Optimizing for search requires time and effort, as most SEO experts would attest.
It could take several months or even years to outrank established competitors who have been optimizing their sites for a long time.
That said, many websites can take advantage of low-hanging fruits to boost their search visibility.
You can uncover untapped potential with the help of SEO specialists or simple tools. Here are four ideas to help you get started.
Who would have thought that some people, even tech-savvy ones, get the most important on-page SEO techniques wrong today?
Yes, I am talking about title tags. You can see them:
- When you bookmark a page.
- When they appear in a browser tab.
- On search result pages (SERPs).
There are three main use cases for title tags. Depending on which you focus on, your SEO may suffer more or less.
Let’s say you want to show the brand in tabs and bookmarks first, plus mimic the actual menu structure.
Then you may end up with something like:
- “Example.com” – Topic – Specific Keyword
Yet, for the best possible SEO results, you’d rather go with the most important keyword first:
- Specific Keyword – Topic – “Example.com”
But when your brand or domain name is extremely long, you might run into issues.
Having something like allothershortdomainnameswerealreadygone.com in the title is not helpful.
If that’s the case, you might prefer to use just the following structure:
- Specific Keyword – Topic
On WordPress, some themes still go with the brand first. Most themes will add “Example.com” to each title tag (usually at the end).
When the brand or URL in the title is as long as or longer than the specific keyword (and topic), you may even end up with duplicate content issues.
With the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, you can quickly and easily adapt that title tag structure.
Otherwise, you may have to tweak the WordPress theme manually, which is not recommended as it gets messy quickly.
But title tags are important beyond preventing duplicates.
While they have been devalued as a ranking signal recently, the title is still what searchers will first see.
When you’re lazy (and most WordPress users are), you will also use the H1 heading as the title.
This works fine in many cases, especially if you have optimized the H1 well, as it’s a significant ranking signal for Google.
However, headlines are meant mostly for readers already on the actual page or for those perusing social media.
What happens then is that headlines may become way too long to serve as title tags.
Some headlines also simply ignore the most significant keywords and go for clickbait instead, which hides the true topic, for instance:
- “You won’t believe what happened then! THIS!”
This example doesn’t even have a single keyword in it. You need to edit your title tag manually then and add some.
2. Check your rankings on Google Search Console
One of the first things to do when it comes to SEO
