There are a variety of reasons to build a website. You may have created a fantastic product that you're ready to sell online. Perhaps you've completed your magnum opus, a personal essay that, if published online, will undoubtedly win the Pulitzer Prize. Or you simply want to share your interests with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, none of this matters if your website receives no traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential if you want people to find your website. SEO is a broad phrase that refers to the techniques used by webmasters to improve their sites' chances of ranking well in search engines like Bing and Google. Whether your site is hosted on a shared, virtual private server, or dedicated server, you should use SEO tricks to ensure that it (ideally!) appears on the first page of search results when someone types a term into a search engine. The following best SEO tips and tricks won't guarantee first-page rankings, but they'll go a long way toward ensuring that search engines—and, by implication, people—find your site.
Best SEO Tips and Tricks for 2021
We put developed this list of the top 10 best SEO tips for 2021 to spare you from continuously browsing Google's update page.
1. Create a Professionally Designed Website
Image is taken from Strikingly
Visitors should be encouraged to explore and share your material on your website to improve SEO. Do you want to sell something? At least a few optimized product photos should be included on your homepage. Do you have a blog? Include a link to your most recent blog entries and standout articles. These acts are appealing to both visitors and search engines. It shows them what you value.
The title field on the backend of your website should condense the entire site to its name and related keywords, as this is what displays in search results. To attract people and spiders, carefully choose your site's name and keywords. In a moment, we'll teach you how to achieve that.
Finally, the most important of the SEO tips and tricks is don't overlook the importance of a well-designed website. People will leave, never return, and go for a more professional-looking competition if your site appears like an old GeoCities page. This translates to fewer visits, external links, social media buzz, and money.
Strikingly is a website builder with incredibly strong website-building capabilities. This free website builder is the most effective tool for creating your first website. Remember that all the procedures in this step-by-step guide are specific to Strikingly, so you won't be able to use them with any other website builder. But why would you go with someone else when Strikingly already has the best?
2. Concentrate On a Single Subject
Search engines seek to direct users to the most reliable and accurate results. As a result, if you're an expert on a topic you'd like to research, your website's content should reflect that. Do you want to share your recipes with the rest of the world? Then your website's focus should be on food. Don't mix pancake content with metalworking, for example. After all, your website isn't a multibillion-dollar enterprise or a major news institution that needs to offer everything to everyone.
The importance of specificity cannot be overstated. If you're a fly angler with a strong preference for fly-fishing over deep-sea angling, your website should reflect that. Make the most of what you offer; it will benefit your online presence.
3. Select Keywords That Are Relevant
The selection of keywords for your website to improve SEO is simplified when you have a concentrated theme. What exactly are keywords in SEO tips and tricks? They're the keywords that bring visitors to your website. To correctly use keywords, you must summarize the various aspects of your website—articles, photographs, videos, and podcasts—in SEO-friendly terms. Keywords should also appear in the URL, header tags, meta descriptions, and alt attributes of your website. Simply insert the terms in the keyword boxes (if you're using a website builder) or alter code (if you prefer entering a web hosting service's backend and playing with HTML) in the backend of your website.
Keywords should be optimized to fit people's queries. If your website sells hand-knit scarves, your keywords should be "scarf" and "knitting." When someone runs a search, the same terms will, as you might expect, bring up other websites. As a result, long-tail keywords, which are more specialized searches, should be used to supplement regular keywords.
4. Consistently Produce High-quality Content
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
SEO considers the quality of the content as well. A blog about vehicle engines, for example, should be able to answer inquiries or shed light on specialist topics. It's better to go in-depth with information-packed articles than to ramble on about engines. Fresh, dynamic material is prioritized by search engines. The topmost in SEO tips and tricks is that you should avoid copying and pasting text from another website. Indeed, search engines will punish your website because of this. Concentrate on high-quality, original content.
Whether in the form of new content, art, or items, you must update your website regularly. Visitors desire a cause to come back to your site or share your material on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Search engine spiders are also eager to examine new information.
Building important authority causes the establishment of off-site links. Search engines scan for links to your site from other reputable websites, such as the social media networks described above or other popular websites. If your site has concentrated, high-quality material and receives a link from The New York Times, search engines will consider it notable.
This, however, cannot be achieved intentionally. Know what you're talking about, put it front and center, present it properly, and keep your website up to date. If your site provides information that people want, it will eventually achieve SEO momentum.
5. Make Eye-Catching Page Titles and Headlines
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
This is also one of the most important SEO tips and tricks. A page title and a headline are two ways to name the same online page that are similar but different. The former is a keyword-focused title intended to improve SEO, while the latter should please visitors to the website.
"2021 Honda Civic Review," for example, is a succinct, SEO-friendly page title that displays exclusively in search results. After all, page titles win the hearts of Bing and Google. "10 Reasons Why Honda's Best Car Is the 2021 Civic" is a superb on-page title that motivates people to share and return. That's also good SEO. Of course, the titles of pages and headlines can be the same. Experiment to see which strategy is most effective for you.
Make sure your page title and headline accurately convey what's on the page to improve SEO. If the material on a page isn't relevant to the title, don't call it "2021 Honda Civic Review." That is the deception of the reader, which is frowned upon by Google and other search engines. You'll lose credibility, authority, and SEO ranking.
6. Optimize Your Photographs
Graphics are how we color inside the lines on the internet; bright, crisp images make a website welcoming. Images also highlight the product or services you're trying to market, as well as to break up long text blocks and keep readers engaged. Because images are so crucial, you should optimize them. This is also one of the main SEO tips and tricks to get a good ranking.
The first step in web image optimization is to reduce the size of your photos to a tolerable amount. Each image should be under a megabyte in size, or much smaller if your page is image-heavy. Your pages will load faster if you resize photos to a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and use the JPG or WEBP formats. Slow-loading websites are frowned upon by search engines.
Make sure your photos have appropriate Alt properties as well. Google, for example, cannot view the photographs you post to your site, but Alt characteristics assist the search engine giant in categorizing them. The alt attribute should be a brief description of the image. Limit yourself to 125 characters. With Strikingly, you can easily add alt text to all the images on your website.
7. Reduce the Website Loading Time
According to Google's research, if a site takes over three seconds to load, 53% of mobile users will abandon it. You don't want to waste their time by having a website that is as slow as molasses.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights, Google's Test My Site, or Pingdom to check the speed of your site. These tools provide specific information on how to enhance the load time of your website. This includes swapping out any graphics or scripts that are taking too long to load.
8. Create Meta Descriptions That are Jam-packed With Information
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
Writing a good meta description is one of the important SEO tips and tricks. A meta description, also known as a snippet, is a short paragraph that appears in the HTML code of each of your pages. Meta descriptions appear beneath page titles in search engine results and provide a more detailed explanation of a page's purpose. Longer descriptions (roughly 150 characters!) that wouldn't fit in page titles can be written here. Don't stuff all of your keywords in there. The practice of cramming keywords into your content is frowned upon by search engines. Instead, use straightforward wording in your meta description to improve SEO.
If you're comfortable with HTML, place the meta description in the "Head" section of each page. Here's an illustration.
Note the description and keyword meta tags. These are the primary locations where your SEO efforts should be concentrated.
Many content management systems allow you to change the meta descriptions without having to go into the HTML. If you're using WordPress, you may use plug-ins like All in One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO to create meta descriptions without having to deal with any coding.
Strikingly makes it simple to optimize your website tags so you can get a head start on your SEO campaign. It includes an SEO tool that allows you to alter essential portions of your material, such as title tags, picture alt tags, and meta descriptions.
9. Your URLs Should Be Addressed
Yes, SEO strategies must be used for URLs as well. The keywords in your site's URL are considered by search engines in the same way that the keywords on a page are.
Do you use dynamic URLs or addresses that are based on numbered pages, on your website? If this is the case, static URLs should be used instead. Consider the following hypothetical blog post: http://thebestsiteever.com/post/detail?id=27869. The number at the end of the URL refers to that post, although it isn't very descriptive.
To fix this, go to the backend of your site and enable static URLs, which will allow you to add important keywords to your site's address. That identical post about smart vehicles will appear as http://thebestsiteever.com/post/smart-cars with static URLs. This more informative URL syntax is favored by search engines. Remember that brevity is crucial, so don't make the URL a long string of keywords. Finally, instead of cramming all the words in the URL together, use hyphens to separate them.
10. Master Internal Linking
Internal linking is popularly used in SEO tips and tricks to get a good google ranking. When other websites connect to your site, it acquires search engine authority, especially if the external pages are trusted and popular. Backlinks are what they're called, and you have little control over them. Put out your best effort and hope for the best.
Internal linking is completely under your control. To encourage people to stay longer on your site, link to similar articles. To improve SEO, you'll want to link to anchor text, which are the words that visitors click to navigate from one page to the next.
Use the hypothetical anchor text "replace your spark plugs" if your site has an article about spark plugs and you want to link to it from a piece about engine maintenance.
Conclusion
Internal links should be organic and used rarely as basic SEO tips and tricks. Because a paragraph made up entirely of links, isn't very readable, search engines will ignore it. It's also a good idea to double-check your links. Broken links show a lack of site upkeep, and search engines will punish your site as a result. Dead Link Checker can assist you in checking your website for dead links.
