Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an important part of website building and online marketing. It entails improving the content and structure of your website to make it more visible and easily discoverable by search engines such as Google.

When it comes to SEO, it’s critical for newcomers to grasp both what to do and what not to do, because even minor mistakes can result in penalties or lower search engine ranks. By adhering to best practices and avoiding common errors, you can increase the visibility of your website, drive more visitors, and, ultimately, expand your business.

Here are lists of things you should and shouldn’t do when it comes to SEO.

What works!

1. Put keywords in the title, URL, and content of the page.
2. Make content that is high-quality, useful, and meets the needs of your target audience.
3. Get backlinks from websites that people trust.
4. Give images and videos relevant file names and alt tags to make them easy to find.
5. Structure your content with header tags (H1, H2, etc.).
6. Make sure your website works well on mobile devices and loads quickly.
7. Share your content on social media and build backlinks.
8. Use a sitemap and a robots.txt file to make sure that search engine crawlers can find your site.
9. Make sure your website’s content, images, videos, URLs, and meta tags are all optimised for search engines.

Note: Using auditing tools to keep track of any errors is crucial to ensuring that your website has all the necessary optimizations for text, images, and URLs. SEO-GO is one example of the many technical SEO tools available, and it provides a comprehensive range of auditing, competition analysis, and on-site checker features crucial to your SEO success.

10. Change and update your content often to keep it relevant and interesting.
11. Use structured data and schema markups to help search engines figure out what your pages are about.
12. Use internal links to help search engines figure out how your site is set up and to help people find their way around it.
13. Make sure that everyone, even people with disabilities, can use your website by following guidelines for web accessibility.
14. Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to keep track of how well your website is doing and learn how to make it better.

No, these DON’T work!

1. Buying backlinks: Search engines can easily detect when backlinks are purchased and may penalise your website.
2. Keyword stuffing: Using too many keywords in your content can make it hard to read, and search engines may punish you for it.
3. Duplicate content: Copying content from other websites can hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
4. Hidden text or links: Trying to change your website’s search engine rankings by hiding text or links in its code is a black hat SEO technique that can get you in trouble.
5. Automated link building: Using automated tools to make backlinks can lead to low-quality links, which can hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
6. Meta keyword tags: The meta keywords tag doesn’t matter much to search engines, so it’s not worth your time to optimise it.
7. Not optimising for mobile: Since mobile search has surpassed desktop search, not having a mobile-friendly website can hurt your search engine rankings.
8. Ignoring user experience: A bad user experience, like a website that takes a long time to load or navigation that is hard to understand, can hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
9. Not doing proper on-page optimization. If you don’t optimise your website’s images, videos, and URLs, your search engine ranking could drop.
10. Not keeping your website up-to-date. A website that hasn’t been updated in a while isn’t likely to do well in search engines. Keep your website’s content up-to-date and interesting by changing it often.

Still not sure what to do?

If you’re just starting to get your feet wet with SEO, don’t worry — we’ve got the tips and tricks that will set you up for success! Take a look at our tutorials and explore all of the amazing tools available to help make mastering this skill easy.

SEO-GO makes it simple to run an in-depth audit report on your website to identify any potential problems. We’ve assigned importance ratings to each problem, and you’ll never get a boring report. We offer straightforward references to the most up-to-date SEO best practices and code recommendations.

From tweaking your TDKs (titles, descriptions, and keywords) to using pre-made code snippets, you can be confident that you and your technical team will be helped every step of the way with the help of these resources in SEO-GO.

Get started on making your website search engine-friendly in no time!