<title>This is a title tag</title>
1. Front load your keyword – Try and include your target keyword as close to the start of the title tag as possible.
2. Avoid truncation – Title tags have 512px to play with in desktop search results, after which they will truncate. A good rule of thumb is to keep the length of your title tags to 55 characters or less, which will generally fit into this area, however, in rare cases, capitalisation and search query may still result in truncation.
3. Make it clickable – Headlines sell newspapers and page titles ‘sell’ web pages.
4. Stand out – If all the page titles in your niche follow a certain format, then doing something different can make your titles stand out in the SERPs.
5. Don’t bother adding your brand – Including your brand name at the end of page titles is unnecessary – Google will often add it automatically anyway – and takes up valuable real estate. However:
6. Optimise home page for brand – The exception to this is your home page, where your title should generally be optimised for your brand.
7. Minimise stop words – With limited space to play with try and minimise use of stop/joining words – “a, and, is, on, of, or, the, was, with” – in page titles.
8. Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t repeat yourself. – Annoying isn’t it? Use your keyword once in the title and don’t repeat it.
<meta name="description" content="This is a meta description. It can help your content stand out in search results and improve CTR" />
9. Sell your content – Your meta description is like your advert in the search results. Write a unique, compelling meta description for each page on your site, that communicates USPs/value, and entices click-throughs.
10. Avoid truncation – Keep your meta descriptions to around 155 characters (maximum) to minimise truncation in the search results.
11. Use your keyword in the meta description – While not having a direct influence on ranking, keywords in meta descriptions will be bolded in search results which can help to improve CTR.
12. Split test – Experiment with different meta description formats to optimise CTR.
13. Ensure each page has a unique H1 tag – Every page on your site should have a unique H1 tag.
14. Use your keyword in the H1 Tag – The H1 tag continues to be an important on-page ranking factor and should include the page’s target keyword.
15. Include secondary and LSI keywords – Additional header tags(H2, H3) are a good opportunity to target secondary key phrases and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords.
16. Avoid using header tags in layout – Many templates use header tags in their layout with generic words/phrases such as ‘More Details’. These should be replaced with CSS styled divs.
17. Use your keyword early – Where possible (without being forced), use your target keyword in the first paragraph of your page’s content to reinforce the topic.
18. Long content correlates with higher rankings – Numerous studies have concluded that there is a correlation between long form content and higher rankings, although the caveat should be that this may have more to do with quality than actual length. Either way, the takeaway is to go in-depth and create the authority page for your target keyword.
19. Forget keyword density – Don’t sweat keyword density. Write naturally and you will tend to use your target keyword several times within your content without having to think about it. Just make sure to include it at least once!
20. Use LSI keywords – LSI keywords are words that are semantically related to your main keyword. They are useful for cementing a page’s topic and also for differentiating homonyms(same words with different meaning, i.e. “bark” the sound a dog makes, “bark” the outer layer of a tree) in search queries. When writing about a topic you will tend to use these naturally, but it can be an idea to do some research beforehand.
21. Add multimedia – Adding multimedia to your content – images, videos , slideshows etc – makes it more engaging, shareable and linkable. There may also be some direct SEO benefit.
22. Add internal links – Adding internal links to other pages from within content allows link equity to flow round your site and also encourages reader exploration, lowering bounce rate. An often criminally under-utilised aspect of SEO.
23. Link out – Linking out to high quality, authoritative, and topically related content aids relevance and builds relationships with other site owners in your niche. Best practice is to open external links in a new tab/window.
24. Keep content up to date – Regularly update old/archive content to keep it fresh, relevant and rankworthy.
25. Prioritise quality over frequency – With the exception of large publications, and news sites (which require lots of daily content), most sites will get more benefit by focusing on content quality, as opposed to frequency. Publishing 1 great article a week is better than publishing 1 mediocre article daily.
26. Set up rich snippets/structured data – Set up and test structured data to benefit from rich snippets in search results.
46. Include table of contents for long content – Include a table of contents with internal links to specific sections on long pages to benefit from wikipedia style ‘jump to’ links (below) in the search results.
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