Search engine optimization: 40 effective SEO tips

Published On - December 16, 2020

author SEO
seo

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is designed to increase the traffic of web pages from search engines and improve the relevance of traffic. It helps businesses increase their revenue-generating capacity, so many companies are vying to get ahead and increase visibility. In our post, we’ve collected over 40 SEO tricks to help you take the lead on your website.

You’re in a great place if you’re interested in search engine optimization tips that can be deployed right away. This article contains operational and immediately feasible proposals. However, before you start the list, there are two things to remember:

  • SEO is not an instant online marketing tool, it’s mostly similar to long-distance running. A project can take at least 6-12 months to produce results.
  • Search engine optimization tips and tricks help you find the right direction, but they don’t save you the hard work you need to produce quality content.

In the 4 years since Marketing21 started, search engine optimization has changed a lot. At the time of writing the original article, we collected exactly 25 SEO tips and tricks, but since then we have had to add 15 new features to the list. Finally, we decided that this will be the entry that we will keep updating with colleagues. The 25 picks were 30 points, then 35 points, and now 40 points. For easier digestibility, we’ve organized SEO tips into 10 main categories.

Let’s hope the fresh coffee is cooked because it’s going to be a long content: we wish you a good education! 🙂

1. Keyword search engine optimization tips

All search engine optimization campaigns are based on keyword research. It is necessary to specify what words can bring us results (for example, in the case of a webshop, a purchase, in the case of a service company, an order). However, it doesn’t matter what words people search for when they think about ordering your product or service. Even if potential customers don’t know it, it doesn’t hit Google. The quickest way to find keywords is with Google’s AdWords keyword design feature, where Google publishes the search frequency and race intensity for each word.

1.1. Make sure you’re targeting the right keyword

It’s not enough to find a word with a good search frequency. It’s more important than the search term you find is really relevant. It’s a good idea to create an Excel spreadsheet with as many keywords as possible, and then consider the expected effectiveness based on search frequency and race intensity. The more valuable a word is, the stronger the competition you can expect.

However, it’s also not a good direction if you want to start with too many keywords: you might want to choose priority words and then target a URL (page) to those keywords. As a rule of thumb, a page must target up to one main keyword and up to 2-3 more closely related SEO keywords.

It’s also a good idea to avoid targeting more than one Page to the same keyword or keyword group. Google will typically list only one page per page.

1.2. Avoid impossible SEO challenges

Sometimes even SEO professionals find super keywords that they want to get top positions on right away. However, it is worth considering whether it is really worth it to target competitors who have many of our resources. The end result is almost always a failure experience and revenue lags. We’re better off thinking small: a dozen or two long-tail keywords (lower search frequency, less competition, but high relevance) can bring a lot to the kitchen.

1.2.1. How strong is your current page?

A completely different SEO strategy is worth following for a new page and an old page: if the page’s DA points (link strength) are very low, you are expected to have a chance only in a small competitive situation. In this case, long-tail keywords are highly recommended.

1.3. Ask yourself a few questions before choosing a search word

If you don’t answer any of the following questions, you can be sure that you need to exclude that search word and not use it for SEO.

  • Are people who enter the search word expected to want to buy your products? (relevance)
  • Do you have enough search queries to make it worth your while to deal with your keyword? (frequency)
  • Do you have enough resources to make search engine optimization effective? (race intensity)
  • Was the query in Keyword Planner correct? (geographic location and language setting, for example)

1.4. Find out what keywords your industry SEO competitors are using

It’s important to know that you’re not usually the first person to use search engine optimization to get results in your industry. There are always companies that have started before and gained a lot of experience. Why would you start at the beginning when you can use their experience? It’s worth looking at the best performing competitors and thinking about SEO for words they’re already using successfully.

2. Content SEO Tricks and Tips

Today, you can’t succeed in search engine optimization if you don’t have quality content on your website. You can get ahead as a result of a lot of copywriting and content creation(e.g. photography, graphic work, etc.). It’s best to start by asking yourself: what kind of content would I want to see if I’m looking online on that topic? Valuable information, articles, and other content must be created on the site, so the return on SEO will surely be faster.

2.1. Find content gaps

If your competitors successfully advance to certain industry keywords for which you haven’t created content yet, you can be sure you’ve found a so-called content gap keyword. These words may not generate immediate revenue, such as educational articles like this post, but you’ll also need these subpages. For example, we often use so-called FAQ pages that contain phrases that users often repeat (and enter) in search engines.

2.2. Provide better content than competitors

It’s a good idea to map exactly what articles and posts your competitors have written on the selected words. If you see that they’ve done a very good job, you’ll have a hard time doing even more thorough research and writing more detailed, read-only articles based on the data and information you’ve uncovered. This way, you can ensure that you have an advantage over old, well-run sites. There’s no better company than quality content anyway.

2.3. How to write even better SEO content?

Case studies Although it is even less common practice in Hungary, it is highly recommended for SEO projects abroad: it is worth adding real case studies to the compiled lexical material. Case studies are more plastic and read than the theoretical background. In Hungary, this method is probably not so widespread because there is not so much competition for search terms. Super introductory text It’s not enough to get visitors to click on your article. It’s important to be able to keep them on the page and read through the article. A well-written introductory text will guide readers to what they will read about, pique their curiosity, and encourage further reading. It is worth writing a short, meaningful, and interesting introduction that does not shoot the joke. Why would anyone continue to read an article when they know all the relevant information from the start? Easy readability The text should not only be useful, it should be interesting. It is important to be transparent. We don’t read 10-20 lines of paragraphs on the Internet. The well-written text helps the user to find the most useful parts. How can you do that?

  • Short, concise paragraphs
  • Simple, straightforward sentences
  • Use pictures and videos
  • Add bullets to points 😉

Regular updates Our content on this page should be updated regularly. If a good position has been achieved with content, it can be supplemented every few months with topicals and extra information. Google loves up-to-date pages!

2.4. SEO tip: using links

All content has a history: we get to the time during several articles, studies, conferences to get good SEO content. These should be irrelevant not only because they help readers, but also because Google likes relevant external links. For example, in this article, we drew a lot of ahrefs.com articles in the blog and searchenginejournal.com post.

3. Page setup search engine optimization tips

Despite the good design and quality of content. Without the right page settings, your best content could fail. However, the so-called On-Page SEO tricks help you not only provide a good experience for users but also fully meet the expectations of search engines. If you’re using a WordPress website, we strongly recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin. However, it is not enough to install the add-on, you also need to understand when to use what features.

3.1. Place the keyword you’re targeting in Title

Yoast SEO only mentions the page title as an SEO title. This will be the line that usually appears in Google results in large letters. It’s definitely a good idea to include your target keyword here once. It’s not worth listing a lot of search words or using a keyword more than once. The title’s task isn’t just to include the keyword: the content here will also strongly determine how much click-through rate your website achieves. The best practice is to use the keyword you’re targeting once and write a few words about the benefits of choosing you as the search user.

3.2. Show your target keyword in headings

It’s also a good idea to include the keyword in headlines: if there’s a lot of competition in a segment, it’s definitely worth showing in H1. (Note: a website should preferably have only one H1 headline!). Keyword accumulation is not a goal here either, but you may want to put your keyword in at least one or two more headlines (e.g. H2, H3). The more headings on a page, the more the importance of each heading decreases. It’s a good idea to structure your texts well with headings and avoid excessive Heading usage. If you have a lot of H1, H2, or H3 headings in a row, it’s good to consider converting your page.

3.3. Complete meta description

Editing a meta description is not an easy task. Here, too, you should think the same way as when determining the title of the page:

  • the meta description contains the keyword you’re targeting
  • the description should be useful to the user
  • include clickbait text

We also often review meta descriptions when we study Google results, so this also affects click-through rates. If the description contains the keyword in a natural context, preferably only once, we have worked for relevance. You’ll then need to make your users feel like they should click. A high click-through rate is also guaranteed to increase our site’s position.

3.4. Seo title and description length

Seo heading and description lengths often change: others look good on mobile, others look good on PC. In this post, I do not describe the maximum number of characters to use. One thing’s for sure, though: heading and description that are too long are ugly and degrade quality. Each character is worth planning here on a pharmacy scale because it will, directly and indirectly, affect our results in the search engine. For example, the iProspect home page was set this way, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s also the result of a long period of testing and testing: Our goal was to let the user know immediately what to expect by clicking on this page. We don’t sell cats in bags, we find out what we do and what we can do to help. In addition, the Title is nice and tidy, and the Description includes call2action.

3.5. Focus on content

If a user clicks on your website, they want to see immediately what they came for: an article, products, and prices, video, or a program. You shouldn’t distract a visitor with annoying pop-ups, advertising over too much drive, or sidebar ads. The best way to get a user is to:

  • Relevant heading
  • Relevant few serial leads (description of what the site will be about)

This SEO trick will help you a lot to reduce the number of people who leave your website immediately after clicking.

3.6. Mobile and tablet-optimized design

This point may not be worth overexplaining today: we are doing a lot and more internet about smart gadgets. Pc/laptop usage is slowly falling below 50 percent in Hungary. Both Google and users expect the website to be available on all devices. At the same time, you can use an instant SEO tip to measure whether our site meets Google’s expectations. Google’s mobile-friendly test helps you know in a few seconds whether the search engine appreciates our efforts to be responsive. The mobile-friendly test can be tried here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly If all is well, mobile-friendly page results have been found, it’s time to click on the “Send to Google” button. You’ve already indicated to the search engine that it’s worth your Page’s preference over weaker competitors.

3.7. Proper handling of images

Most users now know that uploaded images need to be properly named. It should indicate what’s in the image and use brand-related words. However, it’s also important to see the background of the story: Google isn’t “smart” enough to tell you what an image depicts at the moment. You have to explain to the viewfinder what’s in the picture. This allows our images to appear in the image search, as well as giving Google more clues about what our page is about. However, it is not enough to rely on file names. For each image you upload, consider the following:

  • Does the file name refer to the content of the image and the keyword you’re targeting?
  • Is the image properly compressed? Aren’t you going to overload the loading speed?
  • Did you get the “Image alt text” field properly? (Google relies a lot on the information that appears in the alt text, you should not skip the fill)

If you’re using WordPress, you might also want to install an image optimization program, such as the Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin. Download it, try this easy-to-use SEO tip and you’ll be ahead of your competitors in no time!

3.8 Short, straightforward URLs

If your web page has complicated, code-like URLs, you must be on the wrong track. It’s not important, but it’s a good idea to use short URLs that suggest page content.

3.9 Weed out duplicate content!

Perhaps among SEO tips, this is what even experienced agencies and web developers most often miss out on. We tend to forget about SEO aspects when designing web pages and keep duplicate content all over the website. For example, many web shops describe important shipping information in fixed parts of the page (sidebar, the paragraph below the heading). From a user’s point of view, this is useful, but Google will detect it as duplicate content if you find it on countless URLs. Of course, there are times when we choose to remain duplicate content. However, sometimes it’s a good idea to run through the website and consider whether you can do a block of text without duplicating it.

4. Domain name choice from an SEO perspective

Every day, I meet web pages where the keyword is pushed in the domain name. It used to play a significant role, but today it is less important. It’s a good idea to use a good-sounding brand name that users will remember. This will allow users to start hitting the brand in Google search after a few months of operation. Google will also know that it’s a good idea to trust your website!

5. SEO Tip: Site Speed

The time to load a web page has never been more important than it is today. They click on the back button and go to the next result. Google is also aware of this trend, so all website owners are encouraged to provide fast load times. Most of our customers rush to the hosting provider to account for the slow load time. Indeed, the speed of the server also depends on the fast loading time, but web development maybe even more important. From the very first moment, we should strive to make fast websites. We’ve come up with some tips for that:

  • Use small, page-aligned images
  • Set cache (For example, for WordPress page owners, the simpler WP Super Cache or the more complex W3 Total Cache)
  • Learn about the possibilities offered by your hosting provider: a constructive phone call to the service provider can help you a lot, it has been repeatedly revealed that you can move the site to a faster server for a few thousand FORINTs a year. The cheapest storage usually knows exactly what it costs. In addition, you can often speed up with a small cPanel setting.
  • If possible, avoid any externally scanned content: we often use scripts that scan data from external storage. Here are some examples:
    • Facebook page
    • Font Awesome (Font Awesome, Google Fonts)
    • Comment extension
    • Web analytics software
  • Installing and using too many plugins is a common mistake for WordPress sites. It’s a good idea to review and clean the list once in a while
  • HTML, CSS, JS optimization for hardcore users

You can use multiple devices to measure load time. We most often use Google Pagespeed Insights, but it’s also worth trying the free app called Pingdom. At first, all these solutions may seem complicated. Most of the time, it’s enough to take a few small steps to reduce the size of the website to an acceptable level.

6. Creating Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP)

AMP is a dumbed-down, smaller version of websites that loads super fast on any mobile device. Google has also started tagging these web pages, with amp marking in the results list, which guarantees mobile users a great mobile experience. Perhaps more importantly, Google prefers websites that have amp versions. AMP is a very long topic. If you’re more interested, here’s where you can learn more about it.

7. SEO Tip: Rich Snippets and Structured Data

Organic hit list locations are getting tougher. Abroad, especially in English, it is very important that our business excels in the list of results. A rich snippet is an HTML code that helps Google search engines better understand what our site is really about. In addition, this content may appear in the results list when searching, thus highlighting our page from the crowd. And the higher click-through rate (CTR) indirectly increases the position of your page. What content can we highlight?

  • Reviews (for example, very useful for hotels, mobile apps)
  • Description of people, persons
  • Products
  • Prices
  • Company details
  • Events
  • Videos
  • Etc.

8. Link building search engine optimization tips

Link building is still an essential part of search engine optimization. Research shows that there is still a very close correlation between link strength and result rank. Here are a few things to keep in mind when building links:

  • Get links from relevant sites
  • Pay attention to anchor texts, but do not overoptimize.
  • If inbound links lead to page 404, you may want to redirect it to the relevant landing page (301 redirects)
  • Get links where our competitors are already present (link intersection link building)
  • Let’s not always build links just for Google: traffic from the other good links also comes 
  • Suspicious links to spam should be avoided: for example, weak catalog links and PR articles on low-quality link-building sites
  • Submit old, spam-suspicious links to Google in a disavow txt file
  • Guest blogging is always a very good idea, even on small and new blogs

Link building today is practically a separate industry, so for reasons of scope, this article does not cover this more deeply. If you want to be more serious about link building, this post has a good foundation: 10 simple link building tricks.

9. Technical settings search engine optimization tips

9.1. Web page hierarchy

It’s a good idea to build web pages from the start to support SEARCH Engine Optimization. Hierarchical sorting of content is an SEO prerequisite that should be considered when designing a website. But what exactly does that mean?

  • Get the most important content on the home page
  • Make additional important content available from the home page
  • Less relevant, supportive content can go deeper

A common overoptimization error is that website owners make each subpage available from the home page. This is not a good solution either, as Google will not be able to distinguish between really important pages and irrelevant content.

9.2. Do I need a www.?

Customers often ask if www. in front of the domain. From an SEO point of view, the answer is that it doesn’t matter, just be consistent throughout the site. Personally, I consider www. use of the domain before, but it’s more of a matter of taste. The goal is to ensure that each subpage is displayed in a consistent way.

9.3. Block low-quality content

Every web page has pages that cause duplicate content. Typically, this can be the case for the category and tag canonical pages (if there are too many). These should be tagged with a no index, so google robot will know you don’t need to crawl. In my experience, by the way, it’s okay for Google to index some collector pages. This issue occurs when most pages of your Web page are not perceived as separate and unique content.

9.4. Redirect removed pages (301)

Sometimes we are forced to delete a page: a promotion ends, we pause a service, a product runs out of the webshop. However, you often have to delete an unlock that you have previously built a link to or where organic traffic has arrived. These pages should be redirected to a similar and relevant page using 301 permanent redirects.

9.5. SSL setting (HTTPS://)

Google is committed to supporting secure online browsing, so it benefits secure pages that use encryption. It’s a good idea to set up at least one free Let’s Encrypt SSL on our site so we can let our users and Google know that their data is safe.

9.6. Implementing Google’s proposals

Google strives to help SEO professionals and website owners through the Search Console. Any web page can create your Search Console account for free and then use Google’s data and suggestions to improve your SEO chances. You can also view links to our web page, search traffic, results in list numbers, crawl errors, and set up your preferred website variations. In addition, the system is constantly being developed, giving its users more and more opportunities. Extra tip: you can submit the disavow txt file and sitemap URL to Google in the search console.

9.7. Google Search Console and Google Analytics

It’s always a good idea to connect the two accounts: you’ll get a lot of useful information, google analytics, and more robust SEO analytics. For example, you’ll see a list of search terms within your Google/Organic traffic source.

9.8. Simple content sharing

It’s a good idea to build your content on the page so that it’s easy to share. You can set up a cover image (which you read on the message board when sharing on Facebook), a title, a description, and a share button can be placed on the page. This allows us to get links from social media and organically spread our content.

10th SEO Trick: Measurement and Analysis

You can’t sit back after the settings. SEO is an approach, a marketing tool that requires constant investment. Continuously monitor data in Google Analytics and respond to outliers. If Google’s algorithm changes, it’s easy to disadvantage a tool that used to be a key to success. Our content needs to be updated regularly, and the technical settings can always be improved a little. The realization of website optimization will never be completed. Success requires persistent work, but well-planned and accomplished SEO always remits.