SEO is all about following technical guidelines and best practices. If you want to succeed in your online marketing efforts, SEO should be a big part of your plan. SEO doesn’t have to be confusing. Once you know a few best practices for various elements of SEO, your digital marketing game will be sure to improve.
We are going to look at SEO best practices for the following On-Page elements.
- Title tags
- Description Tags
- Meta Keywords
- Site Speed
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Images
- Header or Heading Tags
- WWW Resolve
- Duplicate Content
- Broken Links
- And Mobile and Cross Screen Compatibility
Title Tags
Title tags tell the user and Google what the page is all about. They should give enough information on what to expect when visiting the page or why to visit the page, but also need to be concise. Google will only show the first 50-60 characters so make sure to put the most important information first. It’s considered best practice to limit your titles to under 70 characters. Titles should always be unique for every page and always on topic.
Description Tags
Your description should be an accurate description of the page’s contents and every page should have a unique description. Don’t spam keywords into your description. It’s a good idea to not only have a description of the page, but also a call to action as to why the user should click your link. The more words, the better, but your description should be between 70-160 characters in length. Google will truncate your description if it is over 160 characters. However, Meta descriptions are not ranking factors, but are used as a preview of your content to users. Since they aren’t used for ranking, you might think they are unimportant, but a well written description can help increase the number of users that click a link to your site.
Meta Keywords
These have not been used by Google since 2009 and some SEO experts suggest that having meta keywords for your site can actually harm you, so it’s considered best practice to avoid using them.
Site Speed
A faster website always means a happier visitor. There are far too many techniques involved in properly speeding up a website, that I can’t go into too much detail here.
URLS
Having Search Engine Friendly URLs is another SEO best practice. A lot of CMS’s may not offer Friendly URLs out of the box and need plugins to make them more friendly. An example of friendly URLS are mydomain.com/this-is-the-article-title-topic-or-subject/ instead of some CMS’s that use dynamic links like mydomain.com/?article?ID=jrmanhfioja89831.php. The difference being that they are easier for search engines to index and for visitors to read. SEF URLs have more SEO juice and just plain look better.
You should always use a dash, hyphen or underscore instead of a space for friendly URLs. Google understands a dash, hyphen or underscore as a word separator. It used to be that underscores were not treated the same way as a hyphen, but that has since changed. As well spaces, when translated into a URL turn into the charecters “%20” instead of a space when translated by computers, creating ugly and non Search Engine Friendly URLS.
Images and Other Media
It’s considered best practices in regards to SEO to compress your pictures. Compression will help speed your site up and save you bandwidth. Ewww Image Optimizer is a great plugin for WordPress that will compress your photos automatically for you.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but not with Google. Google can’t recognize what the pictures are of, so you need to tell them. Get in the practice of using alt text and descriptions for your images. Alt text is a short title about what the picture is and the description is a longer, more informative explanation of what the photo is about. Filling in both of these will help the SEO of the page they are contained on, but will also help with your ranking in Google Image Search, which could potentially bring in visitors from another search stream.
Header Tags
Some people use H1, H2 and other header tags to promote keywords, however this is not considered best practice. Header tags should be used in the following way. Use only one H1 tag for site titles. H2 tags should be reserved for article titles and menu titles on your homepage. In articles H2-H5 tags should be used for headings when breaking up thoughts or ideas to help users surf through information. The lower the H number, the more important the information, but that doesn’t mean make everything an H1 tag!
WWW Resolve
When setting up a new site you should decide if the url is www.mydomain.com or simplify just mydomain.com. There is no SEO benefit from choosing either, but the non www looks better in my opinion. The benefit comes with not having duplicate content since Google see’s www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com as two completely different URLs. So choose one. You can always change it down the road with 301 redirects.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is an SEO killer. Google really frowns upon it in their best practices guidelines. There are 2 ways to get duplicate content. One is through having multiple pages that are the same on your website due to not having a WWW resolve or by accidentally having multiple URLs with the same information. The other way is through plagiarizing from other websites and copying their content. Even if you don’t copy it word for word and slightly rewrite the information, it could still be duplicate content if Google recognizes that most of the content comes from somewhere else. To check if your site contains any duplicate content use this tool. Remember, the best content is unqiue and well written with quality in mind.
Broken Links
You might have typed in the url to a link wrong or the site you linked to no longer exists, either way seo best practices dictates that your site be clean of broken links. You can check for broken links on your site with Global Sitemap Generator.
Mobile and Cross Screen Compatibility
Your site should look great no matter what display your user has. There are plenty of online tools to check cross screen compatibility or you can check using your smartphone, tablet and by changing the resolution of your display to make sure your site looks great no matter what. If your site doesn’t look great, it’s because you need a responsive design.
Set Up For Success
Of course there are plenty of more SEO best practices for you to keep in mind, but these are some of the major ones. These guidelines will help you in your efforts to make your site more SEO friendly and drive more traffic to your website.
