The Most Useful SEO Tips for 2024

The world of SEO is an ever-changing one—every SEO expert will tell you this, and you probably already know it yourself. That’s why you’re here reading this, aren’t you?

Joking aside, it’s always good to read up on the latest and most useful SEO tips you can find.

Additionally, even though search engine optimization keeps on changing, Google isn’t always forthcoming with the new algorithm and rule changes they make. That leaves the rest of us to find out about these changes and adjust our SEO strategies on our own.

With that in mind, we decided to give you a detailed overview of all the major search engine optimization tips everyone needs to follow, including the ones that have been around for a while but are still unknown to many.

We’ll also make sure to cover some of the less-noticed ones, which only a handful of experts know. Most importantly, we’ll discuss the ones that will do you good in 2020 and beyond.

Finally, we’ll mention some that you can safely ignore—the obsolete ones that for some reason won’t go away.

With all of that in mind, let’s dive in.

The Most Important SEO Recommendations and Tips You Need to Know

There are plenty of things that some of the most influential experts recommend, but only a handful of these tips are genuinely essential.

You should write for humans, first, and search engines, second.

We can’t stress this enough: an endless number of specific keywords doesn’t drive traffic anymore. It used to, but it doesn’t now.

Yes, we know that many are aware that this is an old tactic that doesn’t offer any benefits in the world of semantic Google search. Lately, however, there’s been a growing number of people reverting back to one of the oldest SEO tips, even though it doesn’t hold any ground today.

Google prefers user-based content, meaning that you need to focus on how people engage with brands, products, and services, and not on the keywords you think they’ll type in.

That doesn’t mean that you should stop using keywords, as technical SEO is still very relevant. You simply need to put the quality of your content first and then consider your keywords and the rest.

Strive to create valuable content that will be useful to your audience, and funny enough, you’ll also end up making something that the search engines will reward.

Remember that this is one of the best search engine optimization tips for a small business we can give you. But even if you have a larger company, or if you’re a simple blogger, creating quality content that will matter to your audience should always be your core strategy.

Make an effort to link to other websites with relevant content.

It’s downright puzzling to us, but many people consider linking to others a bad tactic. Yes, it does sound illogical at first—when you link to other sites, you are literally inviting your audience to leave your site and go to another.

However, in reality, link building is among the most fundamental search engine optimization techniques.

Why? Because linking to others makes your site more valuable and scalable. Take a look at any article on the web that means anything, or simply scroll through this post. You’ll see a bunch of links that lead to some other site.

If you link to other authoritative posts covering a similar subject, you’re giving people additional valuable resources to check, and you’re also inviting those blogs to link to you in return.

All of this combined has a massive impact on the amount of traffic you can receive. If you want more SEO advice on the subject, take a look at this detailed guide from Search Engine Journal.

There, we just showed you in practice how link building is done!

Use a specific type of link.

By this, we mean that you should always use links that are easy for both humans and search engines to read and understand. Put simply, your links should follow the same structure across your site, and they should be made up of only words and dashes.

One of the best HTML-related SEO tips we can give you is to stay away from numbers and characters, and especially from underscores, since Google doesn’t understand these. Furthermore, you should avoid using capital letters.

You can also take a look at this detailed guide from HostGator on how to structure your links for SEO.

Never allow your site to become slow!

It seems like a no-brainer, but there are still plenty of people who can’t get their sites to work fast or even function normally at regular speeds. Bear in mind: Strange Loop has found that you can experience a 7% loss in conversions if there is a single second delay in your page’s load time!

If that’s not enough, take a look at Neil Patel’s statistics on page loading times and how they affect your bottom line.

Page speed is a crucial factor in SEO, and you need to make sure you don’t have anything on your website that’s slowing it down. Moz usually has some of the best tips for SEO, and it also has a great guide on page speed and what you should and shouldn’t do to make your website fast.

Don’t forget about social signals.

Social media and SEO have a special bond, as social signals have a vital role to play in terms of rankings.

Many case studies pointed to this a few years ago, yet many still aren’t using social signals as much as they should. They can really build momentum for your website, which is why we believe that social signals are among the essential SEO tips for 2020.

The impact of social shares, tweets, likes, and pins is still huge on search engine rankings, which is why you need to make an effort to create share-worthy content, add share buttons, mention social media influencers to get them to share your content, and encourage your audience to share your posts as well.

Be consistent with your content creation and publishing.

One of the more vital parts of any content marketing strategy is consistency. The best content marketers know they need to create unique and engaging content, but they also know they have to be consistent with what they create and publish.

That’s precisely why one of the most crucial Google search optimization tips we can give you is to always keep a thing called the fresh factor in mind. The fresh factor determines, as you can expect, how fresh your specific content is. You can’t expect your older content to rank as well as the newer.

The only way to respect this critical factor in SEO is to create new content consistently.

Optimize your site for voice search.

This is one of the hottest SEO trends for 2020.

As you already know, mobile users surpassed desktop users a long time ago, and they’re increasingly using voice search. The technology is very attractive and convenient, and it will become even better in the years to come, which means the following percentages are likely to increase significantly:

• 51% of mobile users use voice search to find info on the products they’re interested in.
• 27% visit a business’s website after doing a voice search.
• 18% of consumers have used smart speakers for voice searches.

As these numbers rise, it’s likely that optimizing for voice searches will become one of the most important SEO tips for your website.

Work toward getting ranked for featured snippets.

If you don’t already know, a featured snippet appears in the search results after the ads but before the ranked results. They usually come together with an image, video, or anything that makes them stand out from the rest of the results.

Neat, isn’t it? For these reasons we feel that telling you how to get ranked for featured snippets is among the best SEO tips and tricks you can find on the web.

So how do you achieve such a desirable location in the search results?

According to the extensive research done by Gherich & Co and SEMRush, there are several things that you need to do:

• Use a paragraph format if you’re trying to rank for question-based keywords.
• Use a list format if you’re trying to rank for a keyword phrase that uses a preposition.
• Be as clear and concise as you can without sacrificing quality.
• Use strong external sources.
• Use headers, as these are easy to scan.
• Keep the social engagement high.
• Make sure your page can be used across devices.

Naturally, these don’t guarantee you’ll rank for a featured snippet, but you’ll definitely have a better chance at it.

SEO Tips for YouTube

As video is quickly becoming the most relevant type of content and is one of the greatest digital marketing trends for 2019, we’ve decided to have a separate section just for this platform.

• Use keywords in the title of the video.
• Use the video title as the file’s name.
• Research keywords and tags (there are many helpful tools for that, Google them!).
• Use search data to optimize existing videos.
• Always write descriptions for your videos.
• Always use the closed captions feature (CC).

SEO Tips for WordPress

Most people use WordPress for their website needs, which is why we wanted to give you a short overview of the best SEO tricks and tips you can use for your WordPress site. For more detailed information, you should check the Yoast guide on WordPress SEO.

• Make sure you have a sitemap for your website. WordPress has the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which can do that for you automatically.
• Change your default permalinks in the settings.
• Make sure your content is shareable.
• Use anchor text and links properly: interlink your posts and keep anchor texts meaningful and relevant to what they’re linking.
• Use SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and others.
• Use search engine optimized themes.
• Find the caching plugin that works for you, and use it if you want your site to be fast.

Additional Search Engine Optimization Tips That Can Help You

Use web analytics from the very start, as soon as you’ve developed your goals. You can use Google Analytics, but there are other useful web analytics tools out there as well. This will enable you to effectively track your site’s development from the very first visit. Thus, you’ll have a clear picture of how your website is improving and performing over time.

Avoid changing your domain name too much. It’s best to find a specific domain name that works best for you and your SEO and to stick with it for as long as you can.

One of several easy SEO tips has got to be rewriting your old, almost-great posts. Why? Because rewriting can bring a lot of improvements, not only in terms of improving the quality, but also for your SEO strategy. Adding more details, answers, examples, stats, images, and the like can turn it into a great piece, which can only improve your SEO.

Write unique meta descriptions for each page—this is probably the most omitted SEO tactic, mostly because people don’t want to be bothered with this dull task. However, it’s still one of the more important SEO tips for Google. Why? Because Google doesn’t like duplicate meta descriptions. That should be enough of a reason, but if you want more, you can take a more detailed look at why duplicate meta descriptions can hurt your site.

Don’t forget to use LSI keywords, or keywords and phrases that may not be the most important for your topic but are still highly related to it. They matter because not every person will use the same keywords to search for a particular topic.

Images play an essential part in most online content, but you should know that they’re also crucial for search optimization. When it comes to that, we feel that among the most vital search engine optimization tips for 2019 is using the right keywords for your images. Keywords are far more important with images because users search for images with very specific keywords.

Use videos! A lot of people don’t realize that videos are the future of content. Video marketing is only going to get more important than it already is, and there are no signs that the trend won’t continue for years to come. At this very moment, though, videos have a lot of potential for your site—they’re great for SEO and are perfect for user engagement. That’s why using them is, in our minds, one of the best SEO tips we can give you for the future.

Stick to making long-form articles since these tend to outrank shorter texts. More specifically, your piece should be at least 2,000 words long. However, you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for length. Relevancy is always a top priority, and then length.

To Sum Up

There you have it, an extensive list of all the essential SEO tips every blogger or business needs to know. By striving to incorporate the advice we’ve given you into your overall SEO strategy, you’ll be well on your way to improving your SEO in 2020 and the years to come.

In the end, don’t forget to stay up to date with all the changes in the world of SEO, and keep on following the advice and tips the experts give you.