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SEO best practices are constantly changing. But some constants — like competitor keyword research, minimizing image files, and using free or paid tools to analyze keywords — will serve you well long term.
Be sure to use descriptive URLs that accurately reflect the content of your page. This will prevent keyword cannibalization, which could negatively impact your search engine visibility.
Check Your Domain Authority
Domain authority is crucial to increase your search engine presence. A website’s domain authority (DA) rating indicates how well it will perform in search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s calculated using 40 different ranking factors to help SEO professionals and marketers understand the effectiveness of their off-page strategies.
There are various strategies to raise your DA, such as producing excellent content pertinent to your sector and speeding up and improving the usability of your website. You can also build quality backlinks from reputable sources and incorporate structured data into your site’s content.
It may take some time until you see changes. Therefore, it’s crucial to check your DA periodically. You can also use tools to check your DA score and identify improvement areas. It’s also helpful to compare your DA score to your competitors’ scores.
Check Your Site Speed
Having an off-page SEO checklist is one of the keys to making sure your website is SEO-ready, which is something you, as a business owner, want to be sure of. However, it’s important to note that these techniques take work to implement and require a degree of technical knowledge.
In addition, the best SEO tools can only help you so much. For example, if your website loads slowly, it negatively impacts user experience and search engine rankings.
To give consumers the most relevant results for their search, Google cares about site performance. As a result, if your website needs to be faster, it will be moved down the search engine result page. Use online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to assess the speed of your website. These programs will provide recommendations based on information from real users and laboratory studies. You may also run a manual test using Chrome DevTools to get even more detailed performance measurements.
Check Your Site Content
Search engines look at the content to determine your relevancy, authority, and keywords your page should rank for. This is why it’s essential to have unique, engaging, SEO-friendly, and up-to-date website content that satisfies searcher intent. According to Battle SEO CEO Mike Guess“SEO content is a masterful blend of art and science, engaging users with compelling narratives while simultaneously charming search engines with precision and relevance. It’s like conducting an orchestra where every note resonates with both the audience and the critics.”
Meta descriptions (the snippet of copy that shows up under your page link on SERP) should be clear and compelling and include your target keyword. It’s also essential to have internal links within your site so that your audience can dive deeper into a topic or find additional information.
Keyword research is not a one-time activity; you must implement and revise your keywords as your business grows. Use a sitewide SEO checker to see which keywords your pages rank for and evaluate them based on their performance. Identify keywords that need more work and consider using a new batch. Also, ensure you don’t have duplicate content – add a rel= “canonical” tag to your pages to tell Google which page version should be ranked.
Check Your Links
Off-page SEO aims to secure backlinks from reputable, authoritative websites. This helps search engines determine how well-written and pertinent your content is. Additionally, it helps search engines determine if you have any technical SEO issues that need to be addressed.
To build backlinks, you need to reach out to reputable websites in your niche and offer them valuable content they can link to. Infographics, lists, quizzes, and how-to articles are a few of the most well-liked pieces.
It’s also important to check your internal links regularly to ensure that all pages are being crawled and indexed by Google. You can do this by using a tool. Additionally, ensure that all your pages are protected (without a link from another page on your site). If a page is orphaned, it will be impossible for search engines to index it, potentially harming your rankings.
