What is effective and recommended by Google in terms of SEO can change, yet good content SEO’d properly, taking consistent action, and getting good links to you have been important since 1997, when I first took a course on it.
We’ve come across this excellent article by Paola-Didone at MOZ. discussing top SEO recommendations in 2019. We have summarized it here for you, or read the full article.
*** AND you may want to read this Google’s Ranking Factors technical article! Want higher ranking? What haven’t you done here?
Structured Data Matters (and the plug in we use takes care of it)
Structured data is required by search engines to know what a website is about.
We use one of the top branded SEO plugins on the market: Yoast. It tells Google everything it needs to know for your site to be found in search results by your clients. We love it because it is simple, quick and effective, translating into focused, budget-friendly SEO effort for our clients.
Page Freshness Matters
Just as users look at page and post dates, so do Google crawlers. As you know, sometimes the date of the page is vital. Things such as a flyer or sale for a local grocery or clothing store are only useful and interesting if they are still within the valid date.
While some sites contain information that is date irrelevant, many sites are date relevant that Google crawlers hold it to a high premium.
Using dates in the Meta Title and Meta Description can be useful as well on page content and page publish date. Think of seeing it right in the Google search result (SERP) for something like ‘Book now – flights to Hawaii for $400 – July 2017’, or ‘Book now flights to Hawaii’ or ‘Book now – flights to Hawaii $400 – Current date’. A search result like this with a far past date is not interesting or relevant. Obviously one with a date immediately tells the user that the page is current. A good thing! More relevant for some types of pages than others of course. But great to keep in mind!
Internal Linking Still Matters
As always, keep user experience top of mind. In this case, no one enjoys a page crammed with links or links that are not relevant.
So, even if there are a lot of internal pages that may be relevant, you may want to only link to a carefully selected few. Think of the pages or services that are most popular page-visit wise or that generate the most income. Perhaps it would be best to just link to those pages and exclude linking to some of the other relevant pages to keep it simple and appealing to users (and Google!) One of our favourite SEO recommendations.
This topic can be delved into more in the original article.
Title Tags Matter (and we know how to do them)
We ourselves have seen direct and practically immediate SEO results based on the title meta tags. Which is great. Measuring how many more clicks happen when a title tag is changed slightly is a little more difficult to measure but also very important. As always, being on page one Google is great but is your SERP enticing people to click on it?
The original article gives great examples of both traffic going up (positive tests) and traffic going down (negative tests) to specific pages after the meta title was changed. Makes sense! A quick scan is all it takes for a user to decide if they want to spend their precious time on your site or someone else’s.
They found that including the year and / or the lowest price of the product or service would generate more clicks. Again makes sense.
Adding emojis or the number of products for sale on a page had a negative effect on page sessions.
Backlinks Matter (but don’t get lame ones)
Enticing other sites to link to yours can be challenging. Writing creative and useful content that is related to the business or industry is a great approach. Think about any unique point of view or knowledge you might have or have collected.
Or have you gained some insight to the business after years or decades? This can be a very interesting angle that others may want to read and share.
Remember that you’re not on your own, there are lots of freelance and contract companies that will assist in content creation for you. Hint, hint https://laraspence.com/services/ , scroll to the bottom for pricing on Writing related duties.
Wrap Up
The experts at Lara Spence web design employ these and other SEO strategies, empirically measuring the results and then providing regular reports with month by month stats on web traffic and more.
Contact us today, we’d love to work with you!
See our portfolio or read our testimonials. We’ll try to keep this blog updated with more top SEO recommendations.