SEO Best Practices: The Ultimate Guide to Explode Your Traffic In 2018

Looking for increasing your traffic from search engines? Still struggling to find the SEO best practices that you can use in 2018 and beyond?

Are you using SEO effectively to boost your business?
SEO is essential to deliver traffic, authority, leads, and sales, but you’ll only get those benefits if you do it right.
If not, your business might as well be invisible online, and who wants that, right?
We know it’s not always easy to stay up to date, but you can’t relax when it comes to SEO.

What Is SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of increasing the search engine rankings of your web pages so that they appear higher in search results, bringing more traffic to your website.

SEO can also stand for search engine optimizer. That’s a person who does search engine optimization.

SEO efforts aim to increase organic traffic. That’s the traffic you get when visitors click a link in search results to get to your site. That’s in contrast to paid traffic, which comes from ads.

Most SEO focuses on optimizing for Google’s search engine, which dominates the overall search market with a share of over 90%. However, it is also possible to optimize for other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and others.

SEO activities are usually broken down into two main types: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

What Is On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is all about optimizing content, code, and other parts of your website that you control.

Off-page SEO means taking action to build trust, authority, social signals and inbound links.

You need both types of optimization in your SEO strategy.

Now that that’s clear, let’s look in more detail at how SEO works.

1. How Does SEO Work?

To understand how SEO works to improve search rankings, we’ll need to break it down a little.

What Is Search Ranking In SEO?

When you talk about search ranking in SEO, you’re talking about the position of your content on search results pages (SERPs).

When you have a #1 ranking, your web page appears first in SERPs. That puts it at the top of the page, unless there’s a promoted result (which is an ad) or an answer box above it. We’ll talk more about answer boxes later in this guide.

Understanding Google’s Search Quality Ratings

Another important part of the search process is the quality of your content. Google has search quality ratings which assess this.

The ratings look at:

• How expert, authoritative, and trustworthy the content is
• Content quantity and quality
• Site information, including who’s responsible for the site
• Website reputation

These guidelines help Google decide which results are most relevant, useful and trustworthy. The most relevant results appear first in SERPs, with less relevant results shown later.

When you do SEO, you’re helping Google’s spiders to crawl and understand your content. You’re also telling Google your content is relevant to certain queries, so your web pages show up in the right search results.

How To Check Your Search Engine Rankings

One of the first steps in improving SEO is to know where you’re starting from. That means checking your search engine rankings.

Here are a couple of ways to do that.

The easiest way is just by searching the terms you want to rank for. To do that, first, open a private or incognito browser window and search Google. Use the terms you think your customers will use to find your site, then check the results.

But what if you have a large, established website, or want to find other terms you might be ranking for?

In that case, you’ll have to use a tool. One of our favorite online toolkits is SEMrush, which includes a variety of tools for SEO, content marketing, and search engine marketing.

Here’s how you find search engine rankings for your web pages with SEMrush.

Go to SEO Toolkit » Organic Research » Positions and type in your domain name. Scroll down to Organic Search Positions to see which keywords your content ranks for and what ranking position it holds.

Now, let’s look at what Google uses to determine which web pages have a good search engine ranking. These are called SEO ranking factors.

2. The Top SEO Ranking Factors

If you’re looking for the top search engine ranking factors, the answer isn’t a million miles away. Google’s been clear on its top three:

• Links
• Content
• RankBrain, or user experience

Let’s look at these in more detail.

1. Links

Links are a crucial SEO ranking signal because they’re what the web is built on. When you’re talking search engine ranking, three types of links matter:

• Inbound links – links coming to your site from external web pages
• Outbound links – links from your web pages to external sources
• Internal links – links within your site to your own content

Inbound links help Google figure out if your content is relevant and authoritative. As we mentioned, if your web page gets a link from a site that’s already an authority, that link is more valued than a link from a low quality site.

In contrast, low quality inbound links can hurt your search ranking, so keep those to a minimum. We’ll explain how to do that in a minute.

To find your inbound links with SEMrush, you’ll need to set up a project to track key metrics for your domain. Then go to SEO Toolkit » Link Building » Backlink Audit. This will bring up an overview report. At this point there are two things you can do:

First, to find low quality backlinks, look at the Domains by Toxic Score section.

Click on the toxic percentage to see suspect inbound links.

Then you can choose to keep or whitelist those links (if they’re not really toxic), or remove or disavow them if they are. Google suggests website owners exercise caution with link disavowal.

Here’s the second way to check out your inbound link profile:

Go back to the main Backlink Audit report in SEMrush, and click on Analyzed Backlinks to see inbound links.

In terms of outbound links, it’s important to create links to authoritative sites relevant to your topic. This shows visitors and Google that you’re creating quality content. Often, you will find authoritative content when researching a content topic. Then you just need to make a note of it so you can add it to your content.

You can also increase the value of your own pages by interlinking your content to create internal links. An authoritative page can pass on search ranking or link juice to other pages on your site. So if you have an in-depth resource, you can link to it every time you talk about your topic.

You can learn more about the importance of links for SEO in our ranking factors guide.

2. Content

Content is the second major SEO ranking factor, and is just as important as links. As we’ve said, relevance and quality are two crucial factors for search engine rankings.

There are several areas to optimize here. Aside from keywords, which we’ll look at in a later chapter, it’s essential to understand what people mean when they type in a search term. This is called search intent.

Sometimes the intent is clear, like when they type in “compare” or “buy.

3. RankBrain (User Experience)

The third major SEO ranking signal is Google’s artificial intelligencesearch ranking algorithm. The company calls it RankBrain, and it’s all about user experience.

There are three important aspects of RankBrain:

1. Clickthrough rate – how many people visit your site from a SERPs entry
2. Bounce rate – how many people bounce a short time after following a SERPs entry to your site. A quick bounce means they didn’t get what they wanted
3. Dwell time – how long they stick around on your site after arriving. Clearly, longer is better, as it means your site delivered what they wanted

Together, these tell Google how users interact with your site and if your content is relevant, which can affect search ranking. Learn more about RankBrain and SEO here.

Other SEO ranking factors include: accessible URLs, domain age (older is usually better), page speed, mobile friendliness, business information, and technical SEO. We’ll look at some of those ranking factors in more detail as we go through the guide.

And check out this article for even more information on SEO ranking factors.

3. Understanding Keywords and Keyword Intent

Before we go any further, let’s recap some key terms:

• Keywords are words and phrases that describe what your content is about and what people are searching for
• Keyword research is about finding those terms so you can use them properly in content optimization and SEO in general.

Why Do Keyword Research?

Keyword research can:

• Help you identify topics your target audience is looking for
• Understand what people really want when they enter particular search terms
• Show you the terms competitors are targeting so you can beat the competition
• Help you streamline and target all marketing activities

We’ll talk more about how to use the keywords you find in a later section, but for now we’ll focus on the research process itself.

Before we do, let’s look at some different ways of thinking about keywords.

As we’ve said, it’s useful to think about what searchers intend to find when they enter a particular word or phrase. That’s called keyword intent, which is like the search intent mentioned earlier.

Understanding Keyword Intent

There are four ways to categorize search intent:

• Navigational – when trying to find a particular site
• Informational – when searching for the answer to a question
• Investigational – pre-purchase searches
• Transactional – when searchers actually want to buy

Ideally, you’ll optimize your content for all those types of searches. Learn more about content optimization for SEO here.

Types Of Keywords

Here’s another way to think about keywords. You can describe them as head, body and long tail keywords:

• Head keywords are generally no more than 1 or 2 words, with a high search volume.
• Body keywords are usually 2 to 3 word phrases with a medium search volume.
• Long tail keywords are phrases of four or more words with a low search volume. Most web traffic comes from long tail keywords.

Other ways to describe these keyword types include head, modifier and tail keywords or short, medium and long tail keywords.

Their search evaluation quality guidelines list four types of searches:

1. Know (finding information) or Know Simple (finding specific answers)
2. Do (performing an action), including Device Action (like installing a mobile app after a search)
3. Website (finding and visiting a site)
4. Visit-in-Person (taking physical action based on search results, like going to a restaurant)

How To Get Started With Keyword Research

A great starting point for doing keyword research simply involves your brain. Always begin by brainstorming and thinking about the kind of information your visitors will need from you.

Keep track of the keywords you think of in a list or spreadsheet, and keep this handy as you go through the keyword research process.

There are lots of ways to find keywords for SEO. One of the simplest is to use the autocomplete function in Google. Start to type, and the suggested phrases are keywords you could consider.

How To Do Keyword Research With SEMrush

SEMrush makes some functionality available without logging in, but to get the best from it, you should create an account.

When you’re logged in, go to SEO Toolkit » Keyword Research » Keyword Overview. Type in your keyword phrase, then press Search.

You’ll get in-depth data on search volume and trends, and on the top pages ranking for those keywords.

Scroll down to see the Related Keywords report, which will give you ideas for new keywords you can use for content optimization.

You can click on any keyword in the table to get a full report for that keyword.

Add suitable keywords to your list of target keywords, or click the Export button to export them into a spreadsheet.

Once you’ve found your keywords, use another SEMrush tool, the SEO Content Template, which is part of their Content Marketing Toolkit, to work out the best way to optimize your content.

Type in your keywords. SEMrush will analyze the top 10 results and suggest terms to include in your content to improve your ranking.

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