Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has come a long way and is more important than ever for websites to get ranked and generate traffic. However, as Google continues to improve its algorithm, SEO strategies must adapt to the changes, and old SEO best practices and techniques must make way for the new.
So, what are the SEO techniques that are set to make websites successful in 2023 and ensure solid SEO foundations going into 2024?
Table of Contents
1. Make target keyword research your primary focus
Keywords are the terms internet users type or spell out to perform search queries. If your website content is inclusive of keywords that your target audience is likely to use, it has the potential to secure a high rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
For SEO professionals, there was a time when keyword research was a complicated and time-consuming process. However, there are convenient keyword research tools you can turn to in 2023, such as Ahrefs and Surfer SEO. These tools can tell you the primary, secondary, and lower-level keywords that are ideal for your website. So, leverage these tools, implement their suggestions and watch your website climb the tall search engine ladder.
Paton Marketing boasts a team of dedicated analysts who can help you create an effective content strategy for your business.
2. Weave words around keywords
Writing SEO content is much more effective when the content is created based on the identified keywords. This ensures that the keywords fit in naturally within the content and don’t seem forced. Think about it – when your use of keywords is organic, the readability of your website content radically improves.
Creating content around keywords should also help you steer clear of the dreaded keyword stuffing. Back in the day, when Google’s algorithm wasn’t as advanced as it is today, you could get away with stuffing keywords in your content. However, those days are long gone. Instead of wasting time on keyword stuffing, make the most of it to get creative and think up some compelling content.
3. Combine creativity, clarity, and keywords across titles, headings, and meta descriptions
To increase website traffic, it’s necessary to get a few things right apart from your content, such as:
- The titles – They should be creative and inclusive of primary keywords without compromising on clarity.
- The headings – Again, creative, inclusive of primary and/or secondary keywords, and clear.
- The meta descriptions – Small chunks of text that communicate with Google’s algorithm and tell Google what your pages are all about.
If you break it all down based on why you should be creative, clear, and include keywords, here’s what you get. By including keywords across all these elements, you would be drastically increasing your website’s chances of a high search engine ranking. Through creativity, you can capture the attention of your target audience. Last but not least, through clarity, you can tell your audience if your website genuinely has what they are looking for.
4. Include relevant internal links
Every website is crawled by Google. Through the crawling process, Google checks if your content includes links to other content related to it. If it does, it’s good news, but if it doesn’t, you need to get your internal linking game on point. With multiple relevant internal links, your website can tell Google that it can be trusted to provide users with high-quality information.
Maintaining a website blog is the best way to go about internal linking. Through your blog, you can keep sharing informative guides and articles based on your industry and niche. Include as many relevant internal links as you can across all your blog posts. There are no specific Google guidelines regarding how many internal links you can use, which means you have the freedom to experiment with as many links as you want.
5. Improve loading times through image optimization
This is a website traffic hack that you are bound to find in almost every post that has to do with SEO techniques. It’s no surprise that this is recommended across so many posts because the fact is – it works. Images are essential for any modern-day website as they enhance the website’s visual appeal. However, they can stir trouble for websites by adversely impacting their loading times.
Remember, internet users’ attention spans are short and are set to get shorter still in the days, months, and years ahead. So, you simply have no option but to optimize each image on every page of your website. Thankfully, Google Lighthouse makes this task simple. Use it to scan your website, and this should give you insights into the images that are slowing it down. Once you know the images to blame, use an image optimization service like Ezgif to reduce their sizes.
Just a word of caution – reducing image file sizes can adversely affect their quality. Your goal should be to reduce file sizes to an extent that the images are clearly visible without any negative impacts on loading times.
Conclusion
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of things to do on the SEO front. You can do way more if you want to. However, these are the basic SEO techniques you should perfect first and then move on to the more complex stuff.
Paton Marketing is a company that caters to businesses that harbor ambitions of becoming brands. Connect with Paton Marketing today and experience digital marketing at its very best. From SEO services for websites to lead generation to branding and more – Paton Marketing can give your business the platform it needs to succeed.
