41 SEO Tips to Get You Most from Search Engines

If you’ve been with us for a while then you know that we’ve covered topics from ecommerce SEO to email marketing, to social media and more, but we have never compiled up a list of SEO best practices.

So, dear readers, today we present you 41 SEO best practices that can help you get maximum free traffic to your site and convert more visitors into customers.

Also Read: 5 SEO Tools You Can’t Do Without

Ready?

Build a remarkable website.
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly and of course SEO-friendly.
If your business needs a separate mobile site (learn here whether or not it does), tell Google about it.
Learn a bit about SEO yourself so you can vet your consultant’s work.
Use Google Webmaster Tools.
Put users first, no matter what.
Invest in content strategy.
Make meaningful URLs and ensure they’re stable.
Write unique, relevant page titles and meta descriptions.
Build high-quality, relevant links.
Make sure your link portfolio is diversified.
Make sure your traffic sources are diversified, too.
Use press releases when there’s actually news.
Have no more than 100 links on your home page.
Invest in social media because Google loves a site that users not just use but share.
Claim Google Plus authorship to build authority in the eyes of Google and to become more clickable in search results.
If you cater to clients from different countries and languages, must use rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotations.
Small businesses can beef up their SEO by leveraging local listings.
Implement schema.org.
Improve your page speed.
Strike out duplicate content from your site.
Use linked-to pages to get weak pages indexed by search engines.
Optimize your images by using alt-text.
Stop obsessing over links (that’d keep Penguin happy) – rather, obsess over creating a remarkable user experience.
Rankings are important but don’t make them your only performance metric. Think about URLs indexed, crawl rate depth, bounce rate, etc, too.
If possible, invest in both SEO and PPC. That’d increase your ROI by 27%.
Don’t buy do-follow links. Yes, you can sure buy links that may get you good traffic.
More or less all major search engines have some guidelines so we’d recommend you to optimize just for Google.
Don’t worry much about PageRank. It’s not an important ranking factor.
Use anchor texts to enhance a user’s experience and not spam.
Stay away from black-hat practices such as keyword stuffing, anchor text over-optimization, comment spamming, etc.
Produce high-quality content and promote it like crazy, to keep Panda satisfied.
Make proper use of robots.txt. We’ve seen webmasters unknowingly blocking search engine spiders from their sites.
Your blog is your silver bullet. Make sure you invest a lot in it.
Keywords are important still so Google Keyword Planner (earlier Keyword Tool) is pivotal to your success.
Make sure canonicalization and pagination are done properly. They’re often the cause of the duplicate content problem.
Use breadcrumb navigation.
Your blog length doesn’t matter much. But its quality sure does.
Blog frequency? At least once a day.
Ensure you’re not linking out to a spammy site.
Make sure your products and services are decent. That’d help you earn links.