In 2015, the world of search is a completely different game than even a couple of years ago. Remember when the Meta keyword tag was popular? Or when a good SEO strategy was to put keywords in everything? Now you need to check site pages to be certain keywords aren’t overused in key elements. Here, we’ll touch on 4 important SEO tactics to help you improve your website.
- Skip Meta Keywords
Search engines have declared that Meta keywords could be a spam signal. We weren’t using them correctly before, so, according to Google, the best solution is to stop using Meta keywords altogether.
- Don’t Stuff Your Content With Keywords
Nothing is worse than arriving to a site and finding content with keywords strategically (and awkwardly) positioned throughout. Keyword density is no longer important and you should stop any and all strategies aiming at stuffing keywords into your content. In order to successfully optimize content for users and ranking:
- Decide upon a topic for a page or blog post
- Extensively research said topic
- Write content that is uniquely valuable to your targeted visitor
- Verify that you have written a minimum of 400 words
- Split the content into short paragraphs, consisting of 2-4 sentences, or bulleted lists
- Add a headline to the opening of each paragraph to describe the upcoming info
- Within the body content create anchor text links to a similar page on the site
- Add a page title that speaks to your targeted visitor and the topic of the page
- Make the page easily shareable on social networks
The result will be an authoritative, user friendly, search engine friendly piece of content for your site.
- Don’t Ignore Your Meta Description
Plain and simple, Meta descriptions are a conversion factor. Knowing that they impact click-through rate, why would you ignore them? Take time to write compelling Meta descriptions for all of the important pages of your site, and for any pages that can be shared socially. While 155 characters is target length, keep in mind that words aligning with the search query will be bolded, causing your description to be longer. So, it would be advisable to keep the character length between 115-145 characters. It’s also important to include some form of a call-to-action or value proposition. Words like ‘decide,’ 'learn,’ or 'find out' can be considered calls to action in this situation.
- Don’t Forget To Markup Site Pages
Next time you search in Google or Bing, look at the results. Spot the results that contain more information than just a title, description, and URL. Those results have additional info because the html of the site is marked up to relay explicit information to crawlers. BuildVisible found that search listings with rich snippets would be clicked on up 25% more frequently. So, make microdata part of every site you create. Markup logos, images, addresses, phone numbers, business name, type of business, reviews, prices, software, and anything else that’s relevant to the site. Clients will thank you and visitors will appreciate it.
Once you’re using these tactics, you can build upon them. Taking these simple steps will help your site rank, and optimizing a website is a practice that doesn’t really end. You can stop improving certain pages, but the site as a whole can always be improved. You’ll surely strengthen your website with these four strategies.
Want to discover more helpful tactics to improve your website in 2015? Click below to uncover 25 website must haves for driving leads, traffic, and sales!
