2013: Top 10 content SEO tips survey
-
Hi folks,
I was asked to write a short top 10 SEO list for editors. My search returned outdated results and SEO is changing fast these days…
So, here is my little survey: What are the best settings for these most important things:
- Title tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Meta description: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Meta keywords: Use them? How many?
- H1 tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- H2-H6 tags: How many characters? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Image alternative text: How many characters / words? Best tricks?
- Text length: Minimum, maximum? What’s better: 1 long article or split an article in several pages?
- How much links within an article? Min? Max?
- Usage of keywords within links?
- Your favorite SEO tip?
I would love to hear your thoughts
Best wishes,
Georg. -
Hi Mike,
wow, what a comprehensive reply, thanks a lot!
I think it's time for a new SEO cheat sheet
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
These are all off the top of my head but I know i have guideline notes somewhere in the mess of my desk that we usually follow. These will change on a regular basis as is necessary in order to keep up with best practices and algorithm changes. The things posted below could all be completely different 3 months from now if Google decides to release a Zebra Algorithm targeting websites with puppies on them.
- Title tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Over 10 characters and under 70 characters though there are instances where titles will be truncated due to character width. I usually aim for 56. Keep in mind that Google can choose to replace your title in the SERPs with what they feel is more relevant. We stick to the format of either <sitename>[seperator] <relevant core="" terms,="" descriptor,="" or="" short="" sentence="" with="" terms="" near="" the="" front="">or we flip it.</relevant></sitename>
- Meta description: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Over 70, under 160... closer to 156 and similar to title can be truncated due to overall character width. Core terms nearer to the front where applicable. Keep in mind that Google can choose to replace your title in the SERPs with what they feel is more relevant.
- Meta keywords: Use them? How many?
- Bing and Yahoo can still make use of meta keywords. Google does not (unless you're News and using the new News related keywords tag). We often continue to include them but more as an idea concerning the interrelation of pages on our sites.
- H1 tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- Core term or most relevant terms concerning the page. If it includes a keyword we aim for closer to the beginning but that may not always be necessary. Make sure they make sense for the over-arching theme of the page.
- H2-H6 tags: How many characters? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
- We keep them concise and to the point. Core terms near the beginning where applicable.
- Image alternative text: How many characters / words? Best tricks?
- Short, sweet, concise and relevant.
- Text length: Minimum, maximum? What’s better: 1 long article or split an article in several pages?
- I stick to one long article with relevant h2-h6 tags highlighting important parts. Three sentences in word looks like nothing, on your page that may look like a huge paragraph. Keep paragraphs concise, 3-4 sentences each. Breaking things up with an image is always nice.
- How much links within an article? Min? Max?
- As are necessary. You can get away with no links if you really wanted to but a few can help point out other relevant copy either on your site or off. But too many links will look cluttered and spammy. This is more a personal choice but if it looks bad then it probably is bad. We had a basic rule of thumb of no more than 1 link per 100 words in the copy... this was not adhered to and often it was less links.
- Usage of keywords within links?
- Natural sounding links are best now. Stay away from overusing heavily keyword laden text links too often. One or two every now and then is fine but overall you want them to be simple and natural. More people link to sites using the site name, site url or phrases like "Click here" than they do with terms like "Cheap Red Widgets".
- Your favorite SEO tip?
- Canonicals are your friend.
- Title tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Index SEO Performance
Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a difference in SEO performance between a page which ends with .html or just with a slash. For example: www.domain.com/test/ - www.domain.com/test.html Which one is better? And is there a difference between productpages and productcategory pages. Because we see mostly productpages ending with .html and category pages ending with a slash. Take a look at some big dutch companies like: http://www.coolblue.nl/
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO
http://www.bol.com/
https://www.zalando.nl/ (product page) There are doing this with a reason.... i guess.... Thanks.1 -
Homepage SEO: Does Text Content Help Traffic?
Hi Mozzers! My employers homepage (www.swarovski.com) is - amongst other problems we're about to fix - very thin (not to say empty!) in text content. If we were to put relevant text on the next version of the page, would that be beneficial in terms of traffic to that page? Thanks and cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | Diderino0 -
Tips and Tricks on yoast's video seo upgrade!
Hello Guys, I am using Yoast for several websites, and videos. I have a video sitemap and for all videos i added: 1. Titles 2. Descriptions 3. Tags My question is: Is the there any way or do anything to rank these videos higher?
On-Page Optimization | | DexSmart0 -
SEO Site Planning Tool?
Does anyone know of a good SEO Site planning tool? I see that SEOBOOK has something that looked interesting but they want $300/mo! Thanks in advance! Andy
On-Page Optimization | | MaxOtto0 -
Numbers above actual site content
Most pages on my website contain many numbers above the actual text on the page. This is useful for users and looks good on an actual view of the page. However, when a bot reads the page it appears as rows of numbers with a few sentences at the bottom of the page. Does having these number have a negative SEO effect? If so, should I change them to something such as an image so they aren't readable by search engines?
On-Page Optimization | | theLotter0 -
Do you ever forget the SEO basics?
We all get a little sloppy at times. Just yesterday , someone pointed out that I accidentally blocked the robots from one of our primary pages, because it was being included in a wildcard match on one of the disallow commands in robots.txt. Sometimes the mistakes are very basic. The one below is just too funny. I thought I would share the love. Search Google for "MD care" MD Care Inc. - Welcome<a id="LXPLSS_979677678U1"></a> <cite>www.mdcarehealthplan.com/</cite> This is an SEO description that will be seen by the search engines and used in the search results. The meta keywords tag is even funnier: <meta name="keywords" content="spam,the,keywords,here,like,this,and this,good" />
On-Page Optimization | | irvingw2 -
Cross Domain Duplicate Content
Hi My client has a series of websies, one main website and several mini websites, articles are created and published daily and weekly, one will go on a the main website and the others on one, two, or three of the mini sites. To combat duplication, i only ever allow one article to be indexed (apply noindex to articles that i don't wanted indexed by google, so, if 3 sites have same article, 2 sites will have noindex tag added to head). I am not completely sure if this is ok, and whether there are any negative affects, apart from the articles tagged as noindex not being indexed. Are there any obvious issues? I am aware of the canonical link rel tag, and know that this can be used on the same domain, but can it be used cross domain, in place of the noindex tag? If so, is it exactly the same in structure as the 'same domain' canonical link rel tag? Thanks Matt
On-Page Optimization | | mattys0 -
Very basic hands-on type of question about SEO
Hello, I am a complete newbie to the world of SEO and I have read few thing available on the net about things to begin with (so google seo guide and then seomoz beginers tutorial) and I just wanted to ask if I understand the process correctly: So I have my website lest call it abcd.com and there I might have a subpage about certain type of robots or specific parts that these robots are built from. I do my keyword search using adwords keyword search tool. Where I get 10 phrases (phrase1, phrase2, phrase3 so on..) that could be used by users to search information about certain type of robots I wrote on my website. Let's asume all 10 of those phrases have low competition so they can all be used. And they are from the long tail ofcourse so let's say I can get 10,000 searches from them per month. Some of them would have 200 searches, some 1500, some 5000 per month in that google adwords report. After reading those basic tutorials I understand it this way: I put one or two best phrases of those 10 in my <title></p> <p>2) I describe the website as accurately as possible to those keywords in <meta description> i.e. Those specific robots are built from those specific parts - we know all about them.</p> <p>3) I put all of them in <meta keywords> phrase1,2,3, etc.</p> <p>4) I use one or two phrases in <h1> on the page with article</p> <p>5) then I use those phrases in the text that's on that particular page of my website - text is about certain type of robots and parts etc.</p> <p>6) I put photos on that page with alt descriptions that may contain some of these phrases</p> <p>7) to be honest I don't know how am I suppose to build links from that page about certain type of robots to anywhere else on my website - but I undestand that's the part of SEO as well</p> <p>And that's pretty much how I understand the basics of SEO. I read about it and I just don't know if that's what I am suppose to do. Silly me!</p> <p> </p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz1