- Truthfully SEO is an ongoing effort.
There isn't one specific tactic that you can implement
at the start to succeed at the race.
It'll require many factors to be evaluated,
tweaked, and then refined.
And it can take a while to see results.
With that said, there's still a handful of variables
that are a good starting place.
Search engines are built around their ability
to index pages, so it's very important
that your site is accessible to crawlers
and that they can get to every page on your site.
Also, search engines love text.
It's the easiest for them to parse.
So if you're using images in place of text,
well, you'll have a problem.
You'll also want to research and experiment
with structured data.
Structured data is a set of tags that you add to your site
which helps search engines understand
the various pieces of information that are on your pages.
Now focus on building a site that is easy to navigate
for your users and it must absolutely be mobile-friendly.
You can use Google's mobile-friendly test
to see how you stack up.
Next, be sure to look at how your URLs are named.
It's a great idea to have natural language URLs
free of any extensions.
So if you have an eCommerce site,
a URL of site.com/kids/pants/denimjeans
is going to be much better
than site.com/productid=123.
Now be sure your title tags are unique
to each individual page and include a clear topic.
And on that note, be sure each page
also has a unique meta description.
Google often uses the meta description
as the short text that's visible in search results.
So create a meaningful sentence or two
that entices a visitor to click.
Next, make sure you're taking advantage of heading tags.
These are the h1, h2, and h3 tags.
And you should only have one heading one tag
and it should come before any of the other tags.
And also, avoid any use of that h1 tag
to say things like about us or contact us
and instead focus on a core topic for that page.
You also want to work to generate backlinks,
which are links pointing to your site
from other relevant sites on the web.
The more relevant backlinks you collect,
the better your SEO is overall.
And on that vein, the quality of the sites
linking to you greatly impacts reputation, as well.
Now, if you've done some research on backlinks before,
you've likely seen link exchanges,
link-building farms, and a mass of companies
promising thousands of backlinks.
That doesn't work.
Google is smart enough to know about this strategy
and it will be quick to penalize you.
Now, I highly recommend signing up
for Google Search Console.
It's going to help you inspect
the overall SEO health of your site.
Now, this is just scratching the surface.
So if you're committed to SEO,
you might enjoy watching SEO Foundations
or Marketing Tools SEO.
I highly encourage you to keep exploring this topic.