If yo💖u’ve been paying attention to the world ꦑof search engine optimization (SEO) recently, you know that it's hardly been business as usual.

In the age of AI, we're seeing ಞtwo major changes to search:

1. With tools like Writer, Jasper, Descript and others, it's easier than ever to create written and video content,♉ which means competition for traffic is higher than ever. 
2. Generative search tools used by Google and Bing offer a novel take on the whole search experien💛ce. 

With so much volatility and upheaval, the tactics that were sure-fire safe bets a few years ago are no longer s🤪o sure. The truth of the matter is that no one really knows where search is going. 

• How much traffic will I lose t🍷ꦍo generative search? I've seen estimates from 15%-60%
• Will generative search link to the same content as traditional search? Maybe, but maybe not, according to this :

But all of this uncertainty is not an invitation to bury your head in the sand an𒐪d wait for the whole AI thing to 🍌blow over. Instead, it's a call to think critically and act decisively — even as some details aren't yet available. 

The fact is, search and๊ SEO are always in flux. Goꦅogle updates its algorithm regularly, and new features are added to search engines all the time. 

In times like these, you need to do three things: Keep in mind the reason you're producing content in the first place, stay up to date on new ღfeatures and tools, and follow best p✤ractices, as best you understand them.

That's what this list is about. 

And, while we understand how important it is to drive website traffic to your website, we also believe it’s important to focus on the right traffic. So, you'll see that our SEO b⛄est practices are a little different than the garden varie💃ty ones you can find anywhere else on the internet. 

These are the tactics we've taught to hundreds of businesses that have helped our clients generate millions in revenue.

Here’s what to know.

Remember, not all traffic is created equal

As we dive into SEO, remember that traffic itself is not a goal — and getting more traffic is not a strategy. 

澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:If you attract traffic that has n▨o intent to buy, it might make you feel good, but it's won't impact your company's bottom lin♏e💃. 

You don’t want just any web traffic coming to your website; you want to drive the right traffic — meaning qualified leads who ar🐎e looking to buy and are looking for the products anওd services you provide. Creating content that addresses their needs should be a key part of your SEO strategy.

We teach our clients to drive more qualified leads to their site with an inbound marketing framework called 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:They Ask, You Answer.

Here's Marcus Sheridan, the creator of They Ask, You Answer, ex🃏plaining how it works. 

The TL;DR is this: For all the complex SEO tactics, don't lose sight of one simple thing: What are the questions and concerns your customers h💧ave before they buy?

We've seen that there are five questions on every customer's mind, no matter what they're buying. When you make answering these questions a part of your SEO strategy, you're always going to be heading in the right direction. 

Whatever you sell, your buyer wants to know:

1. How much they're going to pay — and what fac🦂tors make that number go up or down
2. Potential problems or drawbacks of a given product
3. How two options compare to each other
4. Reviews from experts and past customers
5. What are their best-in-class options 

We’ve seen it time and time aga༒in: When businesses take the time to answer these questions honestly and thoroughly, their search engine rankings improve and they see organic traffic increase steadily month over month.

But at the same time, you should fo💛llow these more conventional approaches to SEO that you can use together with They Ask, You Answer for even betꦿter results.

9 must-have SEO best practices 

Even with the volatility we've seen this past year in search, you should 🍸always follow these best practices to attract traffic to your site. 

1. Focus on the keywords your customers use

As you develop your content SEO strategy, tools like , , and can help you zero in on what your ꩵideal tarꦐget keywords should be.

Keyword planning tools help you align your content with what your searchers are looking🔴 for. Each piece of content you cre🉐ate should strive to match search intent as closely as possible.

Whichever tool you use should provide sugge🅺stions based🔴 on:

• Primary keywords. These high-level keywords should൲ serve as the main top♒ic.
• Secondary keywords. Should be used as often as ♍possible as subheadings in your articles and pilla🍌r pages.
• Supporting language. Lower-level keywords you can use 🥃t🏅hroughout the text.

When you publish articles about a larger topic and link them to an article abo♏ut a subtopic — and vice versa — you’re telling search engines you know a lot about that keyword/subject, which increa﷽ses your chance of ranking for it.

When you try to fit everything into one piece of content, you risk overstuffing that c🍬ontent with awkward, k🎉eyword-heavy text that can feel unnatural to your readers (and Google).

You should also look at the opportunities presented by 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:long-tail keywords. These l🃏ower-volume phrases frequently have more transaction-focused search intent attached 🌠to them, making them perfect for content that pulls your potential customers further down the funnel.

2. Use effective titles and headings

Though the terms may be interchangeable to most people, titles and headings are distinctly different and occupy dif🦋ferent parts o💛f your web pages’ code.

The title is placed in the <head> element of each HTML document you create, and the <head> serves as a container for each web page’s metadata (data about data). This includes information like the document title, the language used on the page, and scripts for your analytics tools.

The title (which is placed between the <title></title> tags) tells ༺Google and oth🐟er search engines what the page is about at the very highest level. It’s also shown on the search engine results.

For example, the larger blue text here is taken from the title tag on our 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:“What Is Inbound Marketing?” page:

Well-constructed titles do two important things:

1. Include th♎e primary keyword you’re trying to ra💮nk for
2. Make people want to click or read the content

Goodꦛ titles are a key part of SEO best practices and should be among the very first things you consider when creating content. If your web pages get indexed by search engines and end up ranking but don’t get clicks, Google will replace them in the search results with content that does get clicked.

Headings are part of the code that creates the part of the page that your visitors actually see. The on-page title of your HTML document will be wrapped in the <h2> tag, with your subheadings placed between <h2> and further subheadings wrapped in tags ra🍌nging from <h3> to <h6>. 

Together, headings tell Goo🦂gle (and your readers) what's important, and how each section relates to the others. 

For example, check out this blog post from .

The H2 explains that this section wi🌃ll be about types of repairs. The H3s list and exp❀lain different types of repairs. 

The importance of headings

Because headings provide Google with a better idea of what 🤪the page is about asꦿ well as your pages’ structure, they are heavily weighted. Including a secondary keyword in your subheadings, for example, tells Google that you not only cover the main topic but also other parts of the topic and are hitting it from several angles.

You 🍬should also take the time to craft individual titles for multiple pages, even if they cover similar aspects of the same topic.

Search engiℱnes like to rank high-quality content that covers the topic well because readers are looking for that one-stop source of information. When Google ranks your website, it does so with confidence that “this is the page that will answer your question.”

3. Write strong meta descriptions

The meta descriptio♔n tag defines the block of text that shows up after the content title in the SERPS (search engine results pages). Just like your page titles, your page’s meta description is placed in the <head> of each page’s HTML code.

This is the text that exp🌊lai꧒ns what information that content provides.

As with the header text, you need to think about what you look 🎉for as a user. What descripti🦩on would make you click on the link to read more?

Keep in mind that Google frequently rewrites meta descriptions. After analyzing user intent, they do their best to take your content and describe it as something they think users are looking for and then display that. Some🍸times they take the text from your meta description or what’s on the p🔯age and reconfigure it in a way they think works better.

The meta description is not used in the search rankings algorithm; however, your site’s click-through rate from the search results is. So, make your meta description as attractive as possible, even if Google ends up rewriting it for you. It’s always worth trying to g🌺et the information you want out there,♛ and it’s an opportunity for free advertising within the search rankings.

4. Optimize all images

You want your pages to load as quickly as possible, so make sure you optimize imag♍es so their file sizes are as small as they can be. 

Use to scan your site and find what images might cause it to slow down. Optimization s🧔ervices, such as and , can help you reduce media file sizes, but most CMSs offer some optimization features too, allowing you to edit directly in the post.

And trust me, optimized images 💖don't need to be grainy or pixelated. 

Here's a 60KB image, for reference. 

But ofꦅten, people are using images 20 times 🍌bigger. 

The smaller the images the quicker the load time, which helpꦛs you avoid Google penalizing you for a slow-loading page. 

While you're at it, see if your site host꧋ uses a lazy-load feature (or if you can use ). This way, the page will load qui▨ckly even while images toward the bottom load more slowly. 

5. Include use𝕴ful links — especially internal ones

You want to link whenever it’s appropriate, but you should always include a few internal links to relevant pieces of content. Google๊ crawls every page and wants to see that you are linking to mꦬore articles connected to the topic that you’re covering.

Link with intention and keep search in mind, especially when choosing anchor text. This means that inst🥂ead of using phrases such as “Read this article,” you’re using anchor text that utilizes the primary keyword that the article is based on. This tells search engines more information about where the link is head🎀ed.

G🐈oogle doesn’t say how many external or internal links to include, but as a rule of thumb, base this on the length of your content. The most important thing is to make sure all yo꧋ur internal links are relevant.

There’s no hard limit to how many you should include, but if you link to a lot of non-relevant content, it distracts the reader ꦍand conf🀅uses search engines.

We recommend using several internal links for clarity purposes toward the beginning of the article when you’re intro🐻ducing new concepts to your readers, but your ultimate goal when creating links in your content should be to focus on the user.

6. Provide a user-friendly design (🐎on desktop and mobile)

Desiꦗgn is frequently left out of internal discussions around improving a company’s search engine rankings, but that's a mistake. User experience matters. Today, when people use desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones to access your site, you need to provide a pleasing experience no matter the device. 

A🗹im to make it as easy as possible for someone on their phone to use your site — and just as eas𝔉y on a computer web browser.

Is it easy to navigate y♉our site? Is it easy to scroll and click links? Does your long-fo𒊎rm content provide a table of contents or an easy way to jump around? Sometimes when you build a website for your desktop users only, you don’t get a chance to see how it looks on a phone.

You can use page previews to see how the same content will appear on different devices. 

Content management systems like HubSpot and WoꦗrdPress make it easy to ensure your site’s user experience is consistent and easy from the start, thanks t♈o .

7. Optimize page speed

The <head> section of each HTML document loads before the visible portion of a particular page does. Th🦂is means that the code in this๊ section should be as lean as possible.

Unfortunately, because this section of a page is less visible to stakeholders on a site, the head ends up getting neglected. It’s not unusual for multiple scripts for Google Analytics or user behavior tools like Hotjar to be left in the code, slowing downl🔜oad times.

If you’re curious about what you can do to optimize your page speeds, you should take advantage of . This tool shows you everything that is slowing down your load time, in addition to images. It can deliver information at a granular level, essentially telling you: “Hey, these are the seven things that are loading slowly.” You can use this information to decide what is essential to your interna𒁃l needs and what can be omitted.

You also want to make sure your CSS (cascading style sheets) are tidied. They should be up to date and constructed as efficie🐻ntly as possible. Whenever you have an opportunity to minify your CSS, you should take it. You don’t have to take ✤a large amount of code down, but every tenth of a second counts.

Site managers with pages that contain a lot of information will want to take advan♎tage of opportunities to deliver as much content as possible to Google🍒 and the user as early as they can. It’s a good idea to ensure that .

This is another place where you can take advantage of so that less search-critical con♛tent, such as images and video, is rendered after your page’s text.

8. Make use of navigation and sitemaps

Your top navigation is the single greatest vote you can have on your site for the importance of a piece of con🉐tent.

Here are tips for making it SEO-friendly:

• Link to your biggest pillar pages from your top navigation. You don’t want to link to♋ everything at this level, but the main topic pages on your website should go here▨.
• Use language that is relevant to the searcher. Try not to use terms such as “soluti♎ons” and “services” if you can help it. For example, a plumber’s website could link directly to “sink installation,” “toilet installation,” etc.

Sitemaps, on the other hanღd, are XML files that tell Google what’s on your site. Once yours is complete, . In the case of HubSpot and🍨 WordPress, you’ll automatically have a sitemap built in that breaks out all the sections of your website in a coherent way.

As a general SEO best practice, you should make sure your sitemap is clearly laid out and that Google knows about it. Google is really good at crawling pages and finding internal links, but you should 💯always have a sitemap set up within Search Console. It’s a great resource to have, especially if, down the line, yo🐬u need to disavow toxic backlinks.

9. Lean into semantic HTML

Semantic HTML tells Google what it’s crawling and looking at, and header tags are one🅺 of the biggest parts. Semantic HTML reveals the structure of a page — how the content is laid out and what primary and secon♏dary topics are included.

This means that instea൲d of formatting your text on a page with larger and smaller text, you use the heading tags discussed earlier. Instead of using the <b> tag to indicate bold text, the HTML code around the text should indicate the text is <strong>, which places more emphasis on what is between the tags.

There is a specific, linguistic difference to Google about ho𝕴w aspects of your text function, and they consider the HTML to see how muc✱h of the page is bold versus italic. They know what a well-written document title and page structure look like.

Much like creating a site with 🐟a user-friendly design, most content management systems make 🥀it very easy to create a page using proper semantic HTML.

Improve organic traffic and optimize your website

To take the first step toward implementing They Ask, You Answer in your business and improving your organic traffic once and for all, 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:talk to one of our advisors who c✨an walk you through how to see these incredible results at your own company.

If you’d like to re🌊ad more b🌜efore you reach out, here are some additional resources:

1. 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:What is They Ask, You Answer?

While all these SEO best practices and concepts 🃏are great to know, it’s the framework we teach that makes them actually work. With our 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:coaching and hands-on training, you’ll fina🎀lly get the support you need to grow your business online and generate more revenue w🅘hile increasing your traffic, leads, and sales.