46 SEO Tips to Improve Website Rankings and Performance

A lot of people may tell you that SEO is dead, but it isn’t true. What is dead is the black hat tricks; but white hat and clean SEO is still effective and will always be.  If you do it right; you will see good results. Here are some SEO tips that will help you build an effective SEO strategy for your website.

1. First, if you ignore SEO, then you are missing the chance of getting categorized and ranked by search engines for keywords in your niche and missing a lot of visitors to your pages.

2. When you think of SEO, you should consider both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. You can’t reach significant results by ignoring one of them.

3. You should put your competitors under your radar and investigate what keywords they are best ranking for. Then, try to include these keywords in your pages to walk their way.

4. Including competitors’ keywords on your website doesn’t mean to imitate everything they do. What worked for them may not work for you. You should think of diversifying your keywords and tips you implement for your SEO plans.

5. SEO can’t stand alone, but it’s combined with content marketing plans. If you want to get good results with SEO, now you should forget about shallow content, but invest in creating attractive content that visitors would like to read and share.

6. Search engines change rules constantly. So, what works today may not work tomorrow, so you should keep up to date to all changes brought by coming to search engine and refine your SEO strategies to win these new challenges.

7. Be patient. When you are implementing any SEO tips, keep patience especially if you have an infant website. It will take some time before building a name among authority websites among competitors.

8. A website is never completed. To attract more visitors, you need to always consider this rule and continue improving and refining your website.

9. Today, you no longer need to introduce your website to search engines. They can know about created websites and pages without being notified.

10. If you wonder how to comply with search engines rules, you can visit for instance Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, or Webmaster Help Videos, or Bing Webmaster Help.

11. Because Google is the most important of search engines and can be a great source of your visitors, you need to build your website in line with their rules and avoid any tricks that would get you a penalty.

12. Be careful when building website. Anything done on your website has effect in search engines, whether you know about it or not. Search engines use bots based on different rules to rank websites, and anything out of these rules can get you in trouble with search engines.

13. To keep an eye on your website performance and any errors that may occur, you need to use Google webmaster tools to get messages and notification whenever there is something wrong with your pages.

14. To get insights about your visitors and what pages are mostly visited and other metrics, you need to use Google Analytics. This can help you improve the performance of your website.

15. Make sure that you have social media pages for your website, and most importantly a Google+ page because it will help gain trust with Google and improve ranking for localized ranking.

16. Don’t rely on Google for all your traffic. They say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s the case here too, you need to diversify your traffic sources and not depend on one source such as Google.

17. If you have some money to invest to attract visitors to your website, you can do Pay Per Click advertisement and it will help generate target visitors. You can use for instance Google Adwords or Bing Ads or any other PPC programs.

18. Avoid low quality backlinks. Today you can no longer build thousands of low quality back links and rank good in search engines. Instead, building low quality backlinks will get you a penalty and in worst cases banned from search engines.

19. Create content for users. When creating your content, you consider how important it could be for your visitors and not how to trick search engines.

20. Avoid duplicate content. When you create you content, make sure that you don’t have the same or closely the same for different pages. Having similar content in multiple pages is what is known for search engines as duplicate content and can get you a penalty.

21. Improve content of your pages. Having a lot of pages with little content will affect your website negatively. So, think of improving content of these pages and merge some of these pages, or delete some of them.

22. Use unique content. If search engines discover that your content is a copy-paste from other websites, you will get downgraded in ranking and even get penalized.

23. If you want to outrank a competitor for a certain page, you need to consider creating content better than that available on that page. That makes sense. But having good content in one single page can’t win you over competitors. Yet, the whole website performance matters.

24. Create engaging content. When you have engaging content on your website, visitors will stay longer on your web pages, and this is a good signal for search engines to rank your website better.

25. Include videos on your website. If you share good videos on your website, they will increase time spent on your site which is a good signal for search engines. You can also benefit from links you can get from video sharing websites.

26. When you create content consider including images, stats, infographics, and other type of content instead of only plain text. People tend to share such rich content.

27. Create a lot of pages with quality content. When you have multiple pages with good content, visitors and search engines will like and trust your website, and will build authority.

28. Link a blog with your website. When you have a blog linked to your website, it will be easy to add new web pages of content to your website.

29. Create content and market it. Creating good content is not enough, but you need to build content marketing strategies to bring that content in front of a lot of people that will read it and share it.

30. Meta tags have lost importance they had in the past, but they still important fro SEO. So, think of creating descriptive tags for your pages including titles and descriptions. This will help humans and search engines have an idea about your page.

31. Before targeting any keywords for optimization, you need to search them. If you make the wrong choice of keywords, no matter how you work on page or off page, you won’t get good results.

32. If you want to have good insights about keywords and how competitive they are, you can use Google Keyword Tool. You can also get more keyword and phrases ideas.

33. Above Keyword Planner, you can also get ideas of keywords from your customers, friends, partners…etc.

34. Use long tail keywords. Some keywords are highly competitive, and it would be very difficult for you to outrank those fierce competitors that are already ranking for those keywords. But, you can instead long tail keywords that are less competitive, but still can get you great results.

35. When talking about keywords, just forget about stuffing keywords all over your content, no matter where they appear as black SEOs used to do. If you do so, you will get penalized by search engines. Instead, make sure that keywords naturally appear in your content and are not overused in your content.

36. Build backlinks. The number of links that link back to your website is important and they play an important role in your ranking in search engines. Yet, you need to prioritize quality over quantity.

37. When talking about quality backlinks, it means to have back links from trustworthy and quality websites rather than from shallow blogs and irrelevant websites.

38. Always work on link building. Building links should always be part of your SEO strategy, and it’s a do it and forget it process.

39. Stay away from any backlink purchase programs or link networks. If you want to stay safe, never buy backlinks for your website, but earn them.

40. Build links to different pages. Don’t build links only for your home page, but build links to different pages you want to rank for.

41. While getting backlinks from different websites, you shouldn’t also forget about internal linking. Make sure that your pages link to each other because this is among the good signals for search engines.

42. If the URL of any of your pages is changed, make sure that you use 301 redirects so as not to lose the old links pointing to your page.

43. Make sure that you optimize images on your website. When you include images on your pages, don’t forget to include target keyword phrase in the file name, and also in img alt tags.

44. Optimize website to be mobile friendly. Today, most of people use mobiles to browse the web, so your website should be mobile friendly to be easily browsed in mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones.

45. Analyze your website speed using this Google speed tool. You can improve your speed based on the commendations they will provide.

46. Hope that these SEO tips are of great help for you to improve your website performance and ranking on search engines. If you have any other ideas please share them in comments below!

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Rachid Madani

I'm here to help you reach success with your online business. I can help with content marketing, social media, SEO, and email marketing. I provide tips you can follow to build a succesful online business.