SEO started in an awkward way to outsmart the first-generation search algorithms, but all such shortcuts and quick fixes have now become obsolete. So, this post is not about smart SEO tips, but the very fundamental things which you need to practice (which many tend to forget easily) to optimize your website. 
There is no need for you to have a Masters in Computer Science to do it. It is easy to get caught up with the most upcoming trends in SEO like mobile-first approach, featured snippet optimization, usage of structured data, but never take your eye off the ball. Our list here is about some of the most important, but basic SEO strategies anyone can learn and apply to get their site rank better.
1. Be empathetic to your users
In fact, UX (user experience) is not a primary SEO strategy, but it acts as an essential element of core SEO. As the number one objective of any search engine now is to serve their users with the best possible answers to their queries, all the ranking factors too are fine-tuned for top-in-class user experience.
So, if you don’t invest your effort and money in user experience, you may easily fall back in the race for SEO. For example, if your web pages take too much time to load if not answering correctly to the questions, the users and the search engine crawlers may instantly leave your page, which will instantly reflect in your SEO value. So, always have a user-first approach to see things by being in the users’ shoes and create a functional site. The questions you need to answer for this are:
- Page speed – Is your site loading quick enough?
- Content – Does your site offer quick answers to the most relevant consumer questions?
- Layout – Is it easy for the users to navigate on your page and find something relevant for them?
- Site structure – Will the user s get an idea about what to do next and where to go when on your website?
All these elements needed to be ensured as the primary best practices for SEO and add value to your website.
2. Optimizing Instagram accounts for SEO
Instagram is now one of the top-grossing visual social media platforms for digital marketers. However, anybody involved in multi-channel digital marketing will surely understand the need to extend their online profile beyond a single channel. In fact, it is a bit difficult to get the Instagram accounts to index in the search results, but your efforts can surely get paid in many ways.
The primary reason why Instagram accounts aren’t getting indexed by search engines is that most of the users on this platform are not interested in promoting and Instagram blocks the search engines from indexing the images. Instagram profiles can be indexed, but not the images. This is the hurdle for the marketers who are trying to get some additional traffic to the Instagram account from search results.
However, here let’s see some expert smart tips to get your Instagram account indexed for search engines.
Have a profile fine-tuned to public
By default, Instagram profiles are set to public, which means that anyone can access your profile and view its content. To ensure that you get Instagram views freely, it is necessary to ensure that your privacy setting is unaltered. To check this, you can access the profile and then go to the “Settings” and access “Account Privacy” to ensure that the “Private Account” field is set to “off” by default.
Set the social profile schema
You can use the schema.org markup as allowed by Google to inform the search engine that which social media profiles you keep. If a brand succeeds to get a card in Knowledge Graph, then your profile may shop up. Have a good look at Google’s documentation on setting up a social profile schema and make sure that your Instagram account gets included in it.
Make your bio keyword rich.
While setting up your bio, make sure that you keep the text well optimized for search engines. In fact, you have a limitation of 150 characters to create an Instagram bio, so it needs to be planned well. You can use hashtag keywords and the most appropriate business keywords, and bio is one such place where you can put links to your website too.
Even though Instagram is not a friendly platform for SEO by default, but taking some handy steps as above will aid your profile and posts come up in the search engine results on relevant searches.
3. Not just links, but try to build solid relationships
With its latest algorithmic changes, Google and other leading search engines now weigh the quality of links heavily as it is the cleanest possible way for measuring whether a page content is relevant to others. At olden times, link building was so easy through even automation. However, Google crawlers are much smarter now and can easily find out the relevance and authority of the links. You cannot fool Google with spam my links yet again.
It is not only time consuming to get quality links to your web pages, but also requires overwhelming efforts to succeed. So, now you have to go offline to explore more effective ways for link building by establishing genuine connections than ‘just for the same of’ type online relationships. You may try to join some reputed organization which may list you as a member to engage in some effective co-marketing campaigns with other allied businesses. From this consortium, you may find more quality links and relationships working out.
This, however, is not an overnight achievement to be made but requires constant effort and quality time spent on it. However, you can surely win the race with this slow and steady approach.
What we discussed here are some of the fundamental practices which can take you closer to your SEO goals. Ultimately, all the leading search engines are trying to mimic the user’s intent, and so your objective also should be set to best meet the user intent on your web pages.