Search Engine Optimization

The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.

Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content. Each page on your site should ideally have a unique title, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.

Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long or otherwise deemed less relevant, Google may show only a portion of it or one that’s automatically generated in the search result. Google may also show different titles depending on the user’s query or device used for searching.

Avoid: Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users. Stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags.

A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about.

Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say “might” because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s query. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. While there’s no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it’s long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

Avoid:

• Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page.
• Using generic descriptions like “This is a web page” or “Page about baseball cards”.
• Filling the description with only keywords.
• Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag.

Use unique descriptions for each page
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain.

Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time football fan might search for [fifa], an acronym for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, while a new fan might use a more general query like [football playoffs]. Anticipating these differences in search behaviour and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Search Console provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

Best Practices

Write easy-to-read text – Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow.

Organize your topics clearly – It’s always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.

Create fresh, unique content – New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back but also bring in new visitors.

Avoid:

• Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users.
• Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.

Optimize content for your users, not search engines – Designing your site around your visitors’ needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

Users feel comfortable visiting your site if they feel that it’s trustworthy.

A site with a good reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area.
Provide information about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. Shopping and other financial transaction websites should have clear and satisfying customer service information to help users resolve issues. News sites should provide clear information about who is responsible for the content.

Using appropriate technologies is also important. If a shopping checkout page doesn’t have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site.

Make expertise and authoritativeness clear

Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increase its quality. Be sure that content on your site is created or edited by people with expertise in the topic. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help users understand articles’ expertise. Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a good practice if such consensus exists.

Provide an appropriate amount of content for your subject

Creating high-quality content takes a significant amount of at least one of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill. Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.

Avoid distracting advertisements

You should not let advertisements distract users or prevent them from consuming the site content. For example, advertisements, supplement contents, or interstitial pages (pages displayed before or after the content you are expecting) that make it difficult to use the website.

Write good link text

Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what the linked pages contain.

Best Practices

Choose descriptive text – The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.

Avoid:

• Writing generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”.
• Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to.
• Using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases, although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website’s address.

Write concise text – Aim for short but descriptive text-usually a few words or a short phrase.

Think about anchor text for internal links too -You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

Be careful who you link to

You can confer some of your site’s reputation to another site when your site links to it. Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards.

While most of the links to your site will be added gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.

A blog post on your own site letting your visitor base know that you added something new is a great way to get the word out about new content or services.

Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You could also send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company’s website.

If you run a local business, adding its information to Google My Business will help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search.

Best Practices

Know about social media sites
Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content.

Reach out to those in your site’s related community
Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a good community resource.

Avoid:

• Spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area.
• Purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank.

Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters to analyze their performance in their search engine. For Google, that tool is Search Console.
Search Console provides two important categories of information: Can Google find my content? How am I performing in Google Search results?
Using Search Console won’t help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.

With the service, webmasters can:

• See which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
• Test and submit sitemaps
• Analyze or generate robots.txt files
• Remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• Specify your preferred domain
• Identify issues with title and description meta tags
• Understand the top searches used to reach a site
• Get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• Receive notifications of quality guidelines violations and request a site reconsideration

Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools also offers free tools for webmasters.

Analyzing user behaviour on your site

If you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you’re probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:

• Get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• Discover the most popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site, e.g did changing the title and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?