SEO is a major part of online marketing, but there’s more to it than just getting your title tag right. There are several things that affect SEO that you might not have considered before. Here are five of them:
Title Tags
Title tags are the most important on-page SEO factor. They’re the first thing search engines see, and they’re what users will click on to find you.
Keep your title tags short and descriptive. The best ones are relevant to the content on the page—a good rule of thumb is that if you can’t describe your page in just a few words, it’s too long.
Make sure each page has its own unique title tag—the same title tag across multiple pages will make Google think those pages are duplicates of each other!
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a list of all the pages on your site and can be submitted to Google and Bing. They are also used by other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask.com.
A sitemap is a file that contains URLs for each page on your site, including internal links (such as “From our blog”). Search engines use it to find pages in order to crawl them and index them on their search engine results page (SERP). The format of a sitemap depends on how large your site is or how structured it is; some may need only one page while others could have dozens. Sitemaps allow you to highlight important parts of your website while giving the search engine an overview of its structure so they know where they should focus when crawling it — especially when there aren’t any clear navigation paths such as breadcrumbs or pagination links available
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file that you can put in your website’s root directory to control how search engines crawl, index and display the pages on your site.
- What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file placed in the root directory of every website that tells search engine crawlers what areas of the site should be crawled or not crawled, as well as how many times each page should be indexed (i.e., crawled by Google). If a page is marked “noindex” in robots.txt then it won’t appear under any listings on Google Search results pages or any other major search engine’s pages because it isn’t included within the index for crawling and indexing purposes (note: some poorly developed SEO tools may still include those pages without following instructions).
Links on Your Site
Links are a big deal for SEO, and there are several different kinds. Links from other sites (called external links) can help your site get indexed by search engines, but it’s also important to have internal links within your own website that connect related content together. This makes it simpler for visitors to navigate through your site and find what they’re looking for.
Internal links can be generated by using anchor text: the words in the link itself that tell Google where you want them to go next when clicking on it. If those words are specific enough—like “person” or “dog”—you’ll probably rank higher than sites with generic anchor texts like “click here.”
Mobile Friendliness and User Experience
We all love mobile, right? Search engines are no exception. Although they aren’t as fond of the small screen as we are, they do recognize that over half of their users access their sites from a mobile device and take this into account when ranking pages. This means that if your website doesn’t adapt to smaller screens, there may be a penalty on your rankings because of it.
- Read More: Mobile Friendliness and User Experience
There is a lot more to SEO than the title tag
There are many factors that affect SEO, but title tags are especially important.
Here are some points to keep in mind:
- Make sure your title tag is unique, concise and relevant.
- Keep it under 70 characters in length. This makes it easy for search engines to read and process, which will improve your rankings. If a search engine can’t read your title tag properly because it’s too long or too short, they will not consider that page when ranking results for the keyword in question.
- Include your target keyword somewhere within the first 60-70 characters of your title tag (but not necessarily all at once). This ensures that you get indexed by Google and other search engines as effectively as possible without making them look spammy or unnatural (which could negatively impact their ranking).
Conclusion
SEO is a never-ending journey that requires constant vigilance, but it’s one you can make easier with the right tools and strategies. As we’ve seen, there are many things that affect SEO that you might not even know about—and if you do know them, you may not be able to impact them with your own site and content alone. That’s why it’s so important to work with an expert like us.
