A solid SEO strategy is needed for your website to grow the way it should. By optimizing your web content around keywords you’ve already identified, you improve your organic search ranking. This helps you climb higher in the results on Google, Bing, and other search engines. That brings in qualified traffic, which leads to more conversions. That’s why you should build SEO tactics into your site before it even goes live. This is something I recently discussed with Apolline Longeon, an SEO analyst at the Hamak agency. Follow good SEO practices to get the most out of your website’s performance with our 8-step guide.
Steps to Get the Most Out of Your Site’s Performance and Output
1. Identify Your Keywords Properly
This first step matters a great deal.
It means identifying the keywords that best match what your business offers. These keywords become the backbone of your content strategy, so choose them carefully.
Among the things to weigh, search intent matters far more than the rest. It reflects what the user hopes to find when typing a query into Google. Depending on the case, this intent can be informational (looking for knowledge), navigational (trying to reach a specific site), transactional (wanting to buy), or commercial (comparing before buying).
To figure it out, a simple way is to type the keyword into Google and look at the type of content that shows up in the results: blog posts, product pages, comparison guides, and so on. This will give you a good idea of what users expect.
Two other things round out the analysis:
- Search volume, which helps estimate the potential traffic a keyword can bring in over a given period.
- Competition level, which shows how hard it is to rank well for that keyword in search results.
Once you’ve finished your analysis, sort your keywords into two categories: primary and secondary.
If you’re a business selling products or services, your primary and secondary keywords should be transactional.
Secondary keywords are often synonyms of your main target keywords, or more specific long-tail terms.
Take the example of an online sports shoe store:
- A main keyword might be “sports shoes.”
- A secondary keyword might be “bright red sports shoes.”
Here are the 3 most popular free tools for identifying your keywords: Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Ubersuggest.
2. Optimize Your Content Around Your Keywords
Once your SEO strategy is in place, the second step is to optimize your website’s content.
On one hand, it needs to be original and well-written to give your target audience the best possible experience.
On the other, you need to work your primary and secondary keywords into the content to help it rank.
Experts call this on-page SEO.
Watch out for over-optimization, though.
- Reading the same keyword over and over in one paragraph isn’t pleasant for users. Search engines can penalize this too.
- Also, optimizing two separate web pages for the same keyword creates a conflict. It puts those two pages of your site in competition with each other. Experts call this keyword cannibalization!
Avoid this at all costs.
3. Strengthen Your Content with Lexical Fields
A lexical field is a useful tool for enriching your content and improving your website’s ranking.
Beyond your primary and secondary keywords, your website’s content should also include a lexical field, also known as an SEO semantic field.
This is a set of words and phrases that are related, closely or loosely, to a page’s main keywords.
A lexical field usually includes generic words that belong to the same theme, helping search engines like Google get a deeper understanding of what a page is about.
The words in a semantic field don’t necessarily carry transactional intent for users. But they add credibility to the page’s main and secondary keywords and build search engines’ trust in your website.
Going back to the shoe store example, the lexical field around the main keyword “sports shoes” could include terms like: non-slip soles, shoe comfort, durable shoes, versatile shoes, and more.
You can map out the semantic field around your products or services by looking at your competitors’ sites for the keywords you’re targeting.
For example, to build out the lexical field around the main keyword “sports shoes,” google it and note which terms show up most often on competitor sites that outrank yours.
4. Optimize Your Tags
The main HTML tags to optimize for your SEO strategy are: the meta title, the meta description, and your content’s header tags.
The first two show up in the search results. They point to the main information about a specific page.
They play a part in your website’s ranking. So you need to optimize them properly, making sure your main keywords come first.
As for the header tags, they show search engine crawlers how the information on a page is organized and ranked in priority.
- The H1 tag is the top-level heading. There should be exactly one per page you want to optimize for search. It plays a major role in showing the main topic of a page, and it should contain the main keywords you’ve identified.
- The other tags (H2, H3, H4, and so on) are used to organize a page’s content into subheadings. It’s a good idea to include the main and secondary keywords you’re targeting in these too.
Just be careful not to overload your site’s content by breaking it into too many subsections, since that can hurt the user experience.
5. Optimize Your Internal Linking
Internal linking refers to how a website’s internal links are organized to help improve organic search ranking.
Don’t overdo it, and place them where they make the most sense.
The anchor text (the words you place the link on) should match the page it links to. For example, you wouldn’t put a link on the word “sneaker” if your page is about “how to walk in high heels.”
Using internal links for your SEO strategy pays off in two main ways: user experience and how your site gets indexed.
First, clickable links are placed within your content to guide users toward other pages on your site.
Internal links make it easier to navigate the site, encouraging visitors to spend more time exploring it in depth. With a better user experience, time spent on the site goes up and the bounce rate goes down.
Good internal linking also helps search engines, which can more easily identify and prioritize the information on your site.
A well-built internal structure lets search engines index your pages faster, which improves your organic ranking.
6. Optimize Your Images
Don’t forget to optimize your images!
The image “alt” attribute lets you attach keywords to images and helps Google understand what they show.
This mostly matters for Google Image searches.
The “alt” attribute can also be read aloud, which helps people with visual impairments.
Get this right and you’ll improve your search ranking and bring more traffic to your site.
Don’t overlook image format either, since it affects how fast your images, and your whole site, load.
We recommend using “.jpg” images, since that’s the format search engines handle best.
Be careful not to stuff too many keywords into these tags, even though they’re not visible. Google can spot over-optimization and will penalize sites that do it.
7. Optimize Your URLs
The structure of a page’s URL often gets overlooked, even though it directly affects both organic ranking and user experience.
- Start by removing unnecessary words from your URLs, like conjunctions such as “and” or “or,” to make them easier for users to read.
- Include your main keywords to describe the page’s content, but again, watch out for over-optimization. Keep it short and clear, since URLs that run too long hurt the user experience. Ideally, a URL should be between 50 and 60 characters long.
- Make sure to use only simple hyphens, and leave out punctuation and accents, so search engines can read the URL easily.
8. Plan for a Blog
As part of your long-term SEO strategy, make room to add content on a regular basis. That’s the whole reason a business blog exists.
A blog lets you publish quality content regularly, optimized with the right keywords. That way, you keep improving your site’s organic ranking and bringing in more qualified traffic.
Search engines give you more credibility when your content is well-optimized.
Through blog posts focused on your industry, you can become a go-to name in your field and boost your reputation.
That way, you build loyalty with existing customers while attracting new ones. What are you waiting for?
Audrey: Thanks, Apolline, for all these good SEO practices. I’d just add that on-page experience matters too, in an indirect way, things like load time and readability, on both desktop and mobile.
FAQ: 3 Questions About Good SEO Practices
How do you choose the right main keywords?
To target the right main keywords and stand out from competitors, the three main things to look at are search volume, competitiveness, and search intent. Go with keywords that have high search volume and low competition, where the search intent matches what your business offers.
Why do you need to optimize your content with an SEO semantic field?
Beyond your keywords, the lexical field should give both users and Google’s algorithm more context and a better understanding of what your business offers. This way, you provide a better browsing experience while also improving your website’s organic ranking.
How do you optimize your URLs?
When you create a web page, its URL should include the primary keywords tied to it. If your site is already live and you want to optimize your page URLs, or if you’re redoing your site, set up a redirect plan to hold onto the ranking you’ve already built. A redirect plan passes the old URL’s authority on to the new one.
Wrapping Up on Good SEO Practices for Ranking Your Website Well
Good SEO practices for building a website start with identifying the right keywords for what your business offers.
From there, optimize your content around those keywords and work in the related lexical field.
Finally, fine-tune your URL structure, HTML tags, and image alt text, and organize your internal linking to support organic ranking.
And if you want to play in the big leagues, add a blog as a way to connect with your customers, driving more qualified organic traffic to your site and building its reputation.
These easy-to-apply tactics will give you a strong online presence and help you avoid a gap between the effort you put in and the results you get.
