Someday you’ll gather your grandkids around the rocking chair for story time and tell them tales about the SEO tactics you employed back in your day. They’ll watch in disbelief with wide eyes as you recall your cramming of a keyword 158 times into the body of your blog post, 36 times into the ALT text of its images and two or three times into its URL to make it onto page one of Google. They’d never consider doing that, because by the time they’ve continued your family tradition of SEO, techniques like keyword stuffing will be ancient history. Search engines are constantly evolving, so to make sure you stay relevant, you’ll need to keep up with all the latest SEO techniques.
SEO Tactics that Can Save Your Site
Cut It Out With the Keyword Stuffing
We’ve already made a mockery of keyword stuffing above, but it’s such an awful practice that we’d like to tell you again: avoid keyword stuffing! Keyword density is no longer the end-all, be-all of your content’s SEO success. In fact, too many keywords are repulsive to search engines and readers alike. Search engines are smart enough to know if you’re using the same word in every single sentence of your content. Readers will quickly lose interest if your content is clearly crammed with keywords
Our friends over at HubSpot recommend looking into TF-IDF, which means term frequency-inverse document frequency. That means you should include in your content different phrases that are relevant to its subject, and that some phrases should appear more often than others.
Consider this example: if you’re writing a page about how to cook the best cheeseburger, you’ll want to talk mainly about cheeseburgers, of course. But, what else is related to your topic? Think side dishes here. Don’t hesitate to talk a bit about French fries, potato salad and corn on the cob because they’re associated with your subject.
Ramp Up SEO With Responsive Design
Nowadays, tons of searches are done from mobile devices. Search engines understand this. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, your SEO will be negatively affected. Mobile-friendly web design is the perfect way to ensure that your website doesn’t plummet to the depths of search engine results pages. A responsive site will tie all of your site’s URLs together across all devices, which makes it easier for Google to see your pages and rank your content.
Make the Most of Your Meta Description
A strong meta description is one of our favorite SEO tactics that goes overlooked all too often. The truth is: meta descriptions don’t factor heavily in terms of page rank, but that doesn’t take away from their importance. They’re your chance to persuade a searcher to become a reader in about 115-145 words. Using words in your meta description that call searchers to action (“learn,” “check this out,” “take a look”) can turn it into an effective conversion factor.
Meta Keywords Can Kick Rocks
Don’t confuse your meta description with meta keywords. Meta keywords were originally used to help search engines gain an overview of your site, but too many people threw in as many keywords as they could. Now, Meta keywords are spam signals for both Google and Bing. Our advice is to just avoid them entirely.
Hold Your Header Tags in High Esteem
Header tags will allow search engines to understand what your content is about. They start at H1, which is the most important, and go all the way down to H6, which is not used as commonly as lower numbered header tags. Since header tags are one of the first things that search engine crawlers look at, it’s important that you understand how to use them to your advantage. Make them as unique as possible for the best results.
Hopefully these SEO tactics will help your website stay relevant in the ever-changing landscape of search engine updates. Remember to keep up with updates to search engines consistently so you don’t get stuck wasting your time with obsolete SEO methods!
