Five ways to optimize SEO, SEO is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and more.
Off-page SEO, in comparison, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web, which is determined by what other websites are linking to you. The goal with off-page SEO is to attract inbound links (or “backlinks”) from relevant, authoritative websites.
While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an approach that is going by the wayside. In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress (or trick) the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings — with the goal being to achieve the coveted #1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.
Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites that are designed to game the system, and legitimate websites that are providing, relevant high-quality content. Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not the search engines.
- Page Titles – A page title is the text you see at the top of your browser window when viewing a web page. It’s also the title of a page that is presented in search engine results. Page titles can be found and edited in your site’s HTML. The text that is surrounded with the <Title> tag is your page’s title. Here are some guidelines for coming up with effective page titles:
- Write page titles that describe – and align with — a page’s content.
- Include relevant keywords (which should happen naturally if you follow the above tip).
- Place keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
- Make it fewer than 70 characters long. (Longer page titles will get cut off by web browsers and in search results. If you make the page title too long, it will also dilute the importance of the keywords mentioned.)
- Include your company name at the end of the page title, unless you are a big brand and people search for you through your brand name.
- Use unique page titles for each page of your website
Five ways to optimize SEO
- Meta Descriptions- A meta description is a short summary that you can write for a web page, which search engines display in search results. These descriptions don’t count toward search engine rankings, but they are still incredibly useful. When creating a description, the goal should be to write compelling copy that accurately describes what’s on a page so searchers will be enticed to click.
- Headings – If a piece of text appears larger or more prominent than the other text on a page, it’s probably part of a heading. You can verify this by checking the HTML code of your website and looking for text with an <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tag surrounding it. Both search engines and searchers tend to pay more attention to headings in comparison to regular paragraph text. For this reason, it is good to include keywords in your headings whenever possible. Keep in mind that tags give the text more weight as keywords than <h2> or <h3> tags.
3. Including too many headings dilutes the importance of keywords in other headings, so we recommend using the <h1> tag only once. If the page is text heavy (like a blog post) then feel free to throw in a few <h2> or <h3> tags as paragraph titles.
4. Images – Images on a web page can enhance user experience. When inserting images into your website, however, you should keep in mind the following:
• Don’t use images excessively. More pictures can slow down the loading of your page, thus negatively impacting both user experience and SEO
• Associate text with pictures. For whatever reason, the images on your site may fail to render. To ensure that visitors can still understand the information you’re presenting, use the “alt text” HTML attribute to provide relevant text descriptions of your images.
• Include keywords in your image file name. This will help you draw in relevant traffic from image searches. Separate the words in the file name with a dash (-).
5. URL Structure – The URL of a web page is its web address. For example, HubSpot’s http://blog.hubspot.com. URL structure refers to how the text in a URL is organized, as well as how the different URLs on your website interact with one another.
When structuring your website’s URLs, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:
- Separate keywords with dashes. For your internal page URLs, separate individual keywords with dashes (-). For example: http://hubspot.com/marketing-resources/ is a good URL that captures ‘marketing’ and ‘resources’ as keywords.
- Describe what’s on the page. Structure your URLs so that searchers can easily understand what information they’re going to find. For example, if you land on a company’s products page, seeing the URL http://company.com/products/product1 will be much more reassuring than something like http://company.com/1543?/eh?.
- Use 301 redirects when necessary. A 301 redirect forwards an old URL to a new one. Make sure you do this if you change the URL of a page on your site. (A common mistake is not applying a 301 redirect between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com. This can be quite a problem from an SEO standpoint, because search engines will give separate credit to both versions of your site.)
Five ways to optimize your SEO