Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ever-evolving field, thanks to Google’s commitment to making hundreds of changes to its algorithm every year. With so many dynamics, it isn’t surprising that some people are unaware of the SEO tactics critical to organic search success and that no longer work.
In this post, we have listed some of the most important organic search tactics for 2022, which can help you develop your organic presence, make your website more visible, and catapult you to the top of the search engine results pages.
Optimize Your Content
You may be tired of hearing it, but content remains the king and will continue to reign supreme in the foreseeable future.
For most people, SEO means finding and targeting new keywords, publishing content on various channels on a regular basis, and getting high-quality link juice to those pages. However, there is a smarter way to use your content.
Experienced SEO professionals understand that you can increase organic traffic by optimizing your existing content. This can be done by implementing simple strategies such as the following:
- Adding primary and secondary keywords and LSIs naturally and at the correct densities
- Having relevant, value-adding content with a good word count
- Writing first for the users and then for the search engine
- Ensuring excellent readability by including bite-sized text sections as well as helpful illustrations
Add Meta Tags
Meta tags provide structured metadata to a webpage. This metadata helps search engines read and understand what the webpage is all about.
To get the full benefit from your meta tags, it is important that you include the relevant keywords for every page and place them in strategic places like the page title, meta description, your H1 and H2 heading tags, image/ alt text, and your webpage URL.
Optimize Site Architecture
Your website’s structure is the foundation for the success of your organic search. If your website has not been structured well for search efficiency, then you will have a hard time getting crawlers to access all the important pages of your website. As a result, this will prevent your website from being properly indexed and showing up on the SERPs in response to a relevant search query.
Most SEO experts believe that website architecture needs to have a logical hierarchy of pages. This helps not just crawlers but also users make sense of the website, allowing an easier time navigating the website content.
Ensure Page Indexability
Just because you have good navigation and structure does not mean that crawlers will be able to index your site. To ensure your site is indexable, you need to make sure the robots.txt file does not block relevant pages from indexing.
In addition, you should permit access to your website’s pages through status codes like 200 HTTP standing code, which means everything is working as it should, and the webpage is immediately accessible to all the users and crawlers.
You can easily check whether a specific web page is being indexed by submitting the URL on the Google Search Console.
If your web page was just recently created, don’t panic if it hasn’t been indexed. It can take some time for crawlers to come to your site and crawl all of its pages. If your website offers new content regularly, your content will be indexed very quickly.
Provide A Streamlined Page Experience
Here’s the thing: Google has no idea what kind of experience a user has on your website. So it makes a calculated guess based on four key metrics.
The first metric is the Core Web Vitals, which has three elements:
Largest Contentful Page: This shows how quickly your webpage loads.
First Input Delay: This shows how quickly users get a response when interacting with elements on a webpage, like clicking on a video, downloading an eBook, etc.
Cumulative Layout Shift: This measures how stable your website’s visuals are.
To improve your website speed, here are some strategies to follow:
- Minify unnecessary coding
- Eliminate long-stringed JavaScript
- Choose a good website hosting plan
- Compress images
- Enable browser caching
- Reduce server response time
Once you have enhanced the site speed, you should take care of the other three metrics, including:
- Make your website responsive and mobile-friendly
- Get an HTTPS certificate for your domain
- Remove unnecessary pop ups
Perform Technical SEO Audits
Performing a technical SEO audit is important since it can detect any underlying issues in your SEO strategy. This should be done on a recurring basis since websites are dynamic and add and change content on a regular basis. In addition, any updates and changes in configuration can all result in unexpected glitches that will need to be worked out.
Through a comprehensive audit, you can identify any issues, such as a page that is loading too slowly or finding a duplicate page.
Perform a technical SEO audit at least once a month to ensure your website traffic does not suffer and you do not risk penalties from Google.
Keep Up to Date With Changes in SEO
SEO is a fluid field, and website owners must keep pace with the latest changes to stay ahead of the curve. SEO might seem complex, but that doesn’t mean you have to become a world-class SEO expert to ensure success for your business.
Even making small changes to your website structure and SEO strategy can help you reap big gains in the long run in the form of better rankings, higher traffic, and more engagement.
Want to get your website and web presence optimized? Reach out to Local Image for our expert search engine optimization services.