SEOs Not Dead, It’s Very Much Alive
These past few years have been a struggle for many websites looking to SEO to improve their rankings and appearances in the SERPs. With constant updates and inconsistent answers from Google, people have come to the conclusion that “SEO is dead.”
Hearing this can seem pretty disheartening to many website owners who have spent countless hours optimizing their webpages in every which way they can, however, we are here to say, SEO is not dead. As long as people use search engines, SEO will be relevant.
Aside from recommendations to follow through with every Google core update, there are still 5 core aspects to which SEO websites should be following and staying on top of.
- Using relevant keywords that aren’t too competitive
- Ensuring there are no errors on your website
- Page load speeds are efficient
- Your formatting is correct
- Keeping your key audience a priority
Relevant Keywords
Finding relevant keywords isn’t that hard. It’s the competition that’s making finding relevant keywords difficult. As always, the SEO recommendation is to find long-tailed keywords to get higher rankings in the SERPs. This will also help boost your website’s overall ranking for other keywords.
When using your keywords, some additional unique challenges exist, such as avoiding overstuffing and competing with AI.
Removing Website Errors
When you embark on your SEO strategy, you may be shocked to learn that your website has hundreds or maybe thousands of errors. The best way to fix these mistakes is to go page by page and tackle them all while preventing new errors from popping up.
One of the best ways to see if your website has errors is to use a tool such as SEMrush to generate your errors for you so you can coordinate how you will go about fixing those errors, whether they’re improving your interlinking, removing broken links, fixing images, or adding meta descriptions.
Page Load Speeds
There’s nothing more frustrating for a user than clicking on a link and wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load (to think how we did it with dial-up!). If your SEO report shows your website has pages that are loading slowly, here are some things you can do to fix that:
- Compress your images
- Use videos instead of GIFs
- Avoid redirects
While these aren’t the only things to do to improve a page’s load speed, these are some of the most common reasons a page loads slower.
Page Formatting
Another core principle of SEO is the page’s formatting. Ensuring your site follows specific formatting guidelines can tackle two problems: readability and crawlability.
Users are likelier to skim a page rather than read the entire page. If you use appropriate headers and subheaders, you will catch their attention to read certain site sections.
Using headings and subheadings will also improve your website’s crawlability. When search engines crawl your site, they start at your web page’s headings to know how appropriate it is for a keyword.
In addition to using the title tags, you can also italicize and bold phrases and keywords to make them stand out more.
Keeping a Key Audience
The final core principle of SEO is to keep your key audience. While going about and looking for keywords, you still want to consider your primary audience. You can still branch off a bit to get a little niched down with long-tailed keywords, but you always want to continue meeting your primary audience’s needs.
Conclusion
After so many updates and changing recommendations, it may seem like SEO is dead because many pages aren’t seeing success after dedicating months to their SEO plan. Remember that SEO isn’t just a one-and-done thing either. To be successful, you must continue to follow through with the core principles of SEO.
Senior-level SEO consultant that enjoys helping businesses learn how to SEO their website since 2007. I have over 20 years of experience helping business owners realize their goals through process development, data-driven decision-making, and simplifying complex processes.