Often, we get carried away when including features on our website. We use big JavaScript libraries. We use lots of images (there is an SEO way of using images) instead of text. We use animations without their textual counterparts.

Do you know that when the Google crawler begins to crawl your website it should be able to access your main content within 1-2 sections? If you have lots of code, lots of HTML tricks, lots of JavaScript-supported animations, it takes longer for the crawler to reach the main content of your web page, and it may leave midway.

Therefore, keep your source code as simple and optimised as possible. If you can do without lots of JavaScript, then avoid it.

Whenever you use images, always use the ALT attribute to fill in textual information describing what the image shows.

For example, if you have an image of a tiger running, you should have ALT=”this image shows a tiger running”.

What about meta tags?

Different SEO experts have different views on whether meta attacks till matter or not. But extra information never hurts. As long as meta tags don’t adversely affect your SEO, use as many as you want.

The title tag, of course, is one of the most important tags in your source code so you can never omit that.

In fact, it is highly recommended that you try to use your main keywords or search phrases within your title tag. The title tag of your web page appears in the search results as hypertext. Repeated research has shown that people tend to click those links more where they see the keywords or search terms they have just used.

Description is important. Description appears in the search results beneath your hyperlink and people who are drawn to your description are also drawn to your website. So, make your description as convincing and informative as possible.

But of course, this tutorial is not about the importance of meta tags, it is about some basic, beginners knowledge of SEO. Anyway, the biggest takeaway of this section should be, keep your source code as clean as possible and only keep those functions on your website and individual web pages that are extremely important; ditch the rest.

These actions are carried out by humans, and even if you are genius enough to trick AI into believing that you’ve got relevant information, you cannot do the same with your human visitors.

Suppose one of your links ranks well for a keyword. People can easily find it and they click it and go to your link.

But they leave the link within a few seconds, come back to Google and carry out the same search, and this time they click the link that appears below your link.

If they spend more time in that link, Google thinks that that link is more useful than your link: in search results Google gives your position to that link and that link’s position to your link, and this goes on, until your link has moved so down that it can never be found.

Make people stay longer on your link by providing relevant information.

You must also get endorsement from other online publishers.

Why would people link to your content, to one of your URLs?

Google thinks that people link to you because your content adds value to their websites. I wouldn’t just randomly link to a website. I would only link if I think that there is useful content on that website and my own visitors will benefit if they checkout that website link.

At least this is what Google thinks.

This is called “backlinking”: your website needs quality backlinks to improve its SEO.

There are professional services that can get you quality backlinks although such an exercise is frowned upon by Google. Howsoever you get them, they are important for your SEO.