniques is one of the most powerful strategies to get quality backlinks.

 

  1. Optimise the google business page to increase local engagement

One of the easiest and most powerful methods to get your business noticed online is to create a Google My Business listing. Google’s algorithms have been designed to account for a user’s search intent as more and more search queries become geographically focused. Because Google’s algorithms are always changing, having a Google My Business page and optimizing it regularly is essential if you want to increase the interaction of local users. After you’ve created and verified a Google My Business page for your company, the following step is to make sure it’s optimised and that all of the necessary information is provided. On your Google My Business listing, you should try to add as much information as possible such as,

  • Make sure your business description is accurate
  • Add new posts to your Google My Business profile frequently
  • Gather reviews from your existing and new customers
  • Upload new photos and videos regularly

Make sure your company’s Google My Business profile is up to date and complete. You’re losing out on one of the finest free methods to appear in Google search results if you haven’t taken the effort to develop and optimise one.

 

  1. Build Google map citations  

Local SEO citations are citations (local business data) published across the web to ultimately increase the rankings and visibility of a business in Google local search results and Google Maps. Citations are beneficial. Google assesses a company’s local authority by looking at how many citations it has. A firm that is mentioned on more websites has a better chance of rising in the rankings than one that isn’t.

When it comes to obtaining citations, there are three things that a company must consider:

  • The number of citations 
  • The accuracy of citations
  • The quality of citations

As a result, each of these features will complement the others. While having a large number of citations is essential, having high-quality citations is much more so. It’s always better to prioritise quality over quantity.