In the SEO world, everyone wants to rank as high as possible. Here are some best practices to follow so that you can get your content ranking on page one.
Page one, above the fold is always the end-goal when it comes to ranking your content, which means there is probably some serious competition around you. If you want to rise to or even near the top of the list for search engines like Google and Bing, you have to step up your game.
While there are hundreds of tips out there, this infographic from SEO Sherpa gives you a play by play on how to perfectly optimize your SEO content from start to finish.
This is by far one of the most robust and impactful infographics we’ve come across to date so we’re excited to share this one with our readers, as well as go a little more in-depth with the why behind some of their suggestions.
Without further ado…
Generally, shorter URLs are better than longer ones, and they also look cleaner. The good news is you don’t have to take this to the extreme and try to make the URL slug the shortest it can be. The easiest way to do this is to remove stop words. Stop words are words such as; the, is, with, and a.
Removing them shortens your URL slug, but the consideration of stop words doesn’t merely stop there. The key to stop words is knowing when you can and when you shouldn’t remove them. Often times this comes down to searcher’s intent or identifying which key phrase has a higher search volume.
For example, you may want to write an article about how you can help dogs be more comfortable while you drive. Your URL could be something such as driving-with-dogs. If you were to remove the stop words that would leave us with driving-dogs. While that may be a more entertaining topic, it’s not an accurate depiction of what people will find when they click your link.
If you compare the search listings for the two, you’ll find that there are two very different types of content ranking for those keywords. Driving-with-dogs populates helpful tips for pet owners, while driving-dogs has adorable and hilarious images of pups behind the wheel.
If your post is accidentally ranking for the wrong keyword optimization, it may experience a high bounce rate which will negatively affect your site performance overall, and eventually, that content will lose it’s standing within search engines.
Another reason one might include stop words in a URL slug is because of search volume. Search volume is the number of times a keyword or phrase is plugged into a search engine on a monthly basis. While driving-dogs has 2,400 people searching for that term in a month, driving-with-dogs-in-car has a search volume of 5,400.
In this case, making the URL slug a pinch longer by keeping a couple of stop words and adding an extra keyword massively impacted the number of searchers that would potentially find that content. Bottom line, always do your keyword research to identify what combination of keywords will perform best for your content.
If you have ever wondered which is better to use in your URL, the short answer, according to Google, is hyphens without a doubt. The reason behind this is hyphens, also called dashes, make it easier for Google’s web crawler to assess the information on your website and give accurate search results.
Hyphens are also the digital representation of space in a URL so it shows that the keywords in your URL slug are all separate.
Example URL with hyphens: examplesite.com/why-use-hyphens-over-dashes/
Search engines read as: “why use hyphens over dashes”
Meanwhile, underscores represent the lack of space, gluing all of your keywords together in a jumble making it more difficult to understand the meaning of your URL and purpose of the page.
Example URL with hyphens: /why_use_hyphens_over_dashes/
Search engines read as: “whyusehyphensoverdashes”
See the difference?
How you write matters a lot in search engine optimization. How user-friendly your content is will always be among the most important things you can focus on.
A straightforward way to do this is to steer clear those giant blocks of text and try for those smaller, easier to read chunks of text. At first glance, those large blocks can be intimidating or seem just plain boring.
Adding in graphics or videos can also be a great way of spacing things out. Separating them can be an excellent way of making your page seem friendlier and more enticing. Also using bullet points or numbered lists can help break up your content into more digestible bites for the population at large as well.
Internal links are the links you place on a page that will direct the users to another page within your own website.
These allow people to navigate through your site, but also allow search engines to do the same and establishes a kind of hierarchy throughout your site and allowing them to establish which pages are related to each other. This also allows them to determine which content is most important.
By allowing your reader or shopper to easily navigate through your site with carefully placed internal links, buttons, and calls to action you can garner better ranks, more time on site, and people finding what they want.
Yes, alt-text is important for two reasons. The first is accessibility. It’s original and primary use is to describe what the image is in a word format should a user be unable to view the image itself for any number of reasons.
This could be because they are visually impaired, they cannot visually identify it, the image link is broken or the image has been removed from its source location, or the image is not loading correctly because of their web settings.
The second reason is image SEO. While search engine image recognition has been greatly improved, it’s not a sure thing every time. Here is where the alt text comes in.
The search engine may recognize it as one thing when it is actually about something completely different. You can tell the search engine exactly what it is to clarify any confusion and help people search, find, and view it with ease.
Additionally, when shoppers are searching for your product, they can discover it visually by conducting a Google image search. With the right description of your product within your alt-text, you can help your shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for even if they don’t know what the name of the product is.
When search optimization first began, search engines would glean insight into a blog post or landing page solely based on the page’s keywords as detailed in the metadata. As search engines have advanced, they have started using LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which means keywords that are related in concept to one another.
For example, you may want to do a blog post about the best resorts in Hawaii. Your keywords would probably be Hawaii and resorts, while your LSI keywords might be Honolulu, Maui, or hotels. There are several free tools online to help you generate LSI keywords so that your content can be as robust as possible.
Using this technique will help you be on your way to creating better content and gaining more traffic.
Headers, sub-headers, and the use of H tags to properly identify them are extremely important for SEO and the user experience. H tags are not only a useful way to break apart written word on your blog post or landing page, but they also add structure to your content by briefly explaining what each subsection pertains to.
Content with a well-organized hierarchy of subheadings makes it easy for users to identify the sections of your work that are most helpful to them and keep the content, as a whole, on track.
While you can create headings and subheadings visually by changing font sizes, weights, and colors, it’s imperative that you also tag them correctly using h-tags. These allow search engines to discern what are the main topics within your content.
H tags range from H1 – H6 and range from most important to least. You should only ever have one H1 tag and that should be the SEO title for your post or landing page. Often times H5 and H6 are a bit too small so content marketers will mostly play with H2 – H4 when crafting subheadings for their content.
Subheadings are an excellent place to include your LSI keywords as well, so that search engines understand that these synonymous keywords and key phrases are highly important as well.
The step by step process detailed out in this infographic makes on-page SEO easier than ever. No matter how new you are to the SEO scene, by following these best practices your content will surely be on its way to ranking on page one.
Using these techniques will allow your site and content to reach more people and gain better rankings. Not to mention it will have you looking like an SEO pro!
Don’t have the time to tackle this on your own? Media Caffeine has your back! Our team of dedicated SEO specialists has the energy and expertise to write and build perfectly optimized content for your website that will drive traffic to your business. Contact us for a complimentary SEO analysis today.
