Making your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts successful can be grueling, especially if you need to learn the fundamentals. To ensure high Google rankings, you must use proven work processes to boost productivity and efficiency.  Here’s when you need the best practices SEO companies in the Philippines are regularly doing. What are SEO best practices? SEO best practices are tactics, techniques, and strategies to optimize your website’s content and structure. Doing these allows you to focus on the essential activities impacting its search engine rankings and visibility.  While there are many methods to boost your website traffic and visibility, we have picked six that you can use immediately. You can use these simple and practical hacks even though you’re not an SEO expert, UX designer, or programmer: Colleagues discussing charts | Photo from Freepik SEO best practices for non-professionals 1. Use the correct content type that matches your audience’s search intent Knowing your readers’ user intent (what they want when searching for the keyword) and producing content that will fulfill it is crucial for SEO success. Make sure your blog post or content will serve as the right match for your target audience’s search intent.  There are four types of search intent: Informational – when someone wants information or wants to learn about various things  Navigational – when a person wants to reach a particular page or website  Commercial – when a searcher wants to know more about what they want to purchase Transactional – when someone has made up their mind on completing an action or buying something  One way of determining the correct content type for your target keyword is by searching on Google and finding out which types of content your audience wants to consume when searching for a specific motive. Say you are a shoe retailer. If you aim to inform your target buyers about the different kinds of shoes, producing blog posts or videos would be your best option. But if you want to sell your products, product ads, landing pages, or e-commerce pages are the best content type to create. A man typing on a keyboard | Photo from Freepik 2. Create valuable and helpful content Useful content serves your target audience by giving them what they need from you. To do this, you should research trending topics your market has already sought. From here, you can develop content that gives them new angles, insights, and data coming exclusively from you.  They can come in the form of company documentation, anecdotes, images, and videos supporting your fresh insights’ credibility and truthfulness. Google has just released its helpful content update that stresses producing content that helps your target audience by providing them with your personal perspective. Besides E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), the search giant included another E (experience) to make your blog post, video, or other content type stand out.   Let’s go back to our shoe retailer example. You can ask permission from your satisfied customers to post their images or videos while using the shoes you bought from them on your blog posts with their testimonials. Aside from making your position more relatable to your customers, it can also improve your post’s credibility and brand. 3. Make your URLs user-friendly Search engines want people to navigate the websites shown on browsers easily. Coming up with a good URL structure is one way of doing this. If a search engine can quickly locate a web page, it will be a factor in “rewarding” you with a higher ranking. Here are ways to make the URLs of your page visible: Use short and readable URLs – the more readable your URLs are for humans, the better their SEO. Include the target keyword, which will give search engines an idea about what your web pages are about just by the URL alone. Include categories and subcategories for easy navigation of your web pages. 4. Enhance the page user experience Google likes web pages that provide a great user experience, especially in design. Ideally, your company might need a qualified UX or SEO consultant to make your blog post or landing page engaging and pleasing. But you can apply some UX best practices to improve the reading time of your readers by using these: Use headers and subheadings  When publishing your content, format it using the proper headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3, etc.)  Use images, infographics, and videos Visually appealing sites would make your readers glued to your content much longer.  Maximize use of white space One way to enhance the readability of text and images is by maximizing white or blank space. The right amount of spacing between the parts of the page would make each of them more recognizable.  A woman accessing a photo blogging website | Photo from Freepik 5. Optimize your images  Images are relevant in making your landing page or blog posts user-friendly. But posting them without optimizing can slow down your page loading time, which is a red flag for search engines.  So the next time you load your image, make sure to: Use the ideal image file format. Look for JPEG and PNG files with the best image compression. You can also use a WEBP file which has superior image compression. The lower the image file size, the faster the loading time of your page. Compress your images You can further reduce your JPEG and PNG image compression using online tools. Compressnow and TinyPNG are some of them. If you use WordPress or other CMS, you can install plugins such as ShortPixel (WordPress) or OptiPic (Drupal) to reduce image file size without sacrificing quality.  Provide alt-text to images. Accessibility is crucial not only for people with disabilities but also for different devices where web pages are accessed. Moreover, so far, Google can only identify what the images are about by crawling the alt-text. Ensure that the caption you provide complies with Google guidelines to avoid issues. 6. Use internal links  For Google, internal links – or linking words