SEO Essentials: Learn, Explore, and Succeed (Master the SEO Basics)

• • Page Load Time: Page load time means the time it takes for your site to fully load. It is important to have your website’s page load time fast so that users will have the best experience while visiting your website.
  • Image Optimization: Compressing and resizing images to reduce load times without degrading the quality.
  • Browser Caching: Storing static files locally in users’ browsers to speed up load times on subsequent visits.

2. Mobile-Friendliness

• • Responsive Design: Ensuring your website adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices.
  • Mobile Usability: Making sure that mobile users have a smooth experience, including easy navigation and readable text.

3. HTTPS Security

• • SSL Certificate: Securing your website with HTTPS encryption. Google considers HTTPS as a ranking factor and it helps protect user data as well. Thus having your site secured with SSL is a good SEO practice.

4. Crawlability

• • Robots.txt: A file that guides search engine crawlers on which pages they should or shouldn’t crawl. You must consider adding a Robots.txt file to your site to allow or disallow various pages on your website.
  • XML Sitemap: A file that lists all important pages of your site to help search engines discover and index them. Having a good sitemap on your website helps in better crawling and indexing.

5. Indexability

• • Meta Tags: Using meta robot tags to control the indexing of pages (e.g., noindex, nofollow). You can skip this if already have a good robots.txt file setup.
  • Canonical Tags: Indicating the preferred version of a page to avoid duplicate content issues. When you have many pages with similar content, you can instruct search engines to consider one particular version as the main and another as a copy of that. This way, your website won’t get the duplicate content penalty.

6. URL Structure

• • Clean URLs: Creating URLs that are descriptive and include relevant keywords.
  • URL Parameters: Managing URL parameters to prevent issues with duplicate content. Read our URL Optimization Guide for more information on this topic.

7. Site Architecture

• • Internal Linking: Using internal links to help search engines understand the structure of your site and to distribute page authority. Make sure that no links are broken, and that all are working well.
  • Breadcrumb Navigation: Providing a navigational trail for users and search engines to understand the site hierarchy.

8. Structured Data

• • Schema Markup: Adding structured data to your pages to help search engines understand the content and enhance search results with rich snippets. Website site scheme, product schema, FAQ schema, and there are many more such schema markups available that you can use on different pages of your website depending on the type of content.

9. Error Handling

• • 404 Pages: Creating custom 404 error pages that help users find what they’re looking for if a page doesn’t exist.
  • Redirects: Implementing 301 redirects to guide users and search engines from old URLs to new ones, preserving link juice.

10. Mobile Indexing

• • Mobile-First Indexing: Ensuring that the mobile version of your site is fully optimized since Google predominantly uses the mobile version for indexing and ranking.

11. Crawl Budget Optimization

• • Site Structure: Organize your site to ensure important pages are crawled efficiently. Because Search engines, especially Google work on a Crawl budget in which it crawl a website within a certain budget. So, if your site has too much content in a short span of time, not all pages will be crawled. Thus, it is important to have the most important pages published first.
  • Avoiding Duplicate Content: Implementing measures to avoid duplicate content issues that can waste the crawl budget is something you must work on.

12. Server Response Codes

• • Status Codes: Monitoring and managing HTTP response codes such as 200 (OK), 301 (Moved Permanently), 404 (Not Found), and 500 (Server Error) to ensure proper indexing and user experience. As a good SEO practice, your pages must return correct response codes.

13. JavaScript Rendering

• • Rendering Issues: Ensuring that search engines can properly render and index content that relies on JavaScript.

14. International SEO

• • Hreflang Tags: Using hreflang tags to indicate language and regional targeting to search engines. You can read a detailed article on this topic on Ahrefs’ blog

• • Brainstorm Topics: Start by listing topics relevant to your niche. Think about what your target audience is searching for.
  • Use Keyword Tools: Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMrush can help you find keywords with high search volume and low competition.
    Watch this video to learn how to find keywords using Ahrefs in the easiest way.

• • Analyze Competitors: Ahrefs and SEMRush Keyword tools help you extract any website’s keywords and their ranking. You can easily put your competitors’ websites into the tool, and reverse engineer them to find the lowest competitive keywords.

• • Descriptive: Clearly reflect the content.
  • Keyword-Rich: Include your primary keyword.
  • Concise: Keep it under 55-58 characters.
  • Icons: You can also use some icons such as ► → » and more to make your Title look stand out in the SERPs which helps in boosting the CTR.

2. Meta Descriptions

Meta Description is not a ranking factor as per Google, but, it is always good to have a good meta description to get the best CTR in SERPs A good meta description should:

• • Include Keywords: Integrate primary keywords naturally.
  • Be Enticing: Encourage clicks with a compelling summary.
  • Stay Short: Aim for 150-155 characters.
  • Follow AIDA Principle: AIDA = Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Consider writing Meta Description following this principle, and you are good to go.
  • Icons: You can also use some icons such as ► → » and more to make your description stand out in the SERPs which helps in boosting the CTR. You may take the help of ChatGPT to generate more such icons to use.

3. Heading Tags

Heading tags are a very important part of the content as they make the content more readable. Having main keywords used in these Heading tags is a good SEO practice.

• • H1 Tag: For your main title, use it only once.
  • H2/H3 Tags: For subheadings that organize content logically.

4. Content Optimization Using Keywords

Since you already have the keywords listed after doing comprehensive keyword research, it is time to optimize your content using those keywords.

• • Primary Keywords: Use naturally in the title, introduction, and throughout the content.
  • Secondary Keywords: Secondary keywords are the related terms to the Primary keywords, and you can use them in content naturally.

5. Content Quality

It is always said that the content is king, and it is very true. Without good quality content, it is impossible to rank higher on Google.

• • Informative Content: Provide value and meet the user intent.
  • Well-structured Text: Use headings, bullet points, and images for readability.
  • Engagement: Add images and videos to keep users on the page.

6. Image Optimization

Along with text content, we all use images to complement our content. Search engines identify images from their file name, and alt text we add to them. Thus, we should consider these:

• • Alt Text: Use descriptive alt text with keywords. (Read our Alt text Guide)
  • File Names: Name image files appropriately (e.g., “best-running-shoes.jpg”).
  • File Size: Compress images for faster load times.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-page SEO focuses on SEO implementations outside your website to improve search rankings and build credibility.

Below are the key strategies:

1. Backlink Building

Backlinks are crucial for SEO. Links are like trust, and for ranking for highly competitive keywords, high-quality backlinks are important. Read our Link Building Guide for understanding in detail.

These are some good ideas for link building:

• • Guest Blogging: Write articles for relevant sites.
  • Broken Link Building: Replace broken links with your content.
  • Content Promotion: Share valuable content that others will link to.
  • Profile Link building: Many websites offer creating user profiles on their site, where you can put your website link as well. This link is not that effective but still helpful in building some foundation links to your site.
  • Brand Mentions: Mentions of your brand, even without a direct link, help improve authority. Use tools like Google Alerts to track mentions and reach out for possible backlinks.