What are the 15 SEO tips for websites to rank higher in Google?

Every website in our gigantic web world wants to make a good place in search results, especially Google as it is the world’s biggest search engine. But unfortunately, most of them didn’t get success to climb the search ranking results.

Today in this answer I’m going to share some very effective tips which I have personally use on my client websites and have seen them achieving success in the next 10 minutes.

These tips are not just for Google, in fact, these tips will help you to grow your search ranking for all major search engines out there, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc.

To make it easy to understand I’m going to divide my tips and suggestions under two main parts Do’s and Don’ts also under Do’s I’ll again classify it in Tech Tips and Non-Tech Tips. So, let’s get started.

Do’s

If you have searched for SEO on the web, then you probably have read a couple of articles written by a few other bloggers. But most of the cases bloggers just pass through the points they have seen on other blogs.

That is why most of the times those tips don’t get effective enough for you. But today everything I’m going to share is what I use on a daily basis.

Non-Tech Tips

I’m going to share all the non-technical tips related to achieve good SEO here. So that you guys won’t get lost inside the de-ja-vu of technical and non-technical points.

1. Simple & Clean Design

Every time I give some presentation or seminar about SEO, I always suggest every webmaster have a simple, clean and minimal design.

Trust me this really helps a lot. Mostly webmasters treat web crawlers differently than normal users, but in reality, they behave the same and rank you as per the experience they had on your website.

So, try to use a clean and minimal design along with good font size, so that it is easily readable from normal screen distance.

2. Keyword Research

Do proper keyword research before targeting any specific keywords. I use 

Adword Keyword Research Tool which is free for planning and choose my target keyword, but if you are willing to spend some money (monthly basis) for better keyword research and analytics, I will suggest you useSEMrushwhich is great for keyword planning.3. Proper Title & Description

This is also very much important and I hope most of the webmasters are well aware of its significance. So, use a proper title in your page or post and make sure it contains your target keyword. Like if your target keyword is Tech Blog so, you better have something like “Jone’s Tech Blog”. So that it ranks well. Also, the description is another important thing for SEO.

Make sure you have a proper description for every single page and post. Also, try to put your target keyword inside the description section. Though Google doesn’t always use page description on their search results, most of the other search engine does, so don’t miss it.

4. No Keyword Stuffing

I’ve seen many webmasters and bloggers do a lot of keyword stuffing just to get higher ranking in search results. But this is a very bad thing and in fact, you can receive a penalty for this kind of work and you will be placed on the 12th page of Google.

Google hates keyword stuffing. What I suggest you are to mention your target keyword inside the Title, Description and the first paragraph of your page or post. After first paragraph, you can use adjacent nouns like “it/this” in the rest of you page or post unless it is really necessary to mention the keyword, don’t mention it just for stuffing.

5. Image with Proper Alt Tag

Almost 76% website on the web does not use proper alt and title tags for their images. They just insert the image link and post it on the web. Don’t be like that, this is a very bad approach towards SEO. Make sure almost every image you have on your website do have alt and title tags properly. Now I do understand that it is not always possible to add the image title due to the title hover effect on images and links, but you can always use the alt tags and there is no harm to use it.

6. Write Unique and Quality Content

This is one of the key ingredients to climb the SEO ladder fast and steady. Google and all other search engines do care for this most beside anything else. If you have a good and unique content which appeals and satisfies more users than any other popular site, Google will be more than happy to place your site at number one position instead of those popular sites. I’ve seen it, trust me.

So, stop creating contents that are actually either copied or inspired the content of what other bloggers have written on their blog. Besides, do your own research and write something so unique that it will impress the readers along with the search engines.

7. Engage with Users

You might be thinking that what is the effectiveness of user engagement with SEO, but there are more than 26 variables inside the search algorithm of Google which actually based on user engagement and satisfaction. The more satisfies users are the more score your site gets from Google.

Along with that user engagement also increases social shares and referral which will help to grow your site traffic and to improve your SEO. If you are a WordPress user, 

MyEffectois a great plugin to increase user engagement on your site.Tech Tips

Now it’s time to share the technical tips for your site to improve your SEO and search engine rankings. So, follow every single piece of advice properly and if you have no idea about the things I’m going to share below, you better sent this post link to the tech team of your site so that they can do this for you.

1. Reduce the site load time

This is the most essential technical aspect of a website to have a better SEO ranking. Every search engine crawler takes the load time of sites very seriously and if your site is loading slowly then most of the users are going to bounce off your site just because it is slow and crawlers will give a bad rating to your site. You can use pingdom toolsto test the loading speed of your site.As you can see from the above screenshot that one of my blog post took almost 3.75 seconds to load up the page and as per Pingdom it is “faster than 43% of all tested websites”. To understand it even better here is a table of load time, rating and what to do.

Site Load | Time | Rating | What should you do?

0 – 1 second Good Nothing to do

2 – 3 seconds Fair Site speed is not good but you should consider improving it soon.

4 or more seconds Poor | Consider switching to a better host, Reduce the number of blocking javascript element, Load js asynchronously, Get a good CDN (MaxCDN preferred).

After testing your website and checking the above table, most of the webmasters find their site on the POOR rating category, especially those who use CMS like WordPress.

This is because WordPress adds few JavaScript inside pages, but every WordPress site uses various plugins and theme who actually adds a lot of blocking element on pages and posts and increase the overhead load time. So, try to use a simple theme with fewer js and properly coded, also a useless plugin to load sites faster.

2. Use Properly Image Size

Most of the theme & website developers don’t care about the image dimension much but this is one of the major reasons to increase the page size, site load time and to reduce SEO score.

I’ve seen many themes and sites who fetch a (1024px X 768px) image from the server whereas the HTML design only needs (400px X 300px) image. So the image getting reduced by the browser with the help of HTML and CSS.

This is really bad and increases a lot of overhead. I’ve seen any developers do this and most of the WordPress theme developers (even premium themes) do this all the time (claiming this as retina display support). If you want to support retina device, use plugins like 

WP Retina 2x, but always serve proper image size inside your HTML and CSS. example of an oversize image

3. Optimize your Images

Most of the time the images we upload on the internet are not well optimized and hence we serve a bigger image without properly optimize it. This also harms your SEO ranking, so you better use properly optimized and properly sized images in your website.

If you are a WordPress user, there are plugins like 

EWWW Image Optimizer, which is free and will optimize your image properly without the need to do anything from your side. But if you a non-WordPress user then you can use Adobe Photoshop or similar applications or save your JPEG images properly sized and progressively load faster.4. Proper Robot.txt

Robot.txt is an advanced text file that tells web crawlers what to crawl and what to avoid. If you configure your robots.txt file improperly, it will block all web crawlers to visit your site and your site will lose SEO and search ranking.

So, unless you are a power user, don’t mess with the robots.txt file of your site. Use 304 If Modified Since Header 304 If Modified Since HTTP Header sends the last updated date through your website HTTP header, so when you will update your page or posts, the Last-Modified date for that page will be changed and this will sent an invitation to all the crawlers out there that you have updated your page.

But if you don’t update anything crawlers will check your site headers' last modified date and decide if the content is already on their index. If the content is already indexed then they will skip it. In this way, this header will reduce your bandwidth usage by crawlers and also crawlers will love your site. If you are a WordPress user there is a plugin named 

If Modified Since HTTP Headerfor doing this job.6. Use Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that keeps the list of all the pages and posts and images which help crawlers to understand the structure and niche of your site and to crawl it properly. Search engines give gives extra preference to those sites who has a proper sitemap instead of those who don’t. If you are a WordPress user, 

Yoast SEO Pluginis the best plugin that has every SEO needs starting with a page title, description, sitemaps everything.7. Enroll in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster ToolsandBing Webmaster Toolsboth provide very good tools for the webmaster so that they can add their site into them and starts monitoring the potential issues you have with your website. One thing you keep in mind that always add every flavor of your website into webmaster tools.So, if your site is 

Example Domain, make sure you add bothExample Domain(non-www) andExample Domain(www) version of your website and then select your preferred domain (non-www or www version) from the webmaster tools settings. This will help search engines to fetch all your site properly and then redirect all of them to a single address.Also, make sure you add a 301 permanent redirect into your site to your preferred version when a non-preferred version has been visited by any user. Don’t forget to add your sitemap.xml into the webmaster tools.

8. Use SSL (if Possible)

Back in 2013 Google declared that their search algorithm will give higher preference to those websites who takes users privacy and security seriously by using SSL. In fact at Google IO 2014 google did a presentation named “

HTTPS Everywhere” to encourage webmasters to use SSL on their site.I’ve really seen drastic improvement on my own site and many of my client’s sites after migrating to SSL. Though people though SSL is very costly (it costs $7.45/year), needs dedicated IP (only if you want to provide ancient browser support, else use SNI which is free), it makes site loads slower (again wrong). If you can tune your SSL site properly, it will load at the same time as an HTTP website and you will not see any noticeable difference.

Don’ts

Now as I’ve shared all 15 SEO tips I have promised to share, now I’m going to share a few things which you do not want to do though they are recommended by many bloggers.

Google has changed its index and ranking algorithm am a lot in 2013 – 14 and now it’s 2015, a realm of Panda, Penguin, Pirate (advanced algorithms of Google). Now Google PageRank is also officially dead for public release and henceforth only keeps update inside Google. In this scenario, there are few things you should avoid though many bloggers assist you to do so.1. Guest Blogging

Yes, that’s right. At the end of 2014, Matt from Google publicly declared that guest blogging for link building strategy is going to be treated as SPAM and Black Hat Technique and websites will be penalized accordingly.

So, if you do guest blogging for building links to your website, you should stop immediately. As per Google, you can do gust blogging as much you want when it is not being used for SEO link building practice.

Instead, I suggest all of you write good quality unique content so that people fall in love with it and you get genuine backlinks automatically. Work hard for good content not for black hat SEO tricks.

2. Don’t use Paid Traffic

Don’t ever use paid traffic to your website to increase hit and web rankings. Advertisements are always good and they are not considered as paid traffic, but there are few companies in the Middle East who generate traffic from BOTs, not from actual users just to increase hit on your site. Don’t ever use these at any circumstances, you better spend money on advertisements. Search engines take these kinds of traffic websites very seriously and place them at the bottom of the search result.

3. Don’t use Black Hat Techniques

There are many forum and blog out there to share black hat SEO techniques to reach higher ranking without don’t much work, but trust me these tricks won’t help you on the long run and eventually when Google will release a patch for this black hat technique, you site will be at the bottom of the search engine sea.

So, always use legit and proper SEO techniques for your sites.

Feedback

Please let me know if my long post helps you to get more visitors to your site. Do you use any other trick to increase traffic to your site? Do you think I’ve missed any points? Let me know your story and if my post helps you in the comment section below. I’ll be happy to hear from you guys.

If you are looking for SEO ConsultationorSEO Services, please feel free tocontact me.