We’ve broken down the search engine optimization tactics you need to implement ASAP to help improve your ranking. Plus, we’ve included a handy checklist at the bottom of the page to help you keep track of the changes you’re making.
Title Tags
If your page doesn’t have a title, search engines will choose what content to show for your page. In order to control what people see in search results, you need to create a title for each of your pages that will be compelling to users and that clearly conveys what the page is about.
Duplicate Titles
In addition to creating titles, it’s also important to make sure that every page title is unique. If you have multiple pages with the same title, search engines may have trouble determining which page is relevant to show in their results.
Keywords in Title
To improve your website ranking, include your important keywords in the title of your page. Remember that the title is usually the first thing users will see in search results, so make sure it’s appealing to searchers.
Title Length
We know, titles have a lot of rules. But it’s one of the most important on-page SEO elements, so it’s critical that you give your title plenty of attention. While you want your title to include keywords, you also want to make sure it’s not too long. Titles that are over 70 characters may get cut off by search engines, while titles that are too short (e.g. only one word) may get overwritten.
Keywords in Body
If you include the keywords you want to rank for in the body content of your web page, you are more likely to improve your ranking. Just be sure to avoid keyword stuffing as search engines could penalize your website for using too many keywords. Your content should make sense and be easily readable for human visitors.
Keywords in H1
The H1 tag marks the heading on your page. You should have just one H1 tag per page, and it should clearly convey what the page is about. Any other titles on your page should use less important heading tags (i.e. H2-H6).
Keywords in Bold & Italics
You can use bold or italicized text on your page to emphasize certain words or phrases. Search engines usually consider words in bold or italics as slightly more important. Put keywords and important phrases in bold or italics wherever natural, but don’t overdo it.
Broken Images
While broken images don’t have a direct influence on your ranking, they create a bad user experience, which can cause visitors to leave your website without taking any action. Broken images can also make it challenging for search engines to crawl your site.
Alt Text
Alternative attributes, or alt text, lets search engines know what your images include. You should create an alt text for each of your images that uses your keywords as much as possible. This will help search engines have a better understanding of your content and possibly rank your site higher in search results.
Broken Links
Just like broken images, broken links contribute to a poor user experience. They also tell search engines that your site is lower quality because broken links give the impression that your website has not been updated recently.
Avoid Over-Optimization
Just as there are technical issues you need to fix to improve your SEO, there are also practices you need to avoid. Too much SEO is known as over-optimization, and it can ruin your site’s ability to rank. When you overdo your optimization, it can have a huge negative impact on your ranking.
Here are a few signs that your SEO efforts might be veering into over-optimization territory:
Non-relevant keywords
Your keywords should always be relevant to your content. Just because a keyword is popular doesn’t mean it will help you site. It may draw in more traffic, but it probably won’t be the traffic you want, leading to lower conversion rates.
Pointing links to top-level pages
Your website should include internal links that point to different, related content all over your website. If the majority of your links point to top-level pages like your homepage, it can weaken your link profile. It’s important to create internal links, but pages like About Us or Contact are already getting plenty of clicks. Instead, work to strengthen your SEO by pointing to deeper internal links.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is when you overuse your keywords to get the attention of search engines and show up in results. If you’re forcing keywords and phrases in where they don’t belong, Google will notice and dock you for trying to cheat the system. Plus, content stuffed with keywords isn’t readable, and your users will definitely notice.
Don’t waste your time optimizing pages that don’t need it, like your contact page. In most cases, the contact page doesn’t contain much content, and it will be a challenge to optimize it for SEO. Plus, this page serves a specific purpose and doesn’t need to show up in search results. Instead focus on your homepage and other content-heavy pages that you want to drive more traffic to.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, let us do your SEO for you with our SEO Services. We will audit your site for SEO errors and fix them for you, making sure your website runs smoothly and improving your rankings. Click here to learn more.
Get access to all the courses and resources you need with MRFP Lifetime Access! For a one-time price of $497, you’ll have access to tons of training, page templates, blog posts, and more. Click here to get your MRFP Lifetime Access today!