Best Practices For SEO Optimization

Identify your competitors

Step one in any good keyword research process is to identify your primary competitors. The best way to do this is to simply Google your main keyword and see who shows up on the first page of results. These are the websites that you will be competing with for ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Once you have identified your main competitors, take a look at their website and see what keywords they are targeting. You can use a tool like SEMrush to get an overview of the keywords that they are targeting.

Conduct a keyword gap analysis

When you research keywords, you’ll want to start by conducting a keyword gap analysis. This will help you understand which keywords your competition is ranking for that you are not. Here’s how to conduct a keyword gap analysis:

Choose your target keywords. These are the keywords that you want to rank for in search engines.
Identify your competitors. These are the websites that are already ranking for your target keywords.
Use a keyword research tool to check the keyword difficulty of your target keywords. This will help you understand how difficult it will be to rank for these keywords.
Use a keyword research tool to check the search volume of your target keywords. This will help you understand how many people are searching for these keywords each month.
Compare the search volume and keyword difficulty of your target keywords to the search volume and keyword difficulty of your competitor’s keywords. This will help you identify which keywords you should be targeting that your competition is not already ranking for.
Find your main ‘money’ keywords

The first step in finding scholarships, student loans, and planning a student budget is identifying your main “money” keywords. These are the terms that you’ll use most often when searching for financial aid and money-saving opportunities.

To find your main money keywords, start by brainstorming a list of terms related to your interests, field of study, and financial needs. Then, use a keyword research tool to find the average monthly search volume for each term. Finally, prioritize your list of keywords by search volume, with the highest-trafficked terms at the top.

Some examples of main money keywords include: “scholarships,” “student loans,” “financial aid,” “college costs,” and “student budgeting.”

Technical SEO

scholarships, student loans, and student budgeting can be very helpful when it comes to college planning. Technical SEO can also be a great help when it comes to college planning. There are many benefits to using technical SEO when college planning.

Leverage the “Inspect URL” feature in GSC

The “Inspect URL” feature in Google Search Console (GSC) allows you to check if Google has indexed your web page correctly, and can also help you debug other indexing issues. The “Inspect URL” feature can be found under the “Coverage” tab in GSC.

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

More people are using mobile devices to access the internet than ever before. In fact, in 2016, mobile devices accounted for over 50% of internet traffic worldwide. This trend is only expected to continue, which is why it’s so important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

There are a few different ways to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. One way is to use responsive design, which means your website will automatically adjust to look great on any device, whether it’s a phone, tablet, or computer. Another way is to create a separate mobile version of your website that’s optimized for smaller screens.

No matter which approach you take, there are a few things you should keep in mind when creating a mobile-friendly website:

-Make sure your website loads quickly. Mobile users are typically patient when it comes to waiting for a website to load, so it’s important to make sure your site loads as quickly as possible.

-Use large fonts and buttons. It’s important to make sure text and buttons are large enough to be easy to read and tap on a small screen.

-Avoid Flash. Flash doesn’t work on most mobile devices, so it’s important to avoid using it if you want your site to be accessible to as many people as possible.

-Make sure your content is relevant and useful. Mobile users are often looking for quick answers to their questions, so it’s important to make sure your content is relevant and useful.

Check your site’s loading speed

Slow website speed can negatively impact your SEO rankings. Make sure you check your site’s loading speed and make improvements as needed. You can use a tool like Pingdom to test your site’s speed and get recommendations for improvements.

On-page and Content

College costs continue to increase, but there are many ways to save money and still get a great education. Scholarships and grants can help offset the cost of tuition, and student loans can make it possible to finance your education. Student budgeting can help you save money on everyday expenses.

Fix duplicate, missing, and truncated title tags

It’s important to have unique, accurate, and complete title tags on every page of your website so that search engines can properly index and rank your content. Duplicate title tags are a common issue that can occur when migrating to a new CMS or making changes to your website’s code. If you have duplicate title tags on your website, it’s important to fix them as soon as possible. Not only do they cause confusion for search engines, but they also dilute the ranking power of your pages.

When migrating to a new CMS or making changes to your website’s code, it’s also possible to accidentally delete or truncate your title tags. This can happen if you change the coding structure of your website without properly updating all the title tags should be 50-60 characters long, including spaces. If your title tags are too long, they will be truncated by Google and other search engines. This can have a negative impact on your click-through rates and organic traffic.

In order to fix duplicate, missing, or truncated title Tags:

Do a site-wide search for your titles using a browser plugin like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or diffchecker.com.
Update all instances of duplicate titles with unique, accurately descriptive text.
Check for any instances of missing or truncated title tags and update them accordingly.
Find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions

If you have a lot of pages on your website, you may want to check for duplicate or missing meta descriptions. This can be a time-consuming task, but it’s important to make sure that each page on your site has its own unique meta description.

There are a few ways to find duplicate or missing meta descriptions. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to crawl your site and look for pages with duplicated or missing meta descriptions. Or, you can manually check each page on your site to see if the meta description is present and unique.

Once you’ve found pages with duplicate or missing meta descriptions, you’ll need to fix them. For pages with duplicate meta descriptions, you’ll need to either remove the duplicate descriptions or write unique descriptions for each page. For pages with missing meta descriptions, you’ll need to add a description to the page.

Creating unique and accurate meta descriptions for each page on your website is an important part of on-page optimization. By taking the time to find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions, you can help improve your website’s click-through rate and organic traffic.

Find and fix multiple H1 tags

If you want to increase your chances of ranking well in search engine results pages, make sure your HTML code contains only a single H1 tag. Multiple H1 tags can confuse search engine algorithms and may result in decreased crawlability and indexation for your website.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your website that can improve your search engine rankings. In other words, it’s anything you do on the web to improve your website’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Analyze your competitor’s link profile

A link profile is a collection of links pointing to a website. The health and quality of a link profile is an important ranking factors for SEO. It’s also one of the most difficult aspects of SEO to control. That’s because links are generated by other people and websites — you can’t just create them out of thin air (although there are some methods of link building that come close).

One way to get an idea of the kinds of links your competitors have is to analyze their link profiles. This can give you some insights into what kinds of links are valuable, and where you might be able to get some similar links for your own website.

Here are a few things you can look for when analyzing a competitor’s link profile:

-The number of total links: A high number of total links is generally a good sign, although it’s not always the most important thing. A website with fewer total links can still have a higher-quality link profile than a website with more links.
-The number of unique domains: This is a good indicator of the diversity of the link profile. If most of the links are coming from a small number of websites, that’s not as good as having links from many different websites.
-The anchor text: This is the text that is used to link to the website. If most of the anchor text is variations on the website’s name or brand, that’s not as good as having a variety of different anchor text.
-The PageRank: This is a numeric score from 0 to 10 that indicates the authority or power of a website. A higher PageRank generally means that links from that website will be more valuable.

Conduct a link intersect analysis

A link intersects analysis is a process of finding out which websites link to multiple articles or pages on your website. This is a valuable exercise because it can help you determine which websites are the most important for your site visibility.

There are a few different ways to conduct a link intersect analysis. The most common is to use a tool like Moz’s Link Intersect Tool.

Another way to conduct a link intersect analysis is to use Google Search Console. Go to your “Links” report and then click on “More >>” next to the “Who links the most” section. From there, you can see which websites have linked to multiple pages on your website.

Yet another way to do this is manual. Simply go to each website that links to your site and see if they link to more than one page. If they do, then you know that website is an important one for your site’s visibility.

Target your competitors’ broken backlinks

Your competition is continually building new backlinks to their site. Of those backlinks, some will eventually become broken. When this happens, it presents an opportunity for you to swoop in and claim that link – and the valuable link juice that comes with it – for your own site.

To find your competitors’ broken backlinks, you’ll need to use a backlink analysis tool. Once you have a list of broken links, reach out to the webmaster and let them know. Most webmasters will be happy to update the link to point to your site instead. Just be sure to offer them something in return, such as a link back to their site from yours.