Stellar SEO Tactics to Employ in Your Strategy

The face of SEO gets quite a makeover day and day, year after year

The face of SEO gets quite a makeover day and day, year after year, and is unrecognizable today from what it looked like a few years ago. A few years back, keyword stuffing was all the rage, and so was Meta keyword tagging. But in the SEO of today, it is quite a different ballgame. In the world of search today, an SEO maverick must check to see that they haven’t overused certain keywords in key elements to avoid penalty risks. Here are some stellar SEO tactics to employ in your strategy.

Stop overstuffing keywords into content, but instead use TF-IDF

This is an age-old adage that doesn’t seem to have gone out of style. There isn’t anything quite as unappealing for a reader than coming across awkwardly interjected keywords all through content. Keywords density is no longer key so there is no excuse for overstuffing them all throughout your content. Instead employ a tactic called TF-IDF or term frequency-inverse document frequency, which refers to that fact that content, should include several different phrases, some of which should appear more frequently than others.

Steps to follow while optimizing content for ranking and users:

Research the topic in question

Offer your site visitor relevant and compelling content

Check that you have written at least 400 words

See that the content is split into bullet lists or paragraphs

Each paragraph should have a heading

Create anchor text links within the body content

Add the topics of the page and a page title

Allow users to share the page easily to share the page easily

Avoid Meta keywords like the plague

Google banned SEO marketers from using Meta keywords because many of them didn’t use them correctly. Today, search engines have deemed Meta keywords to be spam signals. The only option is to avoid Meta keywords like the plague.

Remember to Markup Pages with RDFa, Schema, JSON-LD

Keep an eye on the next search result you do. You will find that results which contain more than just a description, title and URL are more likely to gain more equity of SERP. This is because HTML of the site is marked up to relay information to crawlers. Research has found that search listings with rich snippets have a 25% chance of bring clicked more frequently. Ensure that microdata such as images, logos, phone numbers, addresses, prices, software etc. is an integral part of your site

Pay special attention to your Meta Description

Most of the time, businesses fail to write up a clear and concise Meta description. There are others that do write Meta descriptions, but horror of horrors, use an automated plug-in or tool to generate one. A Meta description is 215 characters which convince potential readers to click on your link in a SERP to read more. These characters include the Meta description as well as the page title. While Meta descriptions do not play a part in ranking algorithms, they are responsible for conversion rates. It would be foolish to ignore them since it is a fact that they affect CTR.

Be sure to write relevant and compelling Meta descriptions for all the key pages of a site, especially for those pages that you intend to be socially shared. Usually, Meta descriptions have a 155 character limit, but remember that your description may be longer as words aligning with the search query will be bolded. That is why it is important to keep Meta descriptions between 115-145 characters.

License: You have permission to republish this article in any format, even commercially, but you must keep all links intact. Attribution required.