Beginner in SEO?Here are 11 basic but sure wins:By SEO Expert

Are you a beginner in SEO and not sure about the appropriate SEO activities that you should do on your website to get higher rankings and a good amount of traffic from search engines? No worries. In this blog, I have shared 11 basic but effective SEO activities that you can perform and see noticeable changes in the rankings of your website on search engines.

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#1 Relevant Keywords

Before you start SEO activities on your website aggressively, you must make sure to target the relevant keywords otherwise all of your SEO efforts would be in vain. Making a list of appropriate keywords for your business would be a great idea to make sure that you will be receiving quality traffic from search engines and that you will convert them into your customers.

Read my blog post where I have shared how you can find profitable keywords for your business. I recommend you hold other SEO activities until you find the right set of keywords because all other SEO activities must be aligned with your targeted keywords. If you are not sure about the targeted keywords for your industry, you may consult an SEO expert who can help you to find them for you.

#2 Sitemap

To help search engine crawlers find & index all the important pages of your website, you must submit and update your sitemap regularly. These sitemaps are generally used in XML format and you can easily generate one with the help of several free online tools available.

One of the best online tools that I recommend for generating an XML sitemap is www.xml-sitemaps.com. If you do not feel confident using a sitemap generator, you may seek the help of your web designer.

#3 Optimized Meta Tags

Since you already have the list of profitable/targeted keywords with you, you can optimize your content and meta tags easily. Do not try to stuff your valuable content with lots of keywords. Rather try to make your content look informative & sensible and at the same time use your targeted keywords appropriately, wherever you feel necessary.

As an SEO Consultant, I can highly recommend you focus on optimized content and meta tags because I have witnessed in every case that it helps to gain noticeable positions on search engines pretty quickly.

#4 Optimized H1,H2&H3 Tags

Similar to the optimization of meta tags, header tags are also important to optimize for the targeted keywords. First of all, make sure that your web designer has used header tags appropriately and then optimize them for your targeted keywords to make sure that both search engines and users learn about the theme of your every webpage through their header tags easily.

#5 Optimize Website for Speed

Website speed is one of the important criteria for search engines to consider a website for ranking in top positions. As a part of the process of complying with usability norms, search engines (especially Google) pay more attention to the download speed of a website.

An ideal speed for a webpage to load should not be more than 6-7 seconds however anything below 4 would be great. Learn a few great tips to enhance the loading speed of your website in one of my previous blog posts.

#6 Great Navigation

Having great and logical navigation will help not only search engines learn about the important pages of your website but also help users to surf your website easily. Your website navigation must have all the important menus and sub-menus in place and they must be readable by search engines. Remember, the more quickly search engines will find important pages of your website, the higher would be the chances for them to visit & index/re-index the maximum number of links. As I already mentioned having great navigation would be good for your users’ experience as well. Learn how you can make sure to have logical navigation in one of my blog posts.

#7 Inter-Linking

Interlinking your inner pages appropriately would also help to boost your search engine rankings. Always make sure to interlink our web pages with targeted but appropriate keywords.

#8 Broken Links

Broken link testing is one of the great favors you can do to your website. Always make sure to test your website for broken links because if your website contains several broken links, I don’t think search engines would love your website. There are lots of tools available to check the broken links on your website. You may consider downloading XENU which is free to use and it can effectively find out all the broken links present on your website.

#9 Consistent NAP for Local Business Listings

To appear in noticeable positions for local business listings, you must make sure that you use NAP(Name, Address & Phone Number) consistently across the data providers. By data providers I mean popular websites like Yelp, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc. Having consistent NAP will ensure that your website is eligible for higher positions on local listings of Google.

#10 Responsive Web Design

This is one of the newest factors that Google has added recently to its ranking checklist. Google has announced officially that responsive websites would now be preferred for securing noticeable positions on a search engine listing page. Therefore, if your website is not responsive and you do not intend to redesign it shortly, you can still hire a web designer who can convert your non-responsive website to a responsive one.

#11 Content Duplicity

Content duplicity is something that search engines (especially Google) hate. There are several tools available to run the content duplicity test of your website. Two of the best tools are Copyscape and Siteliner.