5 Basic SEO tips to rank you higher in 2023

This is an article excerpt from my SEO blog. The full article link is at the end of this article.

If you need to achieve better search engine optimization, my 5 Basic SEO tips will help you big time.

If these tips are too basic, don’t worry, check out my other blog posts that are more advanced.  

Tip #1: Website Speed

Check your website’s speed. This is one of the first things I do when I assess a client’s online presence. Google takes seriously the user experience of its customers (the ones who use it for search).

So if your website is too slow, you can lose your ranking spot or even get penalized for poor performance.

The first thing to do is to check your website’s speed objectively. This doesn’t mean loading it up on your phone or computer and simply gauging how quick it was. That result cannot be trusted for many reasons. But let’s keep it basic.

This is what you have to do.

Go to PageSpeed Insights by Google which you can find here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

There are many great options to consider to gauge website speed, but this is what I find to be the easiest option to see what your website’s performance is.

If your results are poor, then don’t feel bad. The internet mainly consists of slow websites.

Which is great news since speeding your site up can place you miles ahead of your competition.

Tip #2: HTML Heading Tags (H1,H2,H3…)

This is a pretty big deal. I know I said no coding required and that’s true. This is all determined by clicking on options on your platform. Whether you’re creating content on Google Docs or WordPress or Joomla or Wix or Squarespace, your headings can be the weak link for your website.

Let’s quickly discuss what this is all about…

Google Search’s John Mueller has explained on numerous occasions that heading tags help Google to understand the structure of a page.  Google has several recommendations for using heading tags because it helps Google to understand what your site is all about.

Tip #3: Above the Fold Should Be Helpful

Imagine you open a website and nothing on the page is helpful. So you scroll down and then finally find the information you need.

This is a pet peeve of Google Search and should be avoided at all costs.

But what does “above the fold” mean?

Above the fold refers to everything that can be see on a mobile screen or computer monitor on the first load of the webpage. The moment you need to scroll down, it would be “below the fold”.

Tip #4 : Make every page accessible

This touches both on internal linking as well as navigation structure.

Search engines use crawling programs to visit your site and to follow every link they can find. If you have web pages on your site that cant easily be found, then they can’t be that relevant or important to you or to the search engine, meaning the page or pages may not even get indexed!

So two things to do right now:
Make sure that every blog post or page is easily accessible through the navigation menu. The rule of thumb is that any content on your site should be accessible between 1 and 3 clicks. So if someone needs to click 4 or 5 times to reach your content… you’re not doing it right.

The second thing is to make sure that you’re linking between relevant pages on your site.

Tip #5: Keywords and Topicality

Make sure your page mentions the keywords that you want to rank for. Might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many website manage to not mention the exact phrase that they actually want to rank for. (Warning: trying to outsmart a search engine by mentioning the phrase you want to rank for multiple times without context is called keyword stuffing and is penalised by Google.)

However, keywords will not be enough to get you to that spot. You also need to have words and phrases relevant to the topic of your keyword.