By A Guest

By Stephanie Carrillo, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

The traditional days of using keywords and links to build SEO rank is changing as search has moved towards artificial intelligence to determine intent, instead of relying specifically on keywords.  These practices are by no means dead but are becoming more outdated.

Many other factors can affect your ranking results.  Here are some general SEO tips to think about when writing content and building out your pages.

Content and Page Structure:

  1. Page Title:
    • Every page needs a unique title, avoid keyword stuffing.
    • Recommended format by Moz: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword| Brand Name
    • Must be created in HTML and XHTML <Title> tag
    • 50-60 characters in length
  2. Use an H1 tag for title of your page or post
    • Try to include the keywords closely related to the page title
    • Always include your main keywords in the first 300 words of your page. It’s also helpful to use H2 tags for subheadings.
  3. Content should focus more on the topic, and less about keywords as the trends are shifting towards semantic SEO. Semantic SEO is not new, but Google uses latent semantic indexing which means it serves more results by intent without relying on one or two keywords for information.
    • Focus on unique content that is high in quality, as Google ranks pages based on merit.
    • When using keywords, keep the flow of the sentence natural.
    • Look for longtail keyword opportunities

Enriched content is a good start for SEO opportunities, but several other factors go into SEO.  Here are just of few ideas to improve your results:

  1. User experience
    • Page load times will affect your page rank. Ways to optimize your load time includes adjusting image sizes and compressing them or caching content for when someone revisits the page.
    • Technically flawless website will rank higher, avoid using Adobe flash.
    • Having a mobile optimized website is critical for your pages to rank
  2. Optimize SEO to feature Snippets. Snippets allow you to feature content based on question-related to your market area in which you provide a clear and direct answer to that question.
  3. Remove content that holds no value and drives very to little traffic to your site. Many times, this includes an old blog post, press releases, or old service pages that are no longer relevant — deleting these pages Google deems as low quality will improve your overall SEO results.
  4. Restructure your site content or resource center by keyword clustering. Keyword clustering is changing your site structure to build different pillar pages based on topics and clustering the articles around that topic. For example, Heinz Marketing has a lot of research work on ABM campaigns, so creating a pillar page for ABM Campaign that includes extensive information on the topic, and then clustering all the related research papers from the pillar page will help Google index your pages.

SEO is a full time job, and keeping up with the latest trends is difficult.  It’s important to keep adjusting and making changes to your pages and developing new content.  Working with an SEO consultant to perform an audit of your website is very beneficial and recommended.   I hope you find some of these tips helpful.

Related Post