SEO 101: 18 Search Rankings & Engagement Factors You Cant Ignore
There are a lot of SEO guides and How-to blog posts available, but the truth is, many of these resources contain outdated or just incorrect (and outright bad) advice. Over the past few months I have been auditing a lot of websites for various law firms throughout the country. I decided to put together a list of 18 factors that many people simply ignore or forget to implement.
It is amazing how many websites are still stuffing keywords in their title tag. For example, I was auditing a law firms website and their previous SEO company has the homepage title set as Bankruptcy Lawyer (City) | Hire Bankruptcy Lawyer (City) | Best Bankruptcy Lawyer (City) and it reeked of spam. We quickly changed it to something along the lines of Law Offices of XYZ Your Local (City) Bankruptcy Lawyer and this resulted in a more natural title while still including the keyword (City) Bankruptcy Lawyer the firm was clearly targeting.
Stick with titles that make sense and only use your target keyword if it can be used naturally. You also want to think about writing a title that is going to attract search traffic to click on it in the results. Ranking on top is just part of the battle you need to have the individual click on your title as well.
Your descriptions need to be written with one goal in mind, and that it to get the search traffic to click-through to your website. Descriptions hold zero SEO value in terms of ranking, but they hold a lot of weight when it comes to CTR.
A good description provides a solution related to the search that was performed to display your page in the results. For example, if someone is performing a search because they want to buy a widget you want your description to mention that you have the largest selection and lowest prices on different widgets.
I am a big fan of using the page or post title as the URL structure, because it looks more eye appealing and it will often result in having your target keywords in the URL as well.
What do you think looks better and will perform better?
Not only is the title URL more SEO friendly, but also it just looks better. If you are using Word Press you can quickly change your URL structure in the general settings under permalink structure. Select the post name option and you will have SEO friendly URLs for all of your pages and posts.
Your content needs to have headings and sub-headings in order to break up your text and make it easier to skim though while still retaining the main point. Wait, what? The majority of your website visitors are not going to read your content. They are going to quickly skim through it and if you have never-ending paragraphs without headings then they arent going to take anything away from their skim sessions.
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SEO 101: 18 Search Rankings & Engagement Factors You Cant Ignore