Google is king, so it is worth making sure your articles get seen by its search spiders.

At time of writing, Google indexes articles which have 250 or more words, so don’t write an article that is shorter than that

Google sees and reads  Meta Title, Description, H1s, H2s, H3s, Content, Image Titles and Descriptions,  in that order.

Title (Headings) Structure:

●      H1s – Only one H1 per page

●      H2s – As many as required but ensure a mixture of H2s, H3s and H4s

●      Use H3s as subheadings of H2s, and use H4s as subheadings of H3s

 

H1 Heading Example

H2 Heading Example

H3 Heading Example

Images

Use at least one  image for each article. For longer articles, use more relevant images. Ensure that scale and alignment works for both mobile and desktop.

Alt-tags are designed to help readers who are hard of sight (voice software reads the description.)

Ensure alt-titles contain a keyword related to the post but ensure the Alt-Text describes the image. Eg. ‘Plumber fixes damaged hole in the wall.’

Anchor Text

Ensure you have at least one outbound link (link to another source such as Wikipedia.) Ensure that all anchor text is related to a keyword or phrase – do not have an anchor text such as “click here.”

Categories and Tags

Ensure a category is created such as News or Blog and keep all articles in this area. If you create multiple categories then this creates duplicate pages which can confuse Google. For a similar reason, ignore tags completely.

Meta Title and Description

This is what Google sees and displays on Google search (Search Engine Results Page)

●      Meta Title should be 59 characters maximum

●      Meta Description ( the line under the meta title)  is 159 characters visible, but you can extend this to 300.

For Meta- Titles:

●      Use a pipette as separators | Meta titles and descriptions are actually sized in pixels not characters so use as little pixels as possible.

●      Structure your Titles in this way – Title | Service | Call To Action | Brand where possible.

For Meta-Descriptions:

●      Descriptions – Include a variation of keywords, brand information and call to actions. Include USPs such as No Call Out Charge – Free Quotation

Posted in: Digital Training