Important SEO Practices to Follow in 2020

You are on the verge of creating your website and don’t know where to start? – SEO can be frustrating, especially if you face it for the first time. However, by learning the basics, you will be able to become an SEO master and drive organic traffic to your website without even lifting a finger.

SEO is crucial for the success of every website. There is no point in creating a blog that is invisible to the public, and if they cannot find your blog through search engines, your only source of traffic will be social media and paid advertising.

In this article, we will go through some of the best SEO practices you can apply to your content and optimize your website for search engines.

1. Mobile Optimization

Before you start writing content for your website or blog, you need to make sure that it is SEO ready. Nowadays, the majority of your traffic will come from mobile devices, which is why it is essential to optimize your website for mobile.

Most people build their websites with a desktop view in mind and forget about the readability on mobile devices. Google acknowledges the importance of mobile responsiveness and prioritizes sites that are mobile-friendly.

Make sure you have quick load times, better navigation, optimized images, and clickable links.

2. Website Performance

You cannot build a successful SEO campaign if your website is not performing well. No matter what kind of content optimization you use, people will simply abandon your site before even have a chance to read your content.

Website speed depends on many factors, and the Holy Grail is to aim for 2 to 3 seconds max loading time. Your goal should be designing a light website capable of loading as fast as a horse racing on the Kentucky Derby odds.

You should go for a better hosting plan, have the ultimate website structure that is light, optimize massive image files, and create a minimalistic design without too many animations.

3. Prioritize Long-Format Posts

Google is strongly against thin content that doesn’t deliver enough information to readers. If you plan to write short-form articles, you need to understand that they do not provide any kind of value to users, and Google will not push your content on their search engine.

This means you should ditch the 300-400 word articles, and start writing articles with more than 650 words. Additionally, you will be able to cover more things, which will add more value to your content.

4. Focus on User Experience

We’ve seen many changes in the past couple of months to the Google algorithm. Most of the changes apply to improve user experience. One of the best ways to separate yourself from your competitors is to provide unique user-experience.

You need to make sure that all things run smoothly on your website and provide great readability. Nobody wants to see many different pop-ups, or highly graphic ads while they are reading your posts. This means that you need to make sure you put user experience in the first place.

5. Content Targeting

In order to attract more users that are interested in your type of content, you need to use specific keywords in your content. Keyword research is essential for creating articles that target users that are interested in your content.

There is no point in advertising a fishing website for someone who is not interested in fishing. It will end up as a huge waste of money. However, by using trending keywords, you will be able to make your content more visible to users when they search for popular topics on search engines.

The goal is to provide some kind of value to users with your content. Since you are operating in a specific niche, you should already know the problems that these people face, and try to find a solution by covering some of the topics.

These are some of the SEO essentials that you should put into practice. There are many other things, but it is important to start step-by-step, just because it is easy to get overwhelmed by all SEO requirements.