What standard SEO techniques can you recommend for beginning website owners?

In this post, I’m going to outline some of the most important standard SEO techniques, especially vital for novice website owners and beginning webmasters. Yes, I understand that the broad concept of the Search Engine Optimization can easily become confusing or even completely overwhelming. I mean that there is an innumerable count of different SEO techniques and sometimes controversial approaches that, when layered together the right way, can ultimately create a mix of powerful online presence and great public awareness for practically every business, disregarding its main topic or the sphere of industry. Nevertheless, there are some basic SEO techniques and tactics that will be needed for a kickstart launch under any circumstances. Here they are.

Standard SEO Techniques and Basic Approaches to Search Optimization

Keyword-Based URL and Content Structure

Using a single keyword or a long-tail keyword-based phrase in each customized URL would be a great solution, as long as you have permalinks enabled. Seem too easy right? But the trickiest part here is identifying the main target keywords you’re going to optimize for – both your URLs themselves, and the other main content-related sections of your website or blog as well. So, let’s face it – yes, you can find a pretty good phrase with a good search volume yet sufficiently low keyword competition. But the thing is that even little keyword research actually goes a truly long way, unless you’re targeting a precise technically-oriented industry or a really narrow topic. For all others, I recommend getting down with in-depth keyword research using one of the following tools: a good old Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, or more specific online frameworks and toolkits, such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer (Moz) and Semalt’s Keyword Analyzer (otherwise, Semalt Analyzer).

Reasonable URL Checklist

• Ideally, you should use a keyword phrase once per each customized URL you have for every given web page.
• Try to make URLs as reasonably short as possible, as not too long URLs commonly tend to rank better than the longer ones.
• Avoid using so-called “stop words” at all cost (like “a,” “the,” “an,” “many,” “of,” “or,” etc.), unless they are really relevant part of your context.

Maximize Efficiency of Page Titles

The page title itself is arguably the most important thing that can let Google’s search crawling bots “understand‘ what your page content is all about. Apart from telling them that your website or blog is purely relevant o a given search query, page titles are great places to drop some of your main target keywords to maximize their efficiency. Doing so, consider the following basic requirements to sound page titles that work for your actual ranking progress.

HTML Page Title Checklist

• First and foremost, every single web page should have its own unique HTML page title.
• Optimal title length is commonly found somewhere within 35-65 characters, and is expected to cover at least four words.
• Avoid keyword stuffing (dropping maximum count of keywords randomly) at all cost.
• Make sure to have no more than one keyword, or keyword-based combination located closer to the title’s beginning.