With search engine algorithms getting sophisticated, SEO has gone through quite a change. This is beneficial as websites with weak content or spammy websites do not get the chance to rank high on search engines. To guarantee your position, take a look at the Dos and Don’ts for contemporary SEO.

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DOs of SEO for Businesses?

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1. Focus on keywords - Make sure that the meta title or title is associated with the keyword or content clearly. On Google, your title will be cut short to 55 characters. This is not much of a problem as long as the first 55 characters have the power to engage the readers. 
 
The content in the text body should stick to the topic area and needs to be simple. If you try to insert unnecessary information, your SEO will not be hampered. These days, search engine algorithms can understand conversational language and context. Hence, there is hardly any need to repeat the exact keywords. Instead, one can use key phrases and long-tailed keywords. 
 
2. Use analytics for measuring performance - Do you have an idea about the keywords to be ranked in your content? With the help of keywords analytics, you can make informed decisions. 
 
Ensure the use of phrases that are not just relevant to your business, but come with a low difficulty score, which means that fewer sites are competing for them. Also, long-tailed keywords help in converting more than their shorter counterparts. 

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3. Image optimisation - Just adding a video or an image is barely a sign of efficient SEO work. You must always tag, label or add alt-text to them so that search engines can identify them. A long-tailed keyword is enough to help a search engine notice the image and understand what all your content is about, thus helping to rank the keyword. 

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4. Link your website to social media pages - Having images as part of your website design is not the ultimate step. You have to understand that your website is the core of your digital presence. While social media is important, it should not stop short at promoting your website. You can compare a website to a city, which is connected to various suburbs and towns, i.e., social media sites. The smaller towns have a few roads, but those finally lead to the city. The concept of the roads that lead to the city is akin to the size of a site. Directing searchers from other platforms to your website will enhance its visibility, besides increasing its credibility. 

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5. Build static URLs - The overall quality of a website depends on its URLs. If you build static URLs, the content is unchanged till you hard-code the changes with HTML. It is used as it offers high click-through-rates in SERPs, web pages, emails; allows high keyword prominence and relevancy. Also, most of the search engines handle static URLs easily. Additionally, they can be adjusted to a specific anchor text that would assist the page rank higher when it is linked to.  

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Don’ts of SEO for Businesses?

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1. Allow your page a high load time - A page, which takes over 3 seconds to load is bound to be a flop show as it will hamper your SERP performance. Search engines might not directly factor in such a reason for poor ranking, but it definitely offers poor user experience. A slow site is dissatisfying and search engines will respond to it. 

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2. Ignore metadata - Alt tags, Headings, Snippets, Custom URLs, etc. are the little things that demand attention when feeding content into CMS. They usually go unnoticed by the end-readers, but the search engines do not ignore them. So, for the benefit of your website and your business, it is important never to disregard them.  

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3. Think that all SERPs have the same features - Some SERPs have a creative knowledge panel on their right side, while others are feature paid ads. Others come with space for e-shopping listings. If you are in the know about the variations and identify the attributes popping up on your preferred SERPs, you will surely get an idea about the type of content that can better your position or may even show some opportunities.

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4. Overlook voice search - Today, voice search is part of the way things are done in modern times. In the present day, searchers use voice commands on their phones and smart speakers are slowly making their way into households. The kids, who are making use of voice-tech in their growing years, are utilising more conversational and naturalistic search terms. Moreover, voice search too has developed over the years since its inception. SEO professionals should keep in mind this trend and know the target market while optimising. 

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5. End your work just by creating a keyword optimised page - It is true that every page should be optimised for its own keyword. However, just optimising a single page is not going to be enough for search engines to build a strong relation between your keyword and your website. This might be quite a dilemma, but think about it like this - you have to first convince the search engine that your site is associated with a specific keyword. You can begin with optimising a single page with a keyword. But
make sure that you do not end up mentioning that keyword just on that page because that will not convince Google. 
 
Now, consider a page with a particular keyword as the home of the keyword. This keyword definitely wants to be with other keywords. So, what do you do? You let the keywords visit each other’s homes. And, how exactly do you do that? Use the keyword with other keywords throughout the website to demonstrate that the keyword is really valuable to the site. 

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Using these pointers and implementing them as an inbound marketing strategy will improve your SEO. But you need to remember that SEO is a time-consuming procedure, which takes time. Hence you need to be patient for your website to fetch high-end traffic and leads.

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