6 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your SEO (Part 1 of 2)
Guest writer: Brian M. Reiser
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of changing your online presence to improve your position and visibility in search engines. SEO is important for virtually every business including yours (yes, yours!).
That’s because, among other reasons, most (68% according to Brightedge) online experiences begin with a search engine. If you’re going to meet your audience where they are, then most likely, they are on search engines like Google.
But where do you begin with SEO? There are pages and pages in the Google Search Guidelines on how to improve your SEO performance. Not only that, but Google has proven to be, um, not exactly forthright when it comes to their own statements about what works in SEO.
But, you don’t need to feel overwhelmed. I’m going to provide you with six simple ways you can immediately improve your SEO. By the end of this two-part article, you will be able to use these six tactics to improve the search potential of any page on your website.
Optimize Your Page Titles
The first simple way to improve your SEO is to optimize your page titles. An important note here: a page title is not the same thing as an article title or a headline. An article title or a headline is something on your web page or post that users see.
But users do not see your page title on the page. It is only visible in the html code of your webpage. Google crawlers, which scour the internet discovering and interpreting content, are able to read these page titles and use them to determine what your content is about.
Let’s say you own a local shoe store and you have a page on your website all about women’s sneakers. And you want this page to rank well for Google searches containing the words “women’s sneakers”.
One important way to do this is by including the search words—or “keywords” in the language of SEO— “women’s sneakers” in your page’s html title tag. For example, you might create a title tag like this:
“Buy Women’s Sneakers Now at Mary’s Shoe Store”
if the name of the store is “Mary’s Shoe Store.” Or you might simply write:
“Women’s Sneakers”
as your page title.
The html code will look like this:
<title>Buy Women's Sneakers Online Now at Mary's Shoe Store</title>
or simply
<title>Women’s Sneakers</title>
depending on which version you used.
Oftentimes, the name of the brand or company will be styled this way instead:
<title>Buy Women's Sneakers Now | Mary's Shoe Store</title>. ‘=
This “|” separates the main keywords from the brand name. But any of these three titles are far more optimized than a title tag excluding the terms “women’s sneakers.”
Some website builders, like Wix or Squarespace, will easily let you edit a web page’s title tag without needing to edit the html code itself.
A CMS like WordPress has plugins available such as Yoast, which also allow you to easily edit title tags. If your website builder does not allow this, you or your web developer will have to edit the tag directly in the code.
One more important note: Every page should have a unique page title, although the variations may be small and simple. You do not want to have identical page titles on multiple pages, as this is confusing for search engines.
2. Optimize Your Meta Descriptions
Once you have optimized your page title, the next simple way to improve your SEO is to optimize your meta descriptions. A meta description is a brief (about 160 characters ro so) description of the main content on your web page.
Like your page title, you want your meta description to include the keyword(s) that you are trying to rank for. So, in our example of Mary’s Shoe Store, we want our meta description to include the keywords “women’s sneakers.”
Also, like your page title, your users do not see your meta description on your webpage. Instead, the meta description is simply part of the html code of your page. But once again, web crawlers like Google’s will be able to read it and understand what your page is about. This will help Google understand what searches your page may be relevant for.
To optimize your meta description for women’s sneakers at Mary’s shoe stores, you might write a meta description like this:
“Mary's Shoe Store sells the best women's sneakers near you and online. Browse our selection of running sneakers, tennis sneakers, and more on our site now.
In the html code, this meta description would look as follows:
<meta name="description" content="Mary's Shoe Store sells the best women's sneakers near you and online. Browse our selection of running sneakers, tennis sneakers, and more on our site now.">
Like meta titles, the major website builders and CMS platforms will have a simple way for you to edit each web page’s meta descriptions on your website within the page builder itself or through the use of a simple plugin like Yoast. Otherwise, you or your web developer will need to edit the meta descriptions directly in the html code.
One more important note: like your title tags, every page should have a unique meta description, although the variations may be small and simple. You do not want to have identical meta descriptions on multiple pages, as this is confusing for search engines.
3. Optimize Your Headers
In html, a header is a snippet of code that is used to help structure your web content. There are six different types of headers ranging from H1 to H6.
H1 headers are commonly used as the title or headline of your content or blog post that your user sees on the page. Smaller headers like H2s and H3s are used to break down your content into easily digestible chunks or subsections.
Headers are used to tell your audience as well as search engines like Google more about the content on your page. They let your audiences know what the main topic and subtopics of your page are all about.
In our example of Mary’s Shoe Store, we might use the following header as our main or H1 header:
Women’s Sneakers
Which would be written in the html code like this:
<h1>Women’s Sneakers</h1>.
You may use the following subheaders to break down your content into subtopics like so:
Women’s Sneakers
Women’s Running Sneakers
Women’s Tennis Sneakers
Which would be written in code as follows:
<h1>Women’s Sneakers</h1>
<h2>Women’s Running Sneakers</h2>
<h2>Women’s Tennis Sneakers</h2>
Let’s say you further wanted to break down the section on women’s running sneakers by brand. You might structure it this way:
Women’s Sneakers
Women’s Running Sneakers
Women’s Running Sneakers from Nike
Women’s Running Sneakers from Adidas
And this would be written in code as follows:
<h1>Women’s Sneakers</h1>
<h2>Women’s Running Sneakers</h2>
<h3>Women’s Running Sneakers from Nike”</h3>
<h3>Women’s Running Sneakers from Adidas</h3>
And you could even break down into further subtopics like shoe size or fabric type or color by using your h4, h5, or h6 tags.
One thing to note: you do not need to use your keywords, “women’s sneakers” in every single header on your page. Only use them where it seems natural. You can test this by reading your content out loud and listening to whether a person would really write that way naturally.
For example, let’s say you also wanted to have a section about girl’s or men’s sneakers on the same page as above. You would not include the keywords “women’s sneakers” in this subsection’s header because it doesn’t make sense with the content.
However, you could include “men’s sneakers” or “girl’s sneakers”, which still both fit well with the more general topic “sneakers”.
Your headers will be visible to your readers on the page. And usually you can edit your headers and switch from one to another easily within your website builder or CMS without needing to go into the code to make the change.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we give three more tips!
Learn more about SEO content writing on Lauren Perna Communications’ blog.
Brian M. Reiser has over seven years of hands-on experience navigating the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization. Learn more about Brian M. Reiser | Strategic SEO Consultant.
