Here are 10 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips to improve the positioning of your website. Optimizing the SEO of your website is essential to increase your visibility and the ranking of your pages in the search results of Google and other search engines.
Before giving you the 10 SEO tips that will help you to gain positions in the rankings, a short definition of the acronym SEO is essential.
Definition: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, includes all the optimization techniques used to index a website and position web pages at the highest level in search results.
A web page that is correctly optimised according to the criteria defined by Google is called SEO friendly.
10 tips to optimize your SEO!
Now that SEO no longer holds any secrets for you, here are 10 SEO tips selected for you from among the 200 Google recommendations to optimize the natural referencing of your website.
1: The title of your pages with the tag <title>
This may sound simple and obvious, but make sure that your pages all have a title with a title tag <title>. This tag must be filled in and should be a description of the actual page and not of the site as a whole.
The title should include the main keywords of the page, be unique and should not exceed 60-65 characters. The title tag is displayed in Google search results.
2: The meta description of your web pages
The description of your page is displayed in the search results, so it is the description that should encourage the user to click on your link rather than another one.
Update of 01/12/2017: Google is testing the display of longer meta descriptions in its search results. They can now be displayed on 4 lines instead of 2 lines (from 160 to 330 characters). If your meta descriptions are not long enough, Google will use them in the content of your page.
3 : The hierarchy of your content using the semantic H1, H2, … tags.
When we talk about the titles defined by the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 tags, the W3c.
When you classify the titles and subtitles of your page by prioritizing them, you bring a notion of value to each of your titles. An H1 title should therefore summarize the general topic of your page, an H6 title will summarize a very detailed section of the topic covered in your page.
4 : Authentication of the author and the publisher
Google is the number one search engine, but Google+ is not yet the number one social network. Google+ is Google’s social network and the one your company should use to optimize your SEO. Google plus allows you to link your website to a Google plus account.
Google+ is recommended for these reasons :
- It allows you to get in touch with your friends, your fans, your customers and your prospects.
- effective for Google My Business
- A Google+ page provides Google with information that helps determine the relevance of your site to a user’s Google Search query.
5: Micro-data, an “SEO” added value
There are several different formats for metadata such as microformats and RDFs.
Items such as dates, notices and job titles can be highlighted in search results, which is both an added value for SEO and an opportunity from a marketing point of view.
6: Internal links between pages on your website
Internal links linking your pages together are often just as important as external links. All pages indexed on Google have a page rank, this page rank can be passed to each link on the page that has no rel = “nofollow”.
Therefore, if you have links to your own pages, they will get some of this “link juice”. The meshing or linking between your web pages must be relevant both for pagerank transmission and for visitors.
7: The sitemap or sitemap
A sitemap is a file in XML format that lists the URLs of your website with some metadata such as the date it was last updated.Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages will be included in the index of search engines, but it greatly facilitates and improves the quality of the work of crawlers (indexing robot).
Once built, your Sitemap can then be submitted to search engines, usually through a webmaster tool interface such as google webmastertools. (now called Google Search Console)
8: Duplicate data and canonical link
Duplicate content is worst things for your site. Each page must have a single domain pointing and a single URL.
If a page on your Internet has an old and a new URL, a 301 redirect must be set up to tell the search engine that the page has been moved.
As an SEO tip to avoid duplicate content, you can use the canonical tag, this tag is similar to a signpost to avoid the consequences of duplicate content. It points to the default version of a set of pages that are too close, or even completely identical.
9: Tools for webmasters: Bing Webmaster & Google Webmaster Tools (GSC)
Google, Bing and other engines provide webmasters with an interface with tools to consult a multitude of information on a website. One can find for example the search terms used to arrive on your website, the number of pages retained in the Google index or even possible problems with the indexing of your site.
Register your site on Google webmaster tools (renamed Google Search Console) in order to collect very useful information for your referencing and positioning strategy.
10 : A rich, relevant and unique text content
Following the 9 SEO tips listed above is important to take care of your SEO but it is not enough. You should never lose sight of the fact that the most important thing on your web page is the content. The text content should not be limited to the listing of keywords.
Search engines must of course find the keywords, but the content must also be readable and make people want to come back to your website. SEO is there to highlight your content and enhance it in search engines and not the other way around. A number of words between 200 and 400 is a minimum to position a web page.
Why follow these SEO tips?
Following these 10 SEO tips will not systematically guarantee you to reach the first page of Google search results, many other factors are taken into account for the ranking of your web page, competition on keywords on your page being the first of them.
On the other hand, if you don’t follow these tips, you are unlikely to improve your ranking. If you don’t know where to start to optimize your site’s SEO, an SEO audit will give you the first answers.