3 Quick SEO Tips To Get You Started

Content strategy encompasses a wide variety of activities: inbound linking, social media, and creating stellar content just to name a few. One of the more easily approachable parts of a content strategy is implementing on-page SEO tactics. Just like anything in the online realm, search engines are constantly changing but these quick tips will get you started down the right path.

URL Structure

Make sure they are easily readable by a human, which means using hyphens to separate words. This not only lets search engines identify what your post is about but also lets readers know what they should expect to see. They should not contain underscores, spaces or any other characters. It also helps if your URL contains a few relevant keywords. Below is an example:

http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html

Page Titles

Page titles are an oft overlooked part of small business websites. As a business owner the instinctual habit is put your company name first on every page of your site. What will better serve your SEO efforts and more importantly your potential customers is if you tell the user what the page is actually about first. Put the brand last. I mean it. In WordPress this can be a little more tricky but there are many, many plugins that can help you with this. One that I like to use for myself and for clients like Kapow Events is Ultimate SEO.

Optimal Format:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are not as helpful for keyword ranking as they once were. In fact, Google says they don’t even really use them at all for ranking with their latest round of updates. BUT, Google will sometimes use the meta description in search results if it gives users a more accurate description than the on-page content. Also, you may have noticed that the keywords you’ve searched on appear as bold within page descriptions, this helps improve your click-through rate because it naturally makes your content look more relevant to the searcher.

Meta descriptions can be any length but search engines generally truncate snippets longer than 160 characters, For this reason it is best to keep meta descriptions between 150-160 characters.