SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization which in Portuguese means Optimization for Search Engines. This practice is a set of techniques and configurations that you can apply to your website so that it is seen with different eyes by search engines, such as Google or Bing.

With SEO techniques applied correctly, we can better optimize websites and achieve better rankings in search engines organically, which is where you don’t need to spend money on ads to appear prominent.

Let’s see some points to improve SEO:

Think like your user / customer

The first step is to understand how your target audience searches for the most used terms in relation to your business. From this point on, create a list of appropriate keywords to be found through searches for these same keywords.

Define long keywords

Once you have a list of keywords about the topics you want to write about or products you want to sell, the ideal is to choose to use long keywords. The term “long” refers to keywords made up of three or more words, which end up forming a short sentence.

Use synonyms

After defining the keywords that will define the position of the website’s pages and content, you also use synonyms and secondary keywords with similar semantics to the main ones. These are two SEO tips that help a lot with search engine rankings. Google evaluates the way you enter keywords, the semantics and context of the page to classify which content is truly relevant. Therefore, it uses and abuses this practice.

Quality content

Quality content is content that answers user questions in accordance with search intentions using the chosen keywords. This is one of the SEO techniques that most influence the position of a page in search engines.
Writing relevant content means that you must produce text that delivers a quick and effective solution to anyone who has some type of problem or interest. It could be a tutorial, an informative guide, or a step-by-step guide on how to fix something.

Hierarchizes content

Hierarchizing is delimiting the importance of something in relation to another. The most important of them appears before the others and receives greater prominence. That’s basically what you need to do with the content you publish. In addition to making the user’s reading easier and more objective, these SEO techniques make search engines find the content by organizing its text. This way, they will recommend the page as the one that best represents the solution for the searched keywords.

What you should do is define an outline with the information you want to cover in the content. And, from there, organize them into headings with titles and subtitles according to the importance to be given.
The hierarchy structure in content published on the internet is:

•  H1 (Heading 1). It’s the title of the page. It has the highest priority and this is where you must do your best to capture the reader’s attention.
• H2 (Heading 2). These are the subheadings you create to divide the content theme into topics.
• H3 (Heading 3). These are the subheadings of H2. They should be used to add extra information to topics you define.
• H4 (Heading 4), H5 (Heading 5)…. They work like the H3. They further delimit the complementary information of a content.

Use keywords in the right places

The sequence of this task is to know exactly where to position the keywords you chose. This is how you will tell Google crawlers how well optimized your page is. And it is from here that it will appear as a content suggestion for users.
In short, you need to put keywords in, when appropriate and in the most natural way possible:

•  Title (H1). It is the main title of the page or content.
• Subtitle (H2). It is the subtitle of any subtopic you want to write in the content. This must be at least once. Do not repeat this process on other H2s, as this practice is considered harmful to search engines.
• Throughout the content. Distribute the chosen keyword throughout the content, but don’t overdo it. And remember: use synonyms and semantic terms to complement your ideas.
• Meta-description. It’s a description that you create for the content and that appears in search results explaining what your page is about.

Create a friendly URL

One of the ways that search engines crawl pages and identify the intent of their content is through the URL. Therefore, you need to facilitate this identification and make it as explicit as possible so that robots can point out which pages are most suitable in the search results. Don’t overcompose your URL.
Some characteristics that make a URL optimized for search engines are:

• Be short and easy to interpret;
• Contain the keyword you want to rank for;
• Reference the content and its title;
• Have only one subdomain;
• No special characters or unusual symbols.

Optimize images

Google also crawls pages and content through the images you insert. Therefore, you need to optimize all the images in your online project. Search engines still can’t understand exactly what a photo shows, so you need to use some supporting text to let them know what the content of these images is. All you need to do is create a description for those images.

In the name of the image. This is how you will call the image file. In addition to referring to the content you are creating, consider including something that is also contextualized with the page on which you insert the image.
In the alternative text setting. Also known as ALT Text, it is like a caption for the photo. Regardless of the name you give to the image, the caption ensures that engines find the image based on its description and proximity to the content in which it is inserted.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links that point from your website to other pages and from other pages to your website. This is one of the main factors that influence the ranking of a page on Google. This is because search engines understand that if a page or content is linked to on many sites, it is extremely useful for the user. Thus, a referenced domain often becomes relevant, gains authority and rises to the first pages of search engines.

External and Internal Links

These two strategies, when combined, act as a kind of nutrition and strengthening of good SEO practices within your own domain.

Internal Linking – This is when you create links between content and pages within the same domain. For example, a post on your blog has a link to another post on your blog. Or a promotion page linked within a blog post about the topic you are promoting.
External Linking – This is when you create links to external domains on the pages and content of your website. Most of the time, they are consolidated pages and websites with relevant information about what you are publishing.

Responsive and Fast Website

Two other SEO tips that help with a page’s ranking in search engines are having a responsive and fast website.

A responsive website is one that adjusts to any type of screen resolution. In other words, the elements of a page are reorganized so that all of its content can be read on any type of device, screen and by any user.

Furthermore, a website that loads quickly avoids user frustration when accessing the content, and the less you wait, the better experience and interest in staying on the website. The idea behind these two factors is to improve the user’s browsing experience, whether on a desktop or mobile device.

Run a Compatibility Test of your website with mobile devices and a Loading Speed ​​Test and with the results, you will have a better idea of ​​which pages or elements you need to optimize.