1. Find The Best Keywords For Your Site
Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Although content is king, keywords come first: they decide what sorts of users will find you in search. And since you want to be found by the right users, you’d better choose your keywords wisely.
What kind of keywords are good for your site?
They have a high search volume.
In non-SEO terms, it means lots of people type those keywords into search bars. A few hundred searches per month is good, but going higher is always encouraged. The more, the better.
They accurately capture search intent.
The relationship between a site owner and the users works like any business transaction: if you don’t offer them what they want, they won’t take it.
It’s like buying new shoes. If you are an adult with a size 7.5, you are not going to buy children’s shoes (not for yourself, anyway). And looking for generic shoes without anything specific in mind will take you forever to find what you really need.
Keywords are much the same. If you have an online store where you sell shoes, then a product page optimized for the keyword “shoes for women size 7.5” will do a much better job than one saying “shoes for women” or even just “shoes.” Bottom line: use keywords which describe precisely what your target audience wants to find.
They aren’t too competitive.
High competition for a keyword means many other sites are already ranking for it – and beating them all won’t be easy. But pretty much every keyword has a less competitive version. You just need to find and use it.
How do you find keywords which match all these criteria?
For search intent, you must know your target audience and their needs really well, and then use your best judgment. Other factors can be represented in numbers, and that’s where SEO tools come in, such as WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool.
Screenshot from WebCEO, September 2024
Do you have any keyword ideas of your own? Enter them in the field and press Search. The tool will generate a table of related keywords, and then you just pick the most promising ones.
2. Optimize Your Pages With Keywords
Got your keywords? Great. Now, you need to make sure you are using them well.
For maximum effectiveness, your site pages must have keywords in these places:
Page URL
Page title
Meta description
H1-H4 headings (even better if you have a table of contents)
Throughout the text itself
Image filenames and ALT texts (for Google Image Search)
Video transcripts (if you have videos)
Scan your site pages with WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO tool to check the state of your keyword placement.
Screenshot from WebCEO, September 2024
If the tool finds any spaces that could be filled with keywords, do it and run another scan afterward. Instant improvement before your eyes!
One more thing: while having keywords is a must, avoid going overboard with them. One set of related keywords per page, or even one keyword per page is usually enough. Then weave the keywords into your text in a natural-sounding way. The gold standard for content is normally written text with helpful information.
3. Optimize Your Site Structure
It’s easy to turn your website into a poorly interlinked mess if you don’t know what you are doing.
When you do know what you are doing, you can help your most important pages receive a significant ranking boost – just by placing links correctly.
Your users will appreciate it, too. Who doesn’t like having all the content they need at their fingertips?
So here’s the recipe for an optimal site structure:
Page hierarchy. Picture a tree: the home page as the root and the destination pages (i.e. landing pages, product pages, blog articles) at the ends of the branches.
Screenshot from IncreMentors.com, January 2024
Topic clusters. It’s good practice to interlink pages that are dedicated to related topics.
Navigation bar. A bar at the top (less usually on the left side) of the screen, containing links to the most important site pages (e.g. home page, About Us, Contact Us).
Footer bar. Another bar at the bottom of a page, containing the same links from the navigation plus some others, at your discretion. Often, the footer bar contains social media links.
Breadcrumbs. Have you ever seen a bunch of links in a row, something like Home » Category » Subcategory » Page? They are called breadcrumbs and they help users keep track of where exactly they are on a website.
Three-click rule. An unspoken rule says: users should be able to get from any page A to any other page B in three clicks or fewer.
But to use links on your site like a pro, you want to know exactly how much authority your web pages have. And you can find out with the right SEO tools.
Scan your site with WebCEO’s Internal Links tool to get this information.
Screenshot from WebCEO, September 2024
This tool will reveal the pages with the highest amount of link juice. Proceed to share it with your most valuable pages just by linking to them from those high-authority pages.
This practice is at its most effective when the interlinked pages are related to each other through their topics – in other words, when they form a topic cluster. For example, a page about the best toothbrushes and another about the best toothpastes. It’s natural to link the two together, so a slight ranking boost to both is guaranteed.
4. Max Out Your Loading Speed
How long is too long? Five seconds may not seem like much, but if that’s how long it takes your page to load, most users will have already left.
People hate slow loading pages. People hate waiting in general. Whatever the place or the website, everybody wants to be serviced without delay.
And Google concurs. That’s why site loading speed is a major ranking factor, one you absolutely must not neglect.