There are many reasons to create a website. Perhaps you’ve developed an exceptional product that you’re eager to sell online. Maybe you’ve written your magnum opus and want to share it with the world. Regardless, if you want people to discover your website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must.
SEO is a blanket term for the processes that webmasters use to boost their sites’ chances of ranking well in search engines, such as Bing and Google. Whether your site is powered by a web hosting service or a website builder, you should leverage SEO so that your site (hopefully!) appears on the first results page after someone keys a term into a search engine. This is especially true with the rise of generative AI. Emphasizing a unique, human perspective helps you stand out from generic AI-generated content.
The following SEO tips won’t guarantee superb results placement, but they’re essential for helping search engines—and, by extension, people—find your site.
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1. Build a Well-Designed, Attractive Website
If your site is new, large, or contains many multimedia files, consider creating a sitemap. That file provides search engines with the information they need to swiftly crawl and index site pages, video, and audio. Google has a useful sitemap generator. Bing does, too. In fact, your website must contain a sitemap to appear in Google News; therefore, keep that in mind if your goal is to be included there.
Another vital component is a strong mobile site. Google search has a mobile-first index, which means it prioritizes sites with mobile-friendly designs. As a result, a site that doesn’t cater to phones and tablets may see its search rankings drop or potentially be excluded from the index entirely.
On that note, many website builders and web hosts use a responsive design approach that automatically adjusts your site’s layout, content, and features to fit a device’s screen—whether it’s a phone, tablet, or desktop. However, as the webmaster, it’s your responsibility to check your website to ensure it works well on mobile and optimize it as needed. Almost all builders include a “mobile view” icon in the editing interface, which lets you switch to a smartphone-sized preview. You can then make mobile-specific edits directly from that screen. Don’t overlook this!
In addition, your website should encourage visitors to explore and share your content. Selling products? Your homepage should spotlight at least a few optimized product images (more on that later). Running a blog? Link to your latest posts and marquee essays. These actions appeal not only to visitors but also to search engines. It shows them what you consider important.
On the backend, you want your website’s title field to distill the entire site down to its name and relevant keywords, as that’s what appears in search results. So, carefully choose your site’s name and keywords to attract people and spiders. We’ll show you how to do that in just a bit.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the value of an attractive website. If your site looks like an early 2000s GeoCities page, people will leave, never return, and search for a more professional-looking competitor. That’s lost visitors, valuable external links, social media buzz, and revenue. Our recommended website builders provide you with the tools to quickly create an attractive, functional, and mobile-friendly website.
2. Focus on One Topic and Share Your Expertise
Search engines aim to direct people to the most authoritative and accurate results. Effective SEO means producing expert, focused, and original content; your website’s content should reflect this. Want to share your recipes with the world? Then food should be your site’s focus. Don’t blend pancake content with, say, metalworking. After all, it’s unlikely that your website is a massive multinational corporation or a large news organization that needs to cater to everyone. Specificity is key.
In 2023, Google introduced E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), a new set of criteria used in its Search Quality Guidelines to evaluate the quality of web content. This goes beyond a focused vision; Google now looks for website content that showcases firsthand experience and demonstrable expertise.
As an example of E-E-A-T, let’s continue that pancake analogy. Say you are a pancake chef with 10 years of experience at prestigious restaurants and hotels. This is a valuable foundation for your recipe blog, but you must clearly communicate your qualifications to potential visitors. Therefore, you should provide a rich bio that tells your story, including the names of restaurants you’ve worked at and what you learned from them. Showcasing your professional, original, and tested recipes further legitimizes your expertise, especially if you create video recipe content. Likewise, leverage your unique insider knowledge of the restaurant world, kitchen techniques, and the ingredients you use.
In short, lean into what you bring to the table. It’ll help your web presence.
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3. Leverage Short and Long Keywords
Historically, search engines have used keywords to identify the purpose of a user’s query, such as whether they are looking for information (informational), a specific website (navigational), or are ready to make a purchase (transactional). However, search engines now prioritize intent (what users hope to accomplish with their searches) over specific keywords.
You may have noticed recently that Google Search has gotten quite good at identifying natural, conversational queries. So, you should incorporate long-tail keywords (longer and more specific keyword phrases) alongside your short-tail keywords (words that define your main topic areas) to capture a more targeted audience.
You should optimize your keywords to match people’s search queries. If your website sells hand-knitted scarves, then “scarf” and “knitting” should be your keywords. As you probably guessed, those same keywords pull up other sites when someone performs a search. As a result, you should back up standard keywords with long-tail keywords, which are more specific searches.
Long-tail keywords require a more in-depth examination of your website’s content and architecture. These are phrases you want to use within your website’s text. Using our earlier example, a relevant, long-tail keyword would be “best hand-knitted Pokémon scarves.” That’s a particularly specific search that you can leverage to make your site stand out from the pack. Google has a tool called Keyword Planner that helps you find potent keywords. Don’t get too obscure; you don’t want to use keywords that few people key into search engines.
To properly use keywords, you take your website’s various elements—articles, images, videos, and podcasts—and summarize them in SEO-friendly terms. You’ll also want keywords in your site’s URL, header tags, meta descriptions, and alt attributes. To do this, simply access your website’s backend and enter the terms in the keyword fields if you’re using a website builder, or edit the code if you prefer to use a web hosting service.
4. Consistently Create Quality Content
Search engines prioritize websites with fresh, changing content. You don’t want to copy and paste content from another site. In fact, search engines will penalize your site for that. Focus on high-quality, original material.
Additionally, you need to update your website consistently, whether that involves new articles, artwork, or products. Visitors want a reason to return to your site or share your content to Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, or other social media networks. Search engine spiders are eager to check out fresh content, too.
Establishing off-site links is necessary for building valuable authority. Search engines look for links to your site from other trusted sites, which include those aforementioned social media networks or other highly trafficked websites. If your site provides focused, high-quality content that results in a link from The New York Times, for example, search engines will recognize your site as noteworthy and boost its ranking.
You can’t make this happen artificially, though. Know your stuff, put that knowledge front and center, present it clearly, and keep your website up to date. Assuming it’s information that people crave, your site will eventually gain SEO traction.
5. Create Attractive Page Titles and Headlines
A page title and headline are similar yet distinct ways to name the same website page. The former is a keyword-centric title designed to appease the search engine gods, while the latter is designed to attract people who click through to the page.
For example, “2025 Honda Civic Review” is a tight, SEO-friendly page title that only appears in search results. After all, page titles are written for search engines like Bing and Google. “10 Reasons Why the 2025 Civic Is Honda’s Best Car” is a clever, on-page headline that encourages shares and returning readers. That’s good SEO, too. Of course, pages and headlines can have the same titles. Experiment to see which method works best.
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As a precaution, ensure that your page title and headline accurately describe the content on the page. Don’t name a page “2025 Honda Civic Review” if the content doesn’t reflect that. That’s lying to the reader, which Google and other search engines frown upon. You’ll lose trust, authority, and SEO rank.
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6. Optimize Website Images
On the web, images are the way we color inside the lines; bright, clean images make a website inviting. Beyond that, they highlight the products or services you want to sell and break up large text blocks to keep readers engaged. Images are important, so take the time to optimize them.
The first step in optimizing your images for the web is to shrink them to a manageable size. You should keep each image under a megabyte in size, even smaller if your page is image-heavy. Resizing images to a maximum resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels and using the JPG or WEBP formats will help your pages load quickly. Search engines dislike slow-loading websites.
Ensure that your images have proper Alt attributes as well. Google, for example, can’t actually see the images that you upload to your site, but Alt attributes help the search giant categorize your photos. Alt attributes should provide a description of the image, but not be too lengthy. Aim for around 125 characters, maximum.
Content management systems (think WordPress) typically have Alt fields, so you can easily type in an image keyword. If you prefer to edit HTML, the alt attributes look like the text highlighted below:
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Get into the habit of adding this clarifying text to all of your website images.
7. Reduce Your Website’s Load Time
Website loading speed matters tremendously. WP-Rocket, a company that offers a WordPress plug-in to cache pages for faster load times, provides useful insight into exactly how. Its blog post states that 53% of mobile audiences leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. According to Google and Ipsos, conversions can fall by up to 20% for every second delay in mobile page loading. A visitor’s time is valuable, and they lack patience, so don’t encourage them to bounce with a slow-as-molasses website.
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You can analyze your site’s speed with Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom. These tools provide detailed information on improving your website’s load time, including replacing images or scripts that might take a while to load.
If you’re using WordPress, remove plug-ins that aren’t critical to your site. Also, check out the previously mentioned WP-Rocket for WordPress plug-in caching.
A meta description, also known as a snippet, is a brief paragraph included within each page’s HTML code. Meta descriptions appear in search engine results below page titles and provide a more detailed explanation of a page’s purpose. Here, you can write longer descriptions (approximately 150 characters!) that wouldn’t fit page titles. A good meta description can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and increase traffic to your site, even if it doesn’t directly influence your rank. Note: Do not throw all your keywords in there. That’s keyword stuffing, and search engines frown on that. Instead, write your meta description in simple language.
If you’re comfortable editing HTML, drop the meta description in each page’s “Head” section. Here’s an example:
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Free Web tutorials”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”HTML, CSS, JavaScript”>
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe”>
</head>
Note the meta tags for description and keywords. They are the primary areas where you should focus your SEO efforts.
Many content management systems allow you to edit the meta descriptions without needing to delve into the HTML. If you’re using WordPress, many different plug-ins, such as All in One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO, let you add meta descriptions without dealing with code.
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9. Address Your URLs
Yes, you must also apply SEO tactics to URLs. Search engines consider the keywords in your site’s URL just as much as those on a page.
Does your website use dynamic URLs, addresses that rely on numbered pages? If so, replace them with static URLs. Take this hypothetical blog post, for example: https://thebestsiteever.com/post/detail?id=27869. The number at the end of the URL represents the specific post, but it’s not particularly descriptive.
To fix that, log in to your site’s backend and enable static URLs, allowing you to add important keywords to your site’s address. With static URLs, that same post about smart cars will appear as https://thebestsiteever.com/post/smart-cars. Search engines love this more informative URL structure. Remember, brevity is key, so don’t make the URL a keyword-packed sentence. Lastly, use hyphens to break up the words in the URL, instead of cramming them all together.
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10. Master Internal Linking
Your site gains search engine authority when other sites link to it, especially if those external pages are considered trustworthy and popular. These are called backlinks, and the truth is that you don’t have much control over them. Put your best work forward and hope it comes your way.
On the other hand, you have full control over internal linking. You want to link related articles to drive visitors deeper into your site. Generally, you want to link to anchor text, the words visitors click to move from one page to another. For example, if your site has a post about spark plugs, and you want to link to it from a post about engine maintenance, use the hypothetical “replace your spark plugs” anchor text for additional SEO juice.
Internal links should be used naturally and sparingly. A paragraph that’s nothing but links isn’t very readable, so search engines will dismiss it. You should also ensure that your links are working properly. Broken links indicate that you’re neglecting proper site maintenance, which can lead to search engines penalizing your site. If you need help scanning your website for broken links, visit Dead Link Checker.
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These 10 SEO tips are just the tip of the iceberg in search engine optimization, but they serve as an excellent starting point. Ranking well in Bing, Google, and other search engines won’t happen overnight, so be patient as you apply these tips to your website. And return here often! We’ll update this page with additional useful SEO tips on a regular basis.
Mike Williams also contributed to this article.
About Our Expert
Gabriel Zamora
Senior Writer, Software
Experience
In 2014, I began my career at PCMag as a freelancer. That blossomed into a full-time position in 2021, and I now review email marketing apps, mobile operating systems, web hosting services, streaming music platforms, and video games as a senior writer. I’m a graduate of Hunter College, a hard-core gamer, and an Apple enthusiast.
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