- Site Title: Title needs to be closer to 60-65 characters to rank, please keep your best (most traffic) keyword at beginning of title as well.
- Meta Description: Make it clear and precise to the point, and thematic to your keywords. This is a great place to have a USP (Unique Selling Point)
- H1: Your H1 should have your main keyword in it and be more of a Headline about the overall theme of your site/business/product.
- Page load time: Use Pingdom Tools, your goal should be a quick loading page with less than 2 seconds load time.
- Trust Classifiers: Link out to 1 or 2 other trusted resources within your niche. I usually like to do this with a generic word (within your actual content) related to your niche/theme and link to Wikipedia, W3C, or BBB, etc… Those things are all trusted and they will help when you want to rank between #2/3 and #1 and they will also hold value for trust with manual reviews especially if you are offering any type of service or product.
- Social Accounts: Link out to them, try to hard code into the page/site because plugins suck up a lot of page load time.
- Code, Design, Unique Theme, www. or non www: I’m not a code specialist, or theme design quality checker, but please make sure your code is clean, and that your theme is 100% unique. Make sure you’ve chosen to re-direct to either www or non www for your url. Here is a great video by Google Webmasters that will describe more. You can find the content on this particular subject at exactly 50 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM | A sitemap should be prevalent on your website so that the spiders can quickly crawl the entire site.
- Terms of Service / Privacy Policy: Please make sure you have them, and available for someone to click to.
- Content Thematics & Keyword Density: The sweet spot is 1% for density with the current algorithms. Please make sure that your content also clarifies your USP (unique selling point/proposition) This will also help you with ranking top 10. Using this tool while ‘un-checking the option ‘title’ and ‘meta’ works well: https://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html
- Landing Page Layout & Call to Action: Call to action is on top right (where people will always want to click), make sure your banner is not taking up the whole upper half of the page, this (on rare occasions) can result to a penalty, so, you may want to trim off just a bit of that so that you are 100% sure there is a bit of content showing to every browser, mobile device, and desktop. You can use this tool to help you with your adjustments. https://browsersize.googlelabs.com
Author: Joshua Cabe Johnson
