SEO Blog Best Practices (2021)
SEO Blog Best Practices (2021)
Originally I wrote this as a guideline document just for Orbit customers, but I thought, “Hey, who doesn’t like a good checklist? I should share this with the world!” here we are.
Below are eight tips on SEO best practices for on-page optimization. Let’s get started …
1. Title Tags
Assuming you’ve already done your keyword research, this is one of the most important on-page SEO factors. If you haven’t already, here’s a step-by-step guide to keyword research.
The title tag tells search engines what the page is about and that the page on your website is relevant to that keyword or phrase. Title tags must be unique for each page. In search results, search engines will mark your keyword phrases if a user has searched for those terms. This increases visibility and click-through rate.
Suppose you are trying to score for “Chicago Web Design”, your title tag might look like this:
Chicago Web Design and Development | Orbit Media
Best practices:
- Your title tag should be written like this: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand name
- Use a dash between your keyword phrases and a pipe at the end for your brand name.
- Avoid duplicate title tags.
- Do not keep title tags longer than 55 characters, including spaces. If you’d like to learn more about the new title tag guidelines, check out this post from Dr. Pete.
Example of a title tag in a browser:
Example of a title tag in search engine results:
2. MetaMeta
descriptions descriptions, while not as important in search engine rankings, are extremely important to get users to click through from the search engine results page (SERP) to your website. Meta descriptions should use keywords wisely, but more importantly, they should include an engaging description that a user would like to click on.
As with title tags, the SERPs will highlight keywords that the user has searched for, increasing the likelihood that the user will click through to your website.
Best Practices:
- Write convincing meta descriptions
- 150 to 160 characters is the recommended length
- Avoid duplicate meta descriptions
- Do not use quotes or non-alpha characters (Google extracts them from the meta description)
Example meta descriptions in search engine results:
3 Content with targeted keyword phrases
Your content is the meat and potatoes of your website. With all Google Panda updates, it is extremely important that your content is unique and relevant. If you have multiple pages with the same content (or if you have your content on other people’s websites), you risk being penalized by Google and your ranking in search results will suffer.
We want to keep Google happy, so keep your content unique.
Best practices:
- content that is extremely relevant to that keyword phrase
- your keyword 4 times Use in your content (but do not abuse)
- Take links from other pages within your website that point back to this page (see internal links)see internal links)
- create unique content for each medium (press releases, blogs, guest blog posts, etc…). If you are sending a press release, do not copy and paste that press release on your website. If it is picked up in multiple publications, the search engines will see that you have duplicate content and penalize you for it.
4. Header tags and keyword phrases
A header tag, also called an H1 tag, is very similar to the subject line of your web page. You may only use your keyword phrase once in the H1 tag. This should be included on a page that you are trying to drive unique traffic to. You can also use H2 tags (second header) if there are multiple sections.
Practical:
- Use your keyword once in your H1 tag
- tips Use H1 tags on pages you are trying to drive unique traffic to (SEO page)
- Use H2 tags if there are multiple sections
Example of an H1 tag optimized for ‘ web design ‘:
5. Internal page with anchor text
linkInternal link refers to a link on a page that points to another page on the same website. Internal links are important because it helps to reinforce those keywords internally for those pages, it allows users (and search engine robots) to navigate the website, and it tells the search engines that the page is relevant to that keyword.
Best Practices:
- When linking from content to another page on the same site, select good anchor text (keywords) to use in the actual link and do this often. For example, “We offer a wide variety of web design services” instead of “Click here for our services.”
- In the example above, you would link ‘web design services’ to your web design services page instead of ‘click here’.
Example of using anchor text in your internal links:
the ecommerce text links to our ecommerce page, mobile links to our mobile page, etc. You get the picture!
6. ALT tags and image file names
An alt tag is essentially the name of an image. All images must use the correct alt tags. Alt tags aren’t just good for search engines; they are also good for accessibility. If someone uses a screen reader, they can hear what that image is.
If possible, try to include your keyword phrase in the name of your image, but don’t overdo it. Image filenames must also be SEO friendly. Image search is used a lot more often than thought, so traffic from there is valuable too.
practically
- all your images a name that describes what they are
- Give Tips: Use dashes between words instead of underscores (purple-hat.jpg instead of purple_hat.jpg)
- Do not use non-alpha characters in your images or file names (i.e. %, &, $, etc…)
7. Make the content easy to read
This is not a big factor in search engine rankings, but will help your users easily scan your content and find the keywords they are looking for. You must use bold and bullets to distinguish words in the text, and this further tells the engines what is important on the page. Don’t get wild or you’ll clutter up your page and annoy the user.
Practical Tips:
- Paragraphs should be approximately three sentences. Extremely long sentences will lose users’ attention.
- Use bullets and bold to break up large blocks of content. Users tend to scan content for keywords.
- Don’t use too many bullets and bold letters
Example of easy-to-read content:
8. Meta Keywords
Meta keywords used to be popular. These days, Google (or any other search engine for that matter) doesn’t value meta keywords, so skip this.
If I missed something or have something to add, I’d love to hear your comments below!
No comments: