I’ve been working in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) for more than two decades. Over that time, the landscape has shifted dramatically in terms of best practices, what is most effective, and what to avoid. Today, I follow a comprehensive, up-to-date SEO strategy tailored for 2025, which includes the following core components:
- Keyword Research: The objective here is to identify search phrases that are relevant to your website’s content, products, and services—terms that have solid monthly search volume but relatively low competition. It is also important to analyze the current top-ranking pages for these keywords to assess which ones you can realistically target and win rankings for.
- Meta Tags Optimization: For every page and blog post, you have to craft unique meta titles and descriptions. These behind-the-scenes elements help search engines understand the page content and are also what users see in search engine listings, which can influence click-through rates.
- Site Structure Overhaul: Many websites are built in ways that make it difficult for search engines to properly interpret the content. Others have scattered pages aimed at random keyword phrases, but with no cohesive structure. It is vital to reorganize the site architecture so it is logical, easily navigable, and allows search engines to effectively crawl and distribute link equity throughout the site. Poor organization causes the site to lose the link value coming from external links.
- Page Content Enhancement: There are now effective AI tools to optimize the on-page content. For each page, you can select 1–5 targeted keywords and assess the content’s SEO score (one tools rates the page from 1 to 100). The goal is to refine the page text content until it scores at least 70 or higher, increasing its chances of ranking well for the selected keyword phrases. This approach has delivered excellent results for our clients in terms of increasing search engine rankings.
- Blog Content Creation: Using the same AI tools, it is easy to produce high-quality blog posts that score 80–90+ for carefully chosen keywords. This helps build topical authority and drives consistent organic traffic to your site.
- Link Building Strategies: Backlinks remain a significant ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. It is necessary to implement a variety of techniques to secure high-quality inbound links to your site, helping to strengthen its authority and improve keyword rankings. One effective type of link building includes writing guest posts and getting these posted on high domain authority sites, that accept guest posts. This builds up high quality links to your website. Another type of link building is to write press releases about the company’s activities, then post these to online press release sites.
However, it is vital in all link building activities to have what are called “do-follow” links, which is where Google and other search engines assign link value or “link equity” to the link. Many press release sites (not all) have “no-follow” links, which have zero value in terms of link building. So it is important to submit releases and guest posts to sites that have do-follow links. And one can basically ignore the sites that have no-follow links. - Quarterly SEO Audits: Every three months, it is smart to run a full SEO audit to identify and correct technical issues. One of the most frequent problems we find is slow page load speed, often due to oversized images or video backgrounds.
These large images, large slide shows with many slides, or video backgrounds used to be very popular with designers. But in recent years, with Google and other search engines putting more emphasis on fast site loading speed, the site loading speed has to take precedence over certain design choices. In some cases, it might be necessary to switch hosting providers if server performance is a limiting factor. Some of the best known national hosting companies have agonizingly slow server response time. - Toxic Link Cleanup: Twice a year, analyze your backlink profile to identify and disavow harmful or “toxic” links from low-quality websites, which search engines may penalize.
SEO Actions to Avoid
- Getting links to your site from external sites that have “no-follow” links, are of no value, because the no-follow link is a signal to search engines that no link value should passed to the site that is linked to. This includes most social media links, many press release sites, and most social bookmarking sites.
- Posting articles on article directories used to be a great way to get links, but there are hardly any of these directories left, and search engines have devalued the links coming from these.
- Keyword stuffing is where you add a ton of keywords to a page, so it doesn’t read naturally. That should be avoided.
How to Measure SEO Success:
- Increased Leads and Revenue: The most important metric in measuring the success of an SEO campaign is an increase in leads and sales. And most SEO consultants don’t do this. They only talk about search engine rankings and traffic. In order to measure this you have to set up your website so that phone calls into the company can be tracked. Use a phone call tracking service like callrail.com. Then also make sure your site has plenty of response forms, not just on the contact page but preferably on every single product or service page.
Once the site is set up for complete tracking, work out the baseline number of monthly leads that are coming into the company before SEO work began. Also figure out the average dollar sale amount, and what percentage of leads coming in are closed. That will allow you to determine an average lead dollar value. Then as the monthly number of leads increases, that gives you an estimated increase in revenue. - Keyword Rankings: You should monitor where your website ranks for your target keywords across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. We track the number of keywords in the #1 spot, as well as those in the top 10, 20, and 50 positions. These numbers should be consistently going up.
- Website Traffic: Analyze site traffic trends to ensure growth. For seasonal businesses, we compare traffic year-over-year to determine long-term improvement.