SEO Tactics To Use In 2023 [Tips For Beginners]

Optimizing your search engine ranking is key for boosting the visibility of a website. By getting to the front page of a search engine, more people will find and explore this page, ultimately resulting in increased traffic from potential customers.

Start your SEO efforts with basic steps for every website

It's essential to analyze your website's performance and traffic if you want to improve it! Fortunately, there are lots of amazing tools available nowadays that can help us measure its progress - two great ones being Google Search Console and Google Analytics that come at no cost! Additionally, setting them up is pretty straightforward, so let's get started!

Set up GSC and Bing Webmaster tools

The first step to getting started with SEO is to ensure that Google and Bing can find and crawl your website. The best way to do this is to set up Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console is a free platform that gives you insights into how your website is performing on Google Search. You can use it to track your website's progress, diagnose errors, and submit your sitemap. Bing Webmaster Tools is a similar platform from Microsoft that gives you insights into how your website performs on Bing. You can use it to track your website's progress, diagnose errors, and submit your sitemap.

Both platforms are essential for your websites if you want them to rank in search engines. These tools provide valuable data that can help you understand how search engines crawl and index your site. They also allow you to submit your sitemap so that search engines can find and crawl new pages on your site.

Set up Google Analytics

You'll need to set up Google Analytics to see how your website gains traffic from search engines. Google Analytics is a tool provided by Google that allows you to track your website's traffic and visitors.

Set up Google Analytics before you start implementing any SEO strategies so that you can track the results of your efforts. To set up Google Analytics, you'll need to create a Google account and follow the instructions on the Google Analytics website.

Once you've set up your account and linked it to your website, you can start tracking your website's traffic. Google Analytics will show you how many people are visiting your site, where they're coming from, what they're doing on your site, and more.

You can use this information to improve your SEO strategy and ensure that your efforts are giving you the desired results.

Install and configure an SEO plugin (WordPress)

If you're running a WordPress site, a few SEO plugins can help you with your on-page SEO. One of the most popular is Yoast SEO, a plugin that provides a simple interface for configuring your SEO settings on WordPress.

While it's not required, using an SEO plugin can help you immensely keep track of the optimization of every page and ensure you're covering all your bases. To install Yoast SEO, head to the plugin page and click "Add New." Search for "Yoast SEO" and install the plugin.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you'll be prompted to set up Yoast SEO. Follow the prompts and fill out as much information as possible. Once you've finished the setup wizard, yoast will provide you with some recommendations for improving your site's SEO.

Take some time to go through these recommendations and implement them as best as possible.

Keyword Research

To improve your on-page SEO, you first need to understand how to do keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the right keywords for your website. With the right keywords, you can improve your website's ranking in search engines and get more traffic.

Identify your competitors

To find your top keyword competitors:

Open a Google search and enter your target keyword.

Check organic and paid results on the first page to see which websites rank or advertise for this keyword. You can also use SEMrush to research your competitors' keywords.

In SEMrush, enter your competitor's URL in the search bar and click "Domain Overview."

Scroll down to the "Competitors" section to see a list of other companies that are targeting the same keywords as you.

Conduct a keyword gap analysis

A keyword gap analysis is a process of finding keyword opportunities that you are missing out on. To do a keyword gap analysis, start by creating a list of your competitor's keywords.

Then, use Google Search Console to see which of those keywords you are already ranking for. Finally, compare your list of keywords to your competitor's list.

By doing this, you can identify any gaps in your keyword coverage. Keyword gap analysis is an essential part of SEO.

By identifying keyword opportunities you are missing out on, you can ensure that you cover with your content as many topics as possible.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing your website for search engines so that they can crawl, index, and understand your content. Technical SEO includes optimizing your website's structure, code, and content for search engines and users.

Technical SEO can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it is essential for ranking in search engines.

Next, we will cover the basics of technical SEO and some tips on how to improve your website's technical SEO.

Leverage the "Inspect URL" feature in GSC

If you want to make sure your website is appearing in Google search results, you need to make sure Google can see and index your website.

One way to do this is by using the "Inspect URL" feature in Google Search Console (GSC). The "Inspect URL" feature allows you to check if your website is crawlable and indexable by Google.

It also allows you to see if there are any issues with your website that could prevent it from appearing in search results.

If there are any issues with your website, GSC will provide details on the issue and how to fix it.

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

One of Google's most important ranking factors in 2023 is whether your website is mobile-friendly. In other words, how easy is it for someone to use your website on a mobile device?

Your website must be fast to load and easy to use on mobile devices if you want to rank higher in search results. A responsive design is a good start, but the experience of your website on mobile devices is often in small details.

Do you use the correct size of font that is easily readable on mobile devices? Are your paragraphs short and easy to read on a small screen? Are the tap elements large enough so that they can be easily tapped even with a large finger?

Use images wisely: Images can help break up long blocks of text, but they should be used sparingly. Too many images can make your page slow to load, and that can frustrate visitors. 

Avoid pop-ups: Pop-ups can be annoying on a desktop computer, but they're even worse on a small mobile screen. If you must use them, make sure they're easy to close so visitors don't struggle with them.

Check your site's loading speed

One of Google's most important ranking factors is your site's loading speed. You can check your site's loading speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. Follow the recommendation to optimize your website's loading speed.

On-page and Content

Google's algorithm is constantly evolving, and so is on-page SEO. What worked a few years ago might not work today. This is why it's important to keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Next, we'll focus on how to do on-page SEO in 2023. 

Fix duplicate, missing, and truncated title tags

Title tags are still the most important element on your webpage, so they should be a priority when improving your website's content. Make sure that your title tags are of optimal length, relevant to the content, and contain important keywords.

They should be unique, not missing, and not truncated. Duplicate title tags are a common problem. If you have more than one page with the same title tag, you may be missing on opportunities to rank these pages on search engines.

This is an easy fix and should be done as soon as possible. A well-written title tag will improve your click-through rate and help you rank higher in search results. So take the time to fix any duplicate, missing, or truncated title tags on your site.

Find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions

Make sure your meta descriptions are unique, have optimal length, and are optimized for your target keywords. Duplicates are also common with meta descriptions – particularly if you have a large website with lots of pages.

To find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions, you can use a variety of tools. One option is to use a tool like Screaming Frog, which will crawl your website and highlight any pages with duplicate or missing meta descriptions.

Another option is to manually check each page of your website to see if the meta description is optimized and unique. This can be time-consuming, but it's needed if you want to be sure that all of your meta descriptions are ok.

Once you've found any duplicates or missing meta descriptions, you need to take action to fix them. For duplicates, the simplest solution is often just to rewrite the duplicate content and leave the original intact.

However, in some cases (such as if the duplicate content is ranking higher in search engines than the original), you may need to take further action.

For missing meta descriptions, the best course of action is of course, to write an optimized meta description for the page in question. As well as including your target keyword, make sure that your meta description is clear, concise, and compelling – this will help increase your click-through rate from SERPs.

Find and fix multiple H1 tags

One of the most common on-page SEO issues is having multiple H1 tags on a single page. The H1 tag is supposed to be a unique identifier for the title of your page, so having more than one can cause confusion for search engines (and users).

Fortunately, finding and fixing multiple H1 tags is relatively easy. You can use a similar process as with finding duplicate meta tags.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO (also known as off-site SEO) is the process of optimizing a website's promotion and visibility on the internet by building backlinks and improving the site's overall authority.

It's a long-term marketing strategy that focuses on building relationships and earning links from high-quality websites.

Analyze your competitor's link profile

When you're trying to improve your own website's SEO, it can be helpful to take a look at what your competitors are doing. By analyzing your competitor's link profile, you can get an idea of what techniques they are using to build links, as well as what kind of link opportunities you might be able to exploit for your own site.

To start, take a look at the top 10 results for your target keyword in Google. For each of these websites, do a search for "link:www.example.com" (without the quotes) in Google. This will give you a list of all the websites that have links to the website you're looking at.

From here, you can start to analyze the link profiles of these websites to look for common patterns. For example, you might notice that most of the websites have links from a small number of domains. This could be an indication that these domains are powerful in terms of SEO and could be worth targeting for your own website.

Another thing to look for is the anchor text used in the links pointing to these websites. If you see a lot of links with anchor text related to your target keyword, then this is another indication that these websites are ranking well for this keyword.

You can use this information to help you choose the right anchor text to use when building links to your own website.

Finally, take a look at the Domain Authority (https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker) of these websites. If you see that most of the websites have a high Domain Authority, then this is an indication that they have a lot of link juice pointing to them, which is likely helping them rank well in Google.

If you can get links from similar high-quality websites, then this could help boost your own website's SEO.

Target your competitors' broken backlinks

The first and most important step in any link building campaign is to target your competitor's broken backlinks. By targeting these links, you can not only improve your own link building efforts but also potentially steal some of your competitor's link juice.

To find your competitor's broken backlinks, you can use a variety of tools, like, for instance, Ahrefs or SEMrush. Once you have a list of potential targets, you will need to reach out to the webmasters and ask them to replace the broken link with a link to your site. This can be a time-consuming process, but it is well worth the effort.

Keep an eye on your goals and rely on proven steps for SEO success

Is it easy to get to rank in search engines in 2023? Well, with so much quality content around and good SEO optimization on many sites, you need to take it step by step and be patient with this task. But with focused effort and proven tactics in SEO optimization, you can start building your website on a solid base. In the long term, all your efforts will bring you rankings in search engine results pages, which you can further work on.