5 SEO Best Practices for 2021

1) Aligning Content with Search Intent

Search intent (user intent) is described as the purpose of a search query. Everyone that conducts an online search is looking to find something. So, it is a search engine’s goal to understand and provide the correct answer to a user’s intent. There are four types of search intent:

• Informational Intent: The searcher is looking for information. Example search: “Who is George Washington?”
• Navigational Intent: The searcher is looking for a specific website. Example search: “Facebook login”
• Transactional Intent: The searcher is looking to make a purchase. Example search: “Dell laptop price”
• Commercial Investigation: The searcher wants to purchase a product but needs more information on possible solutions. Example search: “best restaurant in Pittsburgh”

When creating content for your website, think about the search intent of your users. If you would like to rank for the keywords “gaming laptop review,” it needs to be understood that the user’s intent is commercial and not transactional. The user in this situation is still gathering information before making a purchase.

2) Page Speed Optimization

Three seconds. Three seconds is all it takes to lose 53% of your mobile users. If your website takes too long to load, your users are going to become frustrated and leave before seeing your content. This will ultimately lead to a drop in search engine rankings.

There are numerous online tools that can be used to check your website’s load times. Personally, I like Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer, but Google’s PageSpeed Insights is also quite user friendly. Each of these tools will provide insights on your page speeds and recommendations to improve load times. Some basic recommendations include:

• Minimize HTTP requests
• Minify and combine files (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
• Defer JavaScript loading. This will prevent it from loading until other elements have loaded.
• Reduce server response time. If you are using a slow domain name system (DNS),switching to a faster DNS can help speed up load times.  
• Enable compression. Smaller files = faster load times
• Enable browser caching
• Reduce image sizes

3) UX Improvements

User experience is a major factor in improving search rankings. Search engines like Google pay close attention to how users interact with content. Think about how you personally interact with a website. What information are you reading? What elements do you click? How do you navigate between pages? 

In order to have a good user experience, a web page needs to be smooth and user-friendly. The use of subheadings for content helps users (and crawlers) better understand the content. Properly using H1, H2, H3 headings will improve UX by making pages more aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. The use of relevant visual content (images, videos, infographics, etc.) also improves UX through better illustrating points. Some people prefer to learn through visuals, so this can help improve the overall user experience. Lastly, the use of blank space helps improve UX. Spacing between paragraphs and increased margin sizes produces more white space on a page, which is essential for web page design. Think about how silly this blog would look with no margins or paragraph spacing to separate text. It would be a cluttered, dense mess.   

Breakdown:

1. Properly use subheadings to help with navigation and aesthetics
2. Use visuals to supplement written content and improve appearance
3. Embrace white space on web pages

4) Title Tag and Meta Description

Title tags are an HTML element that identifies the title of a web page. They are clickable headlines in search results that are often a person’s first impression of your website, so it is important to create a captivating title tag to attract users. When creating a title tag, it is essential to include your target keywords that match search intent. 

Meta descriptions are also HTML elements that describe content and are nested in the head tag. A well-written meta description will have highly relevant keywords that summarize the web page and ideally be between 150-300 characters. Best practices to follow when writing meta descriptions include:

• Use researched target keywords
• Match user intent
• Write unique descriptions for every web page
• Write an accurate page overview

5) URL Structure

URL structure is a simple but often neglected feature of SEO. A well-written URL should provide searchers and search engines with a good idea of what the web page contains. However, that does not mean that a URL should be overly descriptive and long (that is what meta descriptions are for). It is a good rule of thumb to keep URLs as simple and concise as possible. Here are several URL writing tips:

• Shorter > Longer (less than 60 characters)
• Use hyphens to separate keywords
• Remove stop words (a, and, the, but, etc.)
• Use your primary target keyword