Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed a LOT in the past 18 months, and in many ways has gotten easier. Keywords and keyword phrases, by themselves, are no longer reported by Google. Instead groups of related keywords or keyword phrases are important.
An example would be “personas”, “buyer personas”, “personalized recommendations”, “personalization”, “personalized content”, “marketing persona” — these are all related terms that would work well together in a blog post about developing buyer personas. By no longer needing to focus on one or two of these for the search engines, we can use all of them throughout our article and make it more readable four visitors, and still information for the search engines.
19 SEO factors for pages and blog posts
Beyond that, some things have stayed the same. Here are 19 things to consider about your page content, whether it’s a web page or a blog post.
Content Factors
- Quality. Are your pages well-written and do they have substantial quality content?
- Research. Have you or your agency researched the keywords that people actually use to find this specific content?
- Words. Do your pages use these keywords and phrases that you identified?
- Engage. Do your visitors spend time reading your content or do they quickly “bounce” away?
- Fresh. Are pages fresh and about “hot topics”?
- Thin. Is content “thin” or “shallow” and lacking in substance?
- Ads. Is your content ad-heavy?
HTML Factors
- Titles. Do HTML title tags contain keywords relevant to the page topic?
- Description. Do meta descriptions describe what the page is about?
- Headers. Do headlines and subheads contain relevant keywords?
- Structure. Do pages use structured data to enhance search listings?
- Stuffing. Do you excessively use words you want to be found for on the pages? This is a bad practice.
- Hidden. Do colors or design “hide” words you want pages to be found for? Also a bad practice.
Architecture Factors
- Crawl. Can search engines easily discover and “crawl” pages and posts on your site?
- Duplicate. Does your site manage duplicate content issues well?
- Speed. Does each page load quickly?
- URLs. Are URLs short and contain meaningful keywords to page topics?
- Mobile. Does your site work well for mobile visitors on smartphones and tablets?
- Cloaking. Do you show search engines a different page than humans? This is a very bad practice and isn’t seen much any more.
As you can see, most of these factors are either set up already (or should be!) on your website (like the architecture factors) or are easily incorporated into your writing as you create each page or post.
Learn more with the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors
What to learn more? Download this 11×17 (scalable to fit on an 8-1/2 x 11″ page) Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It’s a very rich multi-layered visual tool for on-page and off-page SEO from Search Engine Land.
I’ve got this hanging on my wall at my desk, and refer to it often.
How do you compare with your competitors?
Of course, the goal with search engine optimization is to get those coveted page 1 rankings on Google. Find out how your SEO and other digital marketing is working compared to your competitors and learn what “gaps” your competitors have that you can use to your benefit.
We offer a competitive marketing analysis for US-based B2B companies that clearly identifies how you stack up to your competitors, and where you can gain an advantage over them. There is no charge for this analysis. Request your competitive marketing analysis now.
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