Basic principles of Good SEO Practise

By following basic guidleines of good SEO practise you can help search engines understand your pages.

• Create pages that are primarily for users, not search engines.
• Don’t mislead your customers.
• Consider what makes your website distinct, valuable, or engaging.  Make your website stand out from the crowd in your industry.
• Avoid using tricks to boost your search engine rankings.  Ask yourself whether you would be comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a competitor’s website.

Help your users navigate your pages

• Check all your links lead to active web pages.
• Improve the speed with which your pages load.  Users enjoy faster sites, which improves the overall quality of their web browsing experience.
• Create a website that is compatible with all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
• Check that your website displays correctly in different browsers.
• Test usability with a screen reader for example, to ensure that your pages are helpful for users with visual impairments.
• If possible, use HTTPS to secure your site’s connections.  Encrypting user interactions with your website is good SEO practise for web communication.

Help search engines understand your pages

• Create a useful, information-rich website, and write pages that describe your content clearly and accurately.
• Consider the words that users would use to find your pages and ensure that your site contains those words.
• Make sure your <title> and alt elements are descriptive, specific, and accurate.
• Create a clear conceptual page hierarchy for your website.
• When using a content management system (such as Wix or WordPress), ensure that it generates  pages and links that can be crawled by search engines.
• To help search engines fully understand your site’s content, allow them to crawl all site assets that would significantly affect page rendering, such as CSS and JavaScript files that affect the understanding of the pages.
• Make the most important content on your website visible by default.  Search engines can crawl HTML content that is hidden within navigational elements such as tabs or expanding sections.  However, this content is less accessible to users and it is advised to consider making your most important information visible in the default page view.
• Try to ensure that the advertisement links on your pages do not have an impact on search engine rankings.  For example, use robots.txt, rel=”nofollow,” or rel=”sponsored” to prevent crawlers from following advertisement links.