6 SEO Best Practices for 2023

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SEO stands for search engine optimization.  Optimizing the content on your site helps the search engine crawlers find your site, understand what it’s all about, and then serve up your content to people who are looking for content just like yours all over the internet.

There are a lot of easy tweaks that you can make to your website to improve your SEO in 2023. Some of them are great…

And some of them will get you a penalty from Google. We call those ‘black hat SEO’ tactics and they include things like keyword stuffing or suspicious links that live on your site even suspicious links on another site pointing back to yours.

Check out this video understand what to avoid, how to find out if those suspicious websites are pointing back to your site, and even what to do if you find that you’ve been penalized by Google… but back to the good stuff. Here are a few basic concepts that you can easily implement on your site right now and start improving your search rankings.

1. The Sitemap

The sitemap is a very simple table of contents for your website and it outlines every single page on your site, like an org chart. The first step to getting your site ranked (the term we use when it shows up in the search results) is to make sure that the search engines can find your site. The best way to do that is to submit your sitemap directly to the search engines. Each search engine has a portal for webmasters where you can upload your sitemap directly to their system.

2. Robots.txt File

Next you want to tell the search engines exactly which pages you don’t want them to crawl. We do that using a file called a robots.txt file. You can learn more about creating and testing this file on Google Webmaster Tools. You might be asking “why wouldn’t you want to have the search engines crawl certain pages?” Well, maybe certain content wouldn’t be helpful to users if they came across it in search results.

It’s important to note that this is not an effective way to block certain confidential or sensitive information. You’ll want to use a much more secure method, like requiring a password on certain content.

Now that the search engines can find your website we want to help them understand it.  There are certain elements on your site that the search crawlers look at in order to rank you properly. If you block certain elements like JavaScript, CSS, or images in your robots.txt file, the page won’t render to Google’s crawlers in the same way that it renders to your users, and that’s really going to hurt you in the rankings.

3. Meta Descriptions

Next let’s talk about meta descriptions. If you’re using a content management system or a web platform similar to WordPress, Square Space, or many others that are available today, they now make it very easy for you to update your meta description.

An accurate meta description includes a clear, concise summary of exactly what the user is going to find on that page. It’s very important for you because that’s what users see when they find you in the search results right under that title tag.

Why wouldn’t you just want as many people as possible to land on your site? Attracting visitors who are not interested in your content is actually really bad. Google and the other search engines use something called a bounce rate to determine whether users really like your site or not when they’re deciding whether to serve your website up during a search. A high bounce rate happens when a large number of users hit your site and then leave within 30 seconds, so a good meta description helps users to determine is that really what they’re looking for.

4. Heading Tags

You also want to use heading tags appropriately in your content.

H1, H2, H3… these heading tags highlight really important information, and they also create structure to your content, kind of like an outline. The search engines look at your heading tags, and they can determine the hierarchy – what’s the most important information and what’s not so important.

Pro-tip: use your h1 tag only once on every page

You can use h2 and h3 tags multiple times without confusing the search engine crawlers.

5. Structured Data

Now let’s talk about structured data.

Structured data is code that you can put on the back end of each page to help the search engines understand what type of content is located on the page. This could include things like whether it’s a product, hours of operation, videos of your business, recipes, events and so much more.

Let’s consider an example. Say you have a page featuring a product, and you put some product details in the structured data. When Google looks at that structured data it will display some of your product details right in the search results: the price that you have listed on that page, any customer reviews, and other information that will help attract visitors to the product page.

You may have noticed when you go on search results that you’ll see the hours of operation listed right there in the listing. That’s because of structured data! It’s a great tool to get highly relevant information showing up front and center in front of people who are searching for your content.

There is way more to SEO than I can cover in a brief overview, and I couldn’t cover everything in this post, but I did save the best for last…

6. Keywords

My favorite SEO subject is keywords, and it’s probably the thing you’re most familiar with when you think about SEO. Keywords are the relevant words or phrases that people search for when looking for information across the internet. When used properly, they help the search engines match user searches to highly relevant web content.

It’s really important that you use keywords appropriately across your site and make sure that you use them in your title tags, in your meta descriptions, in your content, and even in the alt tags of the images across your site.

Your keyword research is the foundation of a solid SEO strategy in 2023, so make sure to look up recent trends. Google ads has a really great keyword research tool to help you find out how people are searching, what the current trends are what the expected trends are in the future.

You can even do some research on your competitors to find out what keywords they’re ranking really well for so you can write content around them.

One really important thing to avoid is keyword stuffing.  It’s a terrible practice that I mentioned earlier when I wrote about the black hat SEO tactics. You don’t want to stuff keywords randomly throughout your writing – you want to make it sound very natural in the way that people would speak.  Google values content that reads like you’re talking to a human, because guess what? You are talking to a human! Your users don’t want to feel like a bot wrote all of the content on your website. They want to feel like it speaks to them.

The other final thought that’s really important to remember is that every single page on your site should be optimized for a single primary keyword. You should use the word or phrase 6-8 times throughout the page. You can have a number of other secondary keywords on the page that are related, and even pointing a link to other pages that you want those keywords to rank for.  It’s critical that you don’t optimize your entire site for a single keyword across multiple pages because what that creates keyword cannibalization. The algorithms won’t know which page is the most relevant for that keyword, so you end up competing with yourself for your own keywords.

Hey, I know we’ve covered a lot of territory, but we’ve really only scratched the surface! If you want to learn more about marketing and SEO, come check me out on YouTube. I post weekly videos about all things marketing related.

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