Content Marketing Search Marketing SEO

November 17, 2014 at 7:05 am

SEO Best Practices That Guide Me Through the Years

Every SEO company Philippines is aware of that the industry is an ever-changing industry considering the constant updates that Google and Bing introduce. Here are some of the best practices that never fail to be useful in ranking a site better.

 

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Keywords

SEO all boils down to link profile and content. Ultimately! Google uses these factors in determining the position on the SERPs. Believe or it now, Google reviews the websites MANUALLY at any one time, but only when you chose to follow black hat.

Since we are talking about keywords, let’s take a look at contents in general. Contents must be structured in such a way that Google will like it. So, if you cannot build internal and external links at the moment, the site may still rank because of its contents. Google will list the site based on the keywords on the content.

The secret is writing good and unique keyword-rich text contents and building quality links to that page. What looks spammy to your eyes looks spammy to Google as well.

  • The ideal word count is between 300 and 2,000 words or even more as long as the content is unique and informative
  • The ideal keyword count is 1 in every 100 words
  • Don’t keyword stuff
  • The ideal keyword density is 2 to 4% (If the page within the KD range, the site is relevant. If KD is under, it’s irrelevant. If KD is over, it’s a spam!)
  • The main keyword must be in the URL
  • The main keyword must be in the sub-headline(s)
  • The targeted keyword must be repeated between 3 and 10 times, depending on the actual count of the words in the keyword and length of the content

 

Title

Some argues that this is the most important on-page SEO factor. Indeed, that is, after the contents themselves! Google, Bing and Yahoo display a hyperlinked title. This is what we click to go to the website or web page. There are several factors in making perfectly optimized page titles.

  • The keyword must be in the page title
  • Page title must be highly relevant to the contents of the page
  • Title must only be up to 70 characters or Google will truncate it (Google indexes up to 1,000 characters in the title, but it solely determines which words will be considered as part of the title)
  • The title may  have up to 12 words though keywords must be in the first 8 words
  • The title must be optimized for a unique keyword (new page, new keyword, new unique title)
  • Write titles for humans and search engines
  • Put a title (Google may choose the relevant search snippet title if you fail to put one)
  • The title should be 100% unique

We all love to save bandwidth as possible. Google is not an exemption. If it thinks the titles are spammy as well as the keywords and Meta descriptions, it’ll stop right there. It will not even look at the contents. What for, right?

 

Content

Some SEO experts argued that there is no optimal word count per page. However, there are proofs that the longer the contents, the better it performs on search engine provided that the content is fresh, informative, keyword-rich and relevant. There are websites that rank high on Google with 50 words or less. It was revealed later though that these sites have a good link profile, good hosted domain or both.

  • There should be no wrong spellings, wrong punctuations and grammatical errors
  • Texts must be properly formatted
  • Contents must be published regularly
  • There should be no duplicate contents
  • Contents must be at least 300 words

 

Link

  • Don’t link out from the homepage other than the internal pages
  • Deep link to relevant sites
  • Limit the number of internal and external links per page
  • The internal links should only be between 2 and 10 links depending on the length of the content
  • External links must not exceed the 100 mark for the whole website
  • External links must be relevant to the contents of the pages
  • The anchor tag must be relevant to the external link
  • There must be no broken links

 

Canonical

  • Redirect non-WWW pages to WWW pages
  • There must be 301 redirects

 

Image

Google and Bing also count ALT tags, but observe how some sites over-optimize the tags. These tags are invisible elements hence Google penalizes such.

  • Put the main in just one ALT tag in a page
  • Use descriptive texts to guide the visitors
  • Use a title tag when hyperlinking the image to another page
  • Use ONLY relevant images
  • Include caption and place the targeted keyword on the caption
  • Compress the image to its right size

 

URL

  • Use clean URLs (Google judges the relevance and trustworthiness of URLs)
  • Don’t use stop words in the URL

 

Technical

  • Use authorship markup
  • Use semantic SEO markups
  • Integrate social media widgets
  • Check site speed
  • Check usability
  • Check accessibility
  • Put an XML sitemap
  • Create and submit a Robots.txt file
  • Make the site responsive

 

Comply with these best practices, and notice how they can make your SEO perform better.

 

Image credit: iblogzone.com

 

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