13 SEO Best Practices To Improve Your Website’s Ranking

When the top organic result on a search engine results page (SERP) gets 27.6% of all user clicks, the takeaway is clear: You want to be at the top of those search results. The pages that rank in positions two and three also get a lot of engagement—21.5% and 14.2% of user clicks, respectively. Best of all: The traffic from those clicks is free.

But how exactly does a website rank highly, and can you improve your site’s performance? There’s an entire industry called search engine optimization (SEO) dedicated to these questions.

SEO is an ever-evolving topic, because search engines change their ranking algorithms over time and website owners must continually adjust their sites to rank highly on SERPs. Here, we’ll get into some SEO basics and best practices to help you start optimizing your own website and winning more organic traffic.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of adjusting a website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). As of March 2025, about 79% of search traffic comes from Google, so most SEO efforts are specifically geared toward improving Google search results. However, the SEO tactics that work on Google also apply to other search engines, like Bing.

Boosting search engine rankings requires a concerted SEO strategy. You must create a website that search algorithms deem authoritative, legitimate, and filled with high-quality content. From an SEO perspective, this means populating your site with relevant keywords that match your audience’s search queries, creating content that people want to read, generating backlinks from other sites, and enhancing website performance.

13 SEO best practices to improve your ranking

1. Make sure Google indexes your website
2. Integrate keywords into your site content
3. Publish helpful content
4. Write strategic title tags
5. Use keywords in your meta tags
6. Avoid keyword stuffing
7. Include image alt text
8. Optimize your site for mobile browsers
9. Seek out backlinks from authoritative sites
10. Entry 5
11. Fix broken links within your own site
12. Add new content regularly
13. Take it a step further than competitors

Here are some SEO fundamentals to help you set your website up for success:

1. Make sure Google indexes your website

Before you can rank, Google needs to know your site exists. Use Google Search Console to submit your XML sitemap and check which pages are being indexed and stored in Google’s database. This crucial first step helps Google include your site in organic results for relevant search terms.

Note that a lot of website-building platforms, including Shopify, include automated site indexing at no extra charge. Consult your builder’s suite of features to find out details about your own site.

2. Conduct keyword research

Keyword research is about figuring out which words and phrases users search for that are relevant to your website. Once you figure out what those keywords are, you can make strategic decisions about structuring and optimizing your website’s content.

To dig into monthly search volumes and build out your keyword strategy, leverage a dedicated software platform. Free SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you get started, while paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush offer features powered by artificial intelligence (AI) like the ability to automatically cluster related keywords together, which can help you scale your work with less effort. For a deeper understanding of your own site’s performance, integrate website analytics software like Google Analytics alongside these keyword research tools.

3. Integrate keywords into your site content

Once you have a list of keywords, you’ll want to incorporate them into your site content. Keywords fit particularly well on high-intent landing pages like ecommerce product listings. For instance, an ethically minded skin care business might decide it wants to rank for the target keyword phrase “cruelty-free moisturizer.” It then uses the phrase throughout the copy on the page that details that product. It might also incorporate related terms like “vegan” and a description of its product-testing practices. 

4. Publish helpful content

Search engines scan for relevancy and helpfulness when choosing which pages to rank. For a shot at the top positions, your content needs to directly answer your audience’s questions and provide real value. This principle applies to everything you publish—blog posts, product pages, and your homepage.

When trying to rank for a specific keyword, ask yourself: Does this page best fulfill the intent behind that particular search? Every search has an underlying intent—to learn something, to buy something, or to navigate to a specific page. Make sure you understand the intent you’re answering with each page, and aim to fulfill that intent better than competitor pages.

It’s also important to stay abreast of the guidance search engines publish about how they assess websites. Google’s helpful content guidelines, for example, emphasize that website content needs to go beyond obvious information and add unique value for searchers to rank highly. 

5. Write strategic title tags

A title tag is an HTML element used to demarcate a web page’s SEO title, or the title that should show up on a search engine results page. A title tag helps search engines understand what content appears on a web page. It doesn’t display on your web page itself and can be different from your on-page title. When you write title tags, keep them between 30 and 60 characters. Data shows that title tags in this range have a 33.3% higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to those with more or fewer characters. Include your primary keyword at the beginning of your title tag if it naturally fits there.

6. Use keywords in your meta tags

You can get a lot of mileage from the thoughtful use of relevant keywords in your meta tags, particularly the meta description. Meta descriptions are the text that displays under the title of a webpage on a search engine results page. It’s meant to give the searcher an idea of how that page will fulfill their search intent. Meta descriptions should be 160 characters or fewer to ensure they fully display on a SERP.

7. Avoid keyword stuffing

Keywords play an integral role in your on-page SEO, but going overboard on them won’t help you at all. Google’s algorithms now rely more on context and semantic understanding. Your site will rank higher if you write naturally for human readers, incorporating relevant keywords in a smooth, organic way.

Instead of repeating a specific term excessively, try using synonyms and related terminology to keep the language natural and less repetitive. 

8. Include image alt text

You can use image alt text to describe photos, illustrations, and graphics that appear on your website. The alt attribute provides a text equivalent for images, whether through a short phrase or a long description. Alt text doesn’t display on the page, but it will be available to those who use assistive technology such as screen readers. These tools will read aloud the alt text description of an image, so that if someone can’t see the image for themselves, they can understand its context on the page.

Alt text is crucial for both website accessibility and SEO.

9. Optimize your site for mobile browsers

It’s also important to address technical SEO, a broad category that covers a website’s functionality rather than its content. High on the list of technical SEO priorities is optimizing for mobile. This means making sure your site loads properly on smartphones and tablets.

Most website builders automatically format pages for mobile, and that includes Shopify. But if you’re not sure whether your site is optimized for mobile devices, try Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. This free tool will test multiple pages on your site for fast loading, responsive design, and clickable buttons.

10. Seek out backlinks from authoritative sites

Backlinks are inbound links from outside websites. Google uses these links to gauge whether a website is regarded as authoritative by others in its industry or community. If you want to win backlinks from others, start by creating high-quality, linkable assets such as informative articles or original research. Then contact the owners of other websites and suggest they use you as a resource. Perhaps you can even trade links to one another’s websites. The more high-quality backlinks you receive, the more search engines regard your site as valuable and trustworthy.

Backlinking is part of a broader category called off-page SEO. While on-page SEO focuses on elements purely within your control, like meta tags and keyword usage, off-page SEO covers the actions you take outside of your own website to improve its rankings in search engines.

11. Fix broken links within your own site

Search engines prioritize websites that are easily navigable, so it’s imperative to eliminate dead ends from your site. One way to do this is by ensuring that all your internal links lead to other pages within your site, and any outbound links lead to active, functional websites. You can use Google Search Console to check your site for broken links by navigating to the “Coverage” section and examining crawler errors listed there. 

12. Add new content regularly

Google favors websites that consistently publish fresh content. Plan a monthly content calendar and publish new blog posts, FAQs, or landing pages based on keyword trends, seasonal events, and customer questions. These new pages should draw from your ongoing keyword research and your evolving understanding of your audience’s needs.

13. Take it a step further than competitors

High up on the list of SEO basics: Keep your eye on the competition. SEO is a competitive endeavor, and you’re always trying to beat out other websites for top positions. That means you have to keep tabs on which sites currently rank highly in search results that you want to start winning and what strategies they’re using to win those keywords.

Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu to see what these competitors rank for, how they structure their content, and where they get backlinks. Then, outline what you can do to be better than them. For example, you might aim to write more detailed, unique, and authoritative content. Or, you might aim to include more multimedia content on your pages.