Search Engine Optimization is not just built by offsite items such as trusted inbound links. Rather there is plenty you can do on your site to boost its quality, improve the user experience, and ultimately rank higher. The steps you can take are both technical as well as strategic. The following content breaks down multiple actions you can implement today to improve your sites rank. 

Optimizing HTML for SEO Success

Title Tags: Your First Impression on Search Engines

When building a website, the first thing you should consider is how users will navigate to and understand what your site is about. This means you should: 

• Keep title tags 65 characters or less.

Google will only display the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag. This means anything past 60 or so characters becomes irrelevant to the user making it difficult to understand where they are navigating to. 

• Avoid using the same word more than twice.

The more you use the same word, the more fishy your usage begins to look. As search engines (Google) crawl your site, they may pickup on tactics that seem suspicious – keyword stuffing would qualify you as suspicious and could result in a penalty. 

• Start with the primary keyword for better ranking.

As Google crawls your site it wants to understand where your site and its respective pages fit into users searches. The more relevant your title tag is, the more effectively it can serve your site to users.

Meta Tags: The Silent Ranking Booster

The second thing users will read, after the title tag, of course, is the meta description. The blurb of text below your title tag is equally as important as the title tag. For that reason, you must:

• Craft a compelling meta description in two sentences.

Not only have attention spans shrunk to all time lows but meta descriptions are just about 150 characters long, therefore, keep it short. A couple of sentences about what users can expect to see on your site is all you need.

• Ensure at least one primary keyword is included.

This builds on the brevity of your meta description. If the keyword you are attempting to rank for does not appear in your meta description how will users know that your page is about ‘bagels’? The quicker a user can identify that ‘bagels’ is the topic at hand, the more likely they are to click, and the better your sites click through rate becomes.

Enhancing Onsite Content for Search and User Experience

Keyword Strategy: Balancing Density and Relevance

As you build your keyword strategy you want to ensure you include those keywords into the body of your sites content. However, if I wanted you to know I was talking about ‘bagels’ I would not include the word ‘bagels’ into my content about ‘bagels’ more than was needed just so you knew I was talking about ‘bagels’. 

• Keep keyword density between 1-2% to avoid over-optimization.

‘Bagels’ or relevant keywords should be about 1-2% of your overall text. This means 1-2 of each 100 words can include a keyword – making your content readable and non-obnoxious. Google’s ranking system enjoys NLP or natural language processing, meaning that content that reads like it was written by a human will rank better than AI-generated, robotic-style writing. This also protects your site from being penalized by Google for keyword stuffing.

• Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords to improve contextual relevance.

To remain relevant without stuffing your content full of keywords, you can use LSI keywords. These are words that are relevant to your keywords and signal context. The more words you include that are semantically related, the better signals you are sending to Google that you understand the topic your site is based around. If I did not make mention of butter, cream cheese, toasted, poppyseed, or blueberry, would you really think I knew anything about ‘bagels’? 

You can locate LSI keywords by searching for your keyword and scrolling down to the “People also search for” section that Google provides users. This will inform you of what users are searching for based on the keyword you entered. Leverage these keywords to generate ideas around what might be semantically related.

Conclusion

As you build your site keep these seven things in mind as they can dramatically improve users experience and therefore improve your sites SEO ranking. The more value a user receives from your site the more Google wants to serve your site again. This basic framework can become the lens through which you build your website. Ask if it builds a credible, value-added experience to a user, and if so, Google probably likes it too.