SEO 101

The title of any given webpage, also known as it’s H1 Tag, is the most prominent and, from an SEO standpoint, influential on-page identifier. This should clearly signal the topic or theme of the page and/or reflect the actual name of the page itself.

Crawlers assign a lot of weight to the content of these titles, so it’s very beneficial from an SEO perspective to include keywords that are most relevant to the content on the page and to be as descriptive as possible within the limited character count.

An example of strong H1 tags for our own digital marketing website could be along the lines of “New Jersey Digital Marketing Agency,” “Where’s the Best NJ Marketing Agency,” or “Digital Marketing Agency Helping Brands Scale Their Marketing and Sales Strategies with a Data-First Approach.”

Meta tags are an HTML attribute of a webpage that provide brief descriptions of the content of that page. They’re similar to your H1 tags in terms of the content and the keyword exposure you want to maximize, but because of their higher word count, you can be slightly more descriptive. 

Google relies on meta tags as descriptors for the on-page content. Without a meta tag to gall back on, Google has to pull content from the page itself to fill that gap and may not pull in the most relevant information to attract visitors from search results.

Meta tags can be hardcoded into your HTML but most CMS platforms have very simple ways of inputting and updating meta tags without requiring any coding. According to 2019 study by Backlinko, pages with meta descriptions get 6% more clicks than those without.

To continue with our previous example, an example of a strong meta tag that complemented our digital marketing-oriented H1 tag could be: “Get more leads, acquire more customers, and improve your web traffic. As a NJ digital marketing agency, we help with website design and development, content management, and advertising. See why we’re NJ’s #1 SEO agency.”

Search engines need a sitemap to understand how to navigate your website and find information within it.

Let’s pretend you were driving to a friend’s new house in another state for the first time and you don’t have access to GPS. If you only have an address, you may never find the place. You’d need a map to understand the geography and chart a course to your destination.

Similarly, a sitemap tells Google what pages and attachments on your website are most important, as well as details about those specific lists, such as when it was last updated, how often it’s been changes, any alternate languages offered, and other key details.

Google doesn’t just rank your website, it ranks every single page. XML sitemaps are crucial to SEO because they make it easy for Google’s crawlers to find and index your content.

And don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds: many CMS platforms have tools to create a site map. There are also third party downloadable tools that can help generate sitemaps for you as well.

Voice search has been on the rise for a long time and will likely overtake traditional search in overall number of searches this year.

Voice search is verbally engaging with a search engine to find a desired result. The most common prompts for these sorts of queries almost always begin with either, “Hey, Siri,” “OK, Google,” or “Alexa.” 

Voice search optimization, therefore, ensures that your website is easy for search engines to find when a user verbally asks them a question. This requires Google to have a clear understanding of what your site is discussing, sharing, or offering to provide users with helpful and relevant search results, which are often read back to the user aloud.

Structured data, or “Schema,” is code baked into your website to better direct relevant content to the most appropriate search queries. Schema helps Google understand the meaning of your content so it can more thoughtfully match it to the searcher’s intent.

Schema was created with users in mind and is often referenced as a “virtual business card.” Why? Because when a website is properly marked up, Google should provide all details about what your business does, where it is, and what it offers. Websites with schema will organically rank higher than those without, on average around 4 SERP result positions higher.

Keywords are perhaps the most powerful tool in increasing and strengthening your search result rankings.

Generally speaking, keywords are ideas or topics that define your content, but from an SEO standpoint, they’re the terms that are being searched for by search engine users.

Keywords are the bridge between what people are searching for and the content you provide. By organically ranking for the keywords that are not only relevant to your content but match how users are actually inquiring about your products or services, targeting the right keywords has a strong influence over what traffic you’re attracting to your website.

It might seem obvious for a digital marketing agency like ourselves to target “marketing,” a high-volume short-tail keyword. The catch, however, is that because it’s such a broad and highly searched term, Google results will be mostly monopolized by the biggest marketers in the world with little room for a smaller agency like us to squeeze in.

That’s where high-tail keywords come into play. These are long keyphrases that have more specific intent and can more immediately match your offerings with the needs of searchers. For us, an example could be, “Top New Jersey SEO agency near me.”

There are a bevy of analytical tools that offer incredible insights into keyword volumes and difficulties, competitor rankings, and SEO challenges. This will be a monumental part of your larger content strategy but plays a huge role in everyday SEO success.

Slow pages cause higher bounce rates, plain and simple. In a world where you’re vying for precious few seconds of time, if it takes more than 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load, most users lose patience, trust, or interest. According to Google research, 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Slow pages can also signal to Google that there’s an issue with a site, perhaps even a virus, and Google will rank your seemingly problem-prone site lower as a result. A quick-loading site not only offers more seamless usability for your visitors, but it allows robots in search crawlers to scan your site faster when a query is made online.

The best thing you can do to ensure site errors is by performing all of the above steps carefully and diligently. Pay attention to what’s broken or not working properly and allot the time to fix those issues before they grow into more affecting problems.

Search engines change their rules constantly and if you don’t adapt to them, it can cause errors. It’s an ever-evolving process that requires routine maintenance. Without that due diligence, things will inevitably break.

As with most SEO elements, there are plenty of third party tools you can employ that track and manage site errors and will alert you any time something breaks.

Analyze your performance! To have a comprehensive understanding of what’s working and what isn’t, you need a reliable feedback loop and a way to understand your top performing content, keywords, backlinks, third party channels, etc. so that you can continue to scale and grow your SEO efforts.

There a plenty of third party tools that can offer all of this helpful data for you, but the owness is on you to make checking and adjusting your performance part of your regular SEO due diligence.