SEO: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024 and Beyond

Comprehensive Guide to SEO 2024 and Beyond

Introduction 

Your website’s on-page search engine optimization (aka: SEO) plays a fundamental role in its search engine rankings and should be a substantial part of your overall search engine optimization strategy.  

Since we first wrote the article “Why On-Page SEO is Important” in 2020, the landscape of SEO has continued to evolve rapidly. As we look back over not just the past four years, but the decades since SEO’s inception, it’s clear that while some fundamentals remain constant, the field has undergone significant changes. 

This article is relevant for any business, any size, and regardless of industry. 

In my work at a digital technology company, I often find myself thinking, or using my outside voice, saying “The only constant in SEO – is change.” This sentiment rings true now more than ever, as we navigate the complexities of modern search engine algorithms, user behaviors, and nonstop technological advancements.

Being that a website is the face of a business, and if constructed properly, can reach more interested buyers in a minute than any other method, it’s critical to get it right. Because a pretty website alone, won’t get a business discovered online, the craft of modifying a website to match the needs of a business has become a highly skilled profession. 

The conversation has to start somewhere, so let’s begin by addressing what most people think of when talking about a website, which is what’s visible. Let’s start with On-Page SEO. 

On-Page SEO encompasses all elements within a website that can be optimized to improve its ability to be discovered on search engines, and where it is positioned on those pages (i.e., it’s ranking – as in #3 on the first page of Google Search). On-Page elements include content quality (text and imagery), technical aspects, and user experience factors. In contrast, off-page SEO involves external factors like other websites linking to your content (link building), social media, business citations like Google Business Profiles, and other external signals. 

The craft of SEO is complex and focuses on user experience, content quality, and technical excellence. And as with any professional service you might hire for your business, SEO is not different in that you get what you pay for, and experience pays dividends. 

At Brave River, we bend the rules a bit in that when we optimize for on-page, we also address some of the technical SEO elements of a website to give us a solid foundation to build upon.

So, let’s dive in and see how On-Page SEO works for businesses, and touch on some ways you may be able to boost your online experience for searchers and search engines… 

Key On-Page SEO Elements 

How to Optimize Website Content

Quality content is the cornerstone of effective SEO. Search engines aim to provide users with valuable, relevant information that answers their questions and problems, and your content should reflect this. 

There’s a big difference in using your website to tell what your business does – and using it to provide meaningful information that answers questions and solve problems – like finding the product or service they are looking for, an organization to support, how to do something, or like this article – how to make more informed decisions. 

Content is most often thought of as text (words), but it also includes the structure of a website, imagery, on-page files like PDF’s, audio (podcast maybe) and video, as well as (of course) the words – every single character and word matters. 

Best Practices: 

      • Focus on your business Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – Google calls this your E-E-A-T – to position your company as a trusted thought leader in your industry and to your audience. 
      • Create comprehensive, in-depth content that addresses user search queries (a query is what they input, typed, or spoke into a search engine). 
      • Optimize for natural language and conversational queries – use AI-generated content sparingly at your own risk. By the very nature of AI, the output is an amalgamation of what is already published on the WWW – therefore it’s not unique. Be unique and write your own content. All search engines favor unique content! 
      • Use a mix of content types (text, images, videos, infographics) 
      • While length of content itself is not a ranking factor, unless you’re writing about something groundbreaking and never before written about – more content typically allows you to better position your article as a leadership piece. That said, aim for page content that’s in the 400–600 word range, with longer articles coming in at 1,500-2,000+ words. 

Historical Context:

The emphasis on content quality has intensified since Google’s Panda update in 2011. The addition of “Experience” to E-A-T in 2022 underscores the importance of first-hand expertise in content creation, and recent studies impress the importance of reinforcing clear expertise and experience in your content for online visibility and ranking. 

Title Tag Optimization for META Title & Description (aka, Page Titles & Descriptions)

These HTML elements play a crucial role in how your page appears in search results. 

 Best Practices: 

      • Keep titles unique and under 60 characters to avoid truncation, with each one providing a brief overview of what someone could expect when they click on your link. This is a strong ranking factor. 
      • Include primary keywords naturally and near the beginning of the title. 
      • Write unique, compelling meta descriptions of 150–160 characters that show how your page answers their search query, or teases with enough information for them to want to click for the full story. This is not a ranking element, but is a strong lead-generating and conversion one.  

How to Use Website Header Tags (H1 & H2-H6)

Header tags help organize content and provide context to search engines. The history of these elements is that they come from the print media days – and when you give thought to that, there certainly can be only one Headline (H1) for each article, and (if you remember) subheadings both defined and separated the body of text (representative on websites as H2-H6). 

Best Practices for Header Tag Management: 

      • Use a single H1 tag that aligns with the page title, but is not an exact match to it. It should be more descriptive of what the page is about. Google says there can be multiple Headlines, but stick with the journalistic rule that there can be only one story headline – as Bing does. 
      • Structure content logically with H2, H3, etc., to improve readability and SEO. 
      • Include relevant keywords in headers, prioritizing clarity, and user experience. 
      • Lastly, (please) do not use Headings as stylistic elements without consideration for how they are used – this is a common occurrence for web designers/developers who have a different understanding and expectations than say content developers and SEO specialists. 

Create Good URL Structure

Clean, descriptive URLs have been a best practice for years, with their importance increasing recently. 

Best Practices: 

      • Use short, descriptive URLs that include target keywords, but don’t overdo it here, as there’s an SEO algorithm penalty if it looks spammy (called Exact Match Domain penalty). 
      • Implement a logical site structure reflecting content hierarchy. 
      • Use hyphens to separate words in URLs, do not use underscores, do not use punctuation, and only use lowercase characters. 
      • Opt to use HTTPS secure URLs, it’s really the only way to go with today’s SEO compliance standards. 
      • If your website URLs end with trailing slashes (like this/), then make sure all your page URLs, page-to-page links, and backlinks do also. 

Historical Context: In the early 2000s, dynamic URLs with parameters were common. Today, search engines prefer clean, static-looking URLs, even if they’re dynamically generated. 

How to Optimize Website Images

As web experiences become more visual, proper image optimization is critical. Consider the aggregate image weight on any given page of a website, and don’t forget your logo and maybe social profile images at the top and bottom of your pages. While most articles elaborate on individual image weight goals (i.e., 150kb), it’s really the sum of all the image weights on a page that impacts a web page load speed.

Since the time (speed) a website loads is a ranking factor, image weight is something that you’re going to want to manage the best you can. 

Best Image Optimization Practices: 

      • Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names, and edit/optimize each file before uploading to your website! 
      • Optimize alt text (alternate attribute) for web-accessibility compliance and SEO.
        • Some visitors to your website may be relying on a page reader like Microsoft’s “Read Aloud” app for the Edge browser and Word documents, or maybe a separate screen reader device to create a word picture of what is on your web page. The percentage of the U.S. population that is affected by this is often misunderstood. So here are some physical impairments that might cause someone to use a screen reader while visiting your site – and where having the alternate attribute filled in would be helpful:
          • [stats based on the average U.S. population over 5 years of 332 million persons. The current population as of July 2024 is 346M]
      • Compress images to reduce file weight without significant quality loss. Max compression of many image tools is not always the best solution. Using these tools and plugins as a final editing measure will allow for higher-end images, which should be compressed before adding to the website. 
      • Implement lazy loading for images not immediately visible until you scroll to see more of the web page. This is default on most, but not all web platforms/CMS, so it needs to be mentioned. 
      • Use next-gen & advanced image formats like WebP, AVIF, JPEG-XL, and others for better compression and quality.
      • Optimize META at the property level before uploading to your website. 
      • Consider the aggregate weight of multiple image elements on a single page when factoring how heavy a page is.  

Optimize for Website Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Page speed has been a ranking factor since 2010, but its importance has grown significantly with the introduction of Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) in 2021. CWV is one way to measure the loading speed of any given page and an entire website average against best-in-class benchmarks and goals. CWV is a diagnostic tool, it is not in itself a ranking factor or ranking element, which you might not understand by reading all the articles about it. 

You’re probably going to need a few people with specialized skills to tackle CWV optimization. From your website host to the team who manages your website, as well as your SEO crew, they each have a part to play in improving site speed – so get them all talking and on the same page and using the same tools. Some agencies, like ours, have all these folks in-house and under one roof, which makes collaboration and the rate of change efficient and deliberate. 

Best Practices for CWV optimization: 

      • Optimize for Core Web Vitals, so all metrics are at least in the passing (orange) range. Each business should weigh the value of going all out to get every measure in the passing range (green) because for most sites, this level of optimization shows little return for the effort. 
      • Minimize server response times. 
      • Enable advanced browser caching. 
      • Minify & differ CSS, JavaScript, and HTML when possible. Be super careful here as this can break some web functionality and design elements. 
      • Aim for a total page size under 4 MB, with visual elements (image/video) ideally accounting for no more than half of that. 

Mobile-First Optimization

With Google’s shift to ranking websites by their mobile performance only – called mobile-first indexing, which was finalized in 2021, mobile optimization is crucial. This means that regardless of your type of business, or the device visitors typically use when engaging your website, Google is going to rank your website based on its performance on a mobile device. 

Best Mobile-First Practices: 

      • Ensure your site uses responsive design so it can be viewed on any device. 
        • Tip: If you have to pinch and zoom your website to view and navigate it, it is not responsive by today’s standards. 
      • Optimize for mobile page speed. 
      • Ensure content is similar between mobile and desktop versions, there is little reason to have different PC and Mobile content with a mobile-first website. Those days are long gone. 
      • Use mobile-friendly fonts, font sizing, button sizes, and padding around clickable elements. 
      • Google AMP is an old technology which came out years ago to help websites be more responsive on mobile devices, but this technology has serious limitations, and it is no longer advised by web developers – or by Google. All modern web platforms I can think of have enabled mobile responsive technologies over the years, making AMP obsolete. So don’t use it.  

Optimize Schema Markup

Schema markup has become increasingly important for on-page optimization. JSON-LD is the preferred programming language for this, which is a hybrid JavaScript programming language (programming code). This programming language was designed by the search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to identify and classify certain things on your website in a particular way so that they have a better understanding and context for each page and the site as a whole.

Before this, search engines learned about what you offer – product or service – by reading the nouns and verbs on your site (overly simplified). Schema bridges the gap and is a requirement for a modern website. 

Most websites have some of this automated, but it’s at the bare minimum and is what all of your competition, and you, will have unless you modify/optimize it. In other words, you’ll be no better than everyone else if you don’t take the time to manually create and enhance the Schema for your business. 

Best Practices: 

      • Implement relevant schema types (Organization, specific Business @types, Products, Services, etc.) 
      • Use schema to markup FAQs, how-to content, and other structured information.  
      • In recent months, Google devalued the importance of FAQ markup for its ability to be shown right on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), but the value is still high as it provides contextual relevance and relationship of a website and its pages.
      • Keep the schema up to date with the latest standards. Yes, like everything else in SEO, the standards change with frequency. Visit schema.org for more information.  

Optimize Internal Linking for SEO

A solid internal linking structure remains crucial for on-page SEO. Linking keywords to take visitors from one page of your website to another is one of the most important and underutilized SEO tactics you can do. 

Best Practices for Internal Page Linking: 

      • Implement a logical site structure. 
      • Use descriptive anchor text when linking internal pages. 
      • Link to important pages from your homepage and top-level or pillar pages.  

User Experience (UX) is Critical

How website visitors use and engage with your website, called User Experience (UX for short), has become a more direct ranking factor in recent years as website optimization has migrated away from optimizing for search engines, and focusing on the user first – search engines second. This is not to say SEO is dead, far from it, but create your website pages to be helpful and answer your audience questions first – then backfill with SEO to make sure you’re focused on addressing your reader’s needs.  

As long as website pages are offered as responses to what someone is searching for – it’s SEO that will get the best pages to show up. Viva SEO! 

Best UX Practices: 

      • Ensure intuitive navigation.
      • Optimize for Core Web Vitals.
      • Create a clear visual hierarchy. 
      • Be fully mobile responsive. 
      • Ensure accessibility for all users. 
      • Be people first…  

Video SEO

With the growing importance of video content, optimizing for video search is crucial, and it’s done well before you embed or upload the video to your website! 

Best Practices: 

      • Create and submit a video sitemap. 
      • Use schema markup for videos. 
      • Optimize video thumbnails. 
      • Create engaging titles and descriptions. 
      • Don’t forget to use #hashtags in your description! 
      • Optimize the META and Property elements of the video file before uploading to YouTube or similar, as well as before uploading to your website. 
      • Host your videos on YouTube and embed them on your site for maximum visibility, but do know that YouTube ranking comes from activity on youtube.com and is not influenced by views and engagement elsewhere – like social media or on your website. So, drive as much traffic to your YouTube channel as possible if video is foundational to your strategy.  

Local SEO

For any business marketing locally and regionally, local SEO is a craft unto its own, requiring different skill sets and website development than regular SEO. Make sure your team is expertly versed with the nuances of local optimization – being “SEO Friendly”, a term with no solid criteria or meaning, doesn’t cut it. 

Best Practices: 

      • Claim and fully optimize your Google Business Profile.
        • TIP: If it takes you less than 20 minutes to optimize your profile, it’s definitely not fully optimized, and you’ll likely be no better than your competition. 
      • Ensure NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency across the web. Iterations like LLC, PC, Co, and variations in Unit and Suite are inconsequential – so don’t sweat these details too much, search engines figured this out and these details don’t matter as much as they once did.
      • Encourage and manage customer reviews. 
      • Create custom local schema structured data markup. 
      • Create local content. 
      • If you operate a business out of your residence or do not have a physical location (or just don’t want to disclose it), then market yourself as a Service Area Business. This requires some advanced skills, and many businesses we chat with have no idea this is even possible. 

E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO has its own unique challenges, as well as idiosyncrasies for different platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce – the latter of which is owned by WordPress (did you know that?). 

Best Practices for E-commerce Optimization: 

      • Optimize product descriptions and attributes with unique and richly detailed content. 
      • Make sure your content and product attributes are compliant with Google Merchant Center’s minimum standards. 
      • Oh yeah and be sure to implement Google Merchant Center, which can place your products across the internet for free, as well as tie in with your PPC campaigns like Google Ads. 
      • Use schema markup for products. 
      • Implement faceted navigation carefully. 
      • Manage out-of-stock products appropriately, or they could become de-indexed (removed) from search engines. 
        • TIP: Seeing “Soft 404” errors in technical audits, could be caused by how you identify your product inventory. In-Stock, and Out-of-Stock are not the only options for inventory classification! 
      • Optimize for long-tail (unique), product-specific keywords. 
      • Optimize for the specific e-commerce platform the website is on. 

Google Analytics

Okay, having analytics of any kind is not going to get your content indexed, perform better, generate more sales or leads, or have visibility on search engines or on other platforms – but without it, you’ll never know any of these things! So, as Nike says, Just Do It. And as I love to say, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  

Emerging Trends and Future Outlook for Website SEO 

Let’s take a look at what’s trending right now and rub the genie lantern to see what is likely to play a role in the near-term for your website. 

1. AI and Machine Learning: With leading edge technologies like GPT and Google’s Gemini, AI is playing an increasingly key role in both search algorithms and content creation. Businesses must learn to work alongside AI tools while maintaining the human touch that brings true value to content. 

      • We all know that AI can make stuff up and create its own facts (this is called hallucinating) – so don’t forget to fact-check everything out of AI.  
      • One of the most dangerous and reputation destroying aspects of using AI content is not the hallucinations though, those can be fact checked – but rather the missing information that, unless you’re an expert in the topic you are creating with AI, will never know of its omission, but your educated audience will, and your reputation is shattered in an instant. So, when copywriting, consider not only the accuracy of content, but also the probability of any meaningful omission. 
      • Use AI wisely. Craft an AI policy for your company or have one written for you – your SEO or content development team should be able to provide this for you (we do it all the time). 
      • Consider embracing the AI^2 (AI Squared) approach that we maintain, which is: Artificial Intelligence (+) Actual Intelligence (=) AI Intelligent Content.  

2. Voice Search Optimization: As voice enabled appliances and wearables have become mainstream, optimizing for natural language queries is becoming increasingly important. 

3. Visual Search: With advancements in image recognition technology, optimizing images and visual content for search, like Google Lens, will become more complex and important for your business. 

      • DYK, the image file format you use, can help or hurt your ability for Visual Search? Yup, some file types don’t render lines or text well when compressed, or enlarged, which will ding your online visibility.  
      • DYK-2, Google Image search, is the second most-used search engine in the world?  

4. Passage Ranking: Google’s ability to rank specific passages (full or partial content blocks) of a page emphasizes the need for well-structured, comprehensive content including headings, and content features like bullet points and numbered sequences where appropriate. 

5. E-E-A-T and Page Quality: Google’s focus on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is intensifying, making it more important than ever to demonstrate credibility and authority in your content. So, when creating content, be honest when reviewing it and ask yourself – is this the best content in my industry and within my region for providing value to a website visitor? Remember, longer content is not a guarantee of success, but it does provide for more creative writing. 

6. Core Web Vitals: As user experience signals become more important, optimizing for Core Web Vitals and other UX factors will be crucial for future success. 

7. Ethical SEO Practices: With the rise of AI in content creation, maintaining ethical SEO practices is more important than ever. Focus on creating valuable, original content and use AI tools responsibly to boost the efficiency of your work – not the quantity of it. 

How Ongoing SEO is Like Caring for a Flower Garden

SEO as an Ongoing Process 

One of the most crucial lessons from decades of SEO practice is that it’s not a one-time task, but an ongoing process. As 25+ year SEO veteran Chris Sheehy often reminds his team, “SEO is like caring for a prized garden.” 

The need for continuous optimization is driven by several factors: 

  • Frequent algorithm updates 
  • Changing user behaviors 
  • Evolving technology 
  • Competitive pressures 
  • The constant need for fresh, relevant content. 

By staying informed about the latest trends, consistently applying best practices, and always focusing on providing value to users, businesses can maintain and improve their search visibility in an ever-evolving digital landscape. 

The Wrapper 

As we look back on how far SEO has advanced – from the days of keyword stuffing and link farms to today’s sophisticated, user-centric and highly technical approach – we can only imagine how it will continue to evolve. One thing is certain: the fundamental goal of connecting users with the most relevant, high-quality content will remain at the heart of SEO for years to come. 

In our experience, the majority of websites today are not well optimized. Implementing these tips and staying on top of the latest developments in SEO will help you stand out from the competition, increase market share, and bring in new leads and revenue. Just remember, SEO is an ever-evolving field, so it’s crucial to stay updated with the latest trends and algorithm changes that matter most to your business. 

 

About the Author: Chris Sheehy is the Digital Services Director at Brave River Solutions, a Rhode Island-based technology agency providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), digital marketing, and digital advertising (PPC). Chris has been working in the industry since 1997 and has received much acclaim, publishing’s, and recognition in his career.

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