Improve your site Google ranking with on-page SEO

In My Previous Post(Improving SEO with keyword research using Google Keyword Planner) we understood which keywords you want to target  to maximize your performance, you’re equipped to make meaningful on-page SEO changes.

Backlinko has an excellent infographic that breaks down 16 on-page SEO factors that will earn you big points with Google and your visitors.

Let’s break down a few key considerations.

Optimize your title tags

Title tags have withstood the test of time. They’re still a big part of how your site will perform.

Make sure that every one of your title tags is descriptive, unique, and catered to your targeted keywords.

Avoid using the same keywords and title tags over and over. This way, you’ll diversify your opportunities while avoiding cannibalizing your own efforts.

Say that you’re an ecommerce company. A good formula for your product pages could be:

[Product’s Name] – [Product’s Category] | [Brand Name]

Like this:

Curly Hair Leave-in Conditioner – Hair Care | Diana’s DIY

Here are some more title tag optimization tips:

• Use pipes ( | ) and dashes ( – ) between terms to maximize your real estate.
• Avoid ALL CAPS titles. They’re just obnoxious.
• Never keep default title tags like “Product Page” or “Home.” They trigger Google into thinking you have duplicate content, and they’re also not very convincing to users who are looking for specific information.
• Put the most important and unique keywords first.
• Don’t overstuff your keywords. Google increasingly values relevant, contextual, and natural strings over mechanical or forced keyword phrases.
• Put your potential visitors before Google – title tags can make-or-break traffic and conversions.

Keep in mind that Google will show roughly 60 characters on a SERP, but don’t cut yourself off if a longer title suits the page content. The search snippet title that Google displays can be dynamic based on the search query. So ultimately, you might be doing yourself a favor by getting more descriptive.

Plus, desktop snippet titles are limited by pixel width, while mobile display titles are typically longer.

Here’s an example from Hobo Web:

In the image above, Google displays as many characters as possible from the beginning. But in the image below, Google truncates the middle of the title to show the term “Hobo” at the end to show relevance to the user’s query.

While meta descriptions have negligible (if any) impact on your rankings, they still serve the important purpose of helping to determine your search snippet and adding an extra factor of uniqueness. This in turn can influence your click-through rate (CTR) from SERPs.

Check out this Kissmetrics article on making the most of meta descriptions for your CTRs.

Use schema markup (aka structured data markup)

Searchmetrics estimates that nearly one-third of Google SERPs incorporate rich snippets that are supported by schema. But only 0.3% of websites are actually taking advantage!

Schema markup can be thought of as extra “labels” on information that tells Google what your content means.For example, let’s say my name appears on an article, so Google displays my name in a SERP entry.

But if I use the right schema around my name in the article’s HTML, I can indicate to Google that I’m the author of the article, not just another term in a sea of indistinguishable words.

Not only does schema markup help Google understand your website, it also makes a massive difference in attracting traffic to your website.

Schema helps give users more relevant information in a visually organized and aesthetic way.

Plus, featured snippets are featured more on mobile SERPs, which we discussed are more common in the U.S. than desktop searches.

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a great tool for implementing schema markup on your site.

You can use schema tags to identify various types of SERP information, including:

• Articles
• Book reviews
• Events
• Local businesses
• Movies
• Products
• Restaurants
• Software applications
• TV episodes
• TV episodes with ratings

Schema can also be used to identify information in HTML emails like:

• Bus, car rental, event, flight, lodging, restaurant, and train reservations
• Orders
• Parcel delivery

This Kissmetrics article offers a step-by-step schema markup tutsrial to get you started.

Create a search engine sitemap

A sitemap tells search engines about the organization of your site’s content.

That way, when Googlebot reads the file, it can more intelligently crawl your content. This helps make it more readily available for ranking on SERPs.

Sitemaps also provide valuable metadata about pages on your site like when they were last updated, how often you make changes, and how the page relates to other pages on your site.

You can use XML-sitemaps.com, a simple sitemap generator.

Once you have your sitemap, download and put it into the domain root folder of your website, and adding the sitemap URL to your Google Webmaster account.

Now that we’ve covered some key on-page SEO factors, it’s time to discuss how to differentiate your brand from good to great with unique, strategic, and purposeful content.