My SEO formula
SEO (search engine optimization) has never been my main focus in my career, but I've learned a ton about it from my own experience with my personal websites and writing projects, as well as in my professional gig. As someone who's created a lot of websites and published tons of writing online, I've always tried to learn and practice good SEO habits so I can reach as many people as possible with my ideas. I've seen the real results of this working, and it's fascinating! Although everyone is more or less aware of SEO, I feel like not enough digital professionals understand how it really works and what we as content creators, designers, web developers, etc, should focus on in order to maximize the engagement we can win through search engines.
Of course Google frequently tweaks their search algorithm, and so SEO best practices have changed a bit over the years. Google actually doesn't publish all the specifics of how their search algorithm works because they don't want unscrupulous website creators to try to game the system — however, Google also knows how to detect these shady websites who try, and those sites get punished by being placed lower in search results, or even removed from search results entirely.
There are a handful of key SEO guidelines that have basically been true forever, and I make sure to consider them whenever I'm writing (and/or designing, and/or programming) anything for the web. This first one is really the main thing you need to know:
Content* is king
*That is to say, well-written, high-quality, honest, accurate, precise, relevant, valuable, engaging content is king.
Good SEO can help boost your website, but there are no SEO tricks that will help bad content get good engagement. And the opposite is true; in general, a site with bad SEO can still do well if the content is excellent and valuable to users. It's the usefulness of content that matters more than anything else.
However, there are lots of best practices around SEO that absolutely can help your site get ranked higher in Google search results and get more people engaging with your content. They're free! They're easy! Here they are.
Repetition — within reason
Of course, the more times you use an important term in your piece, the more Google may consider the piece to be relevant to users who are searching for that term. So it does help to repeat key terms and phrases, but of course you don't want to overdo it to the point where your text starts to sound awkward or tacky, or generated by a bot; users react badly to that sort of thing. Remember, well-written, high-quality content. You don't want to sacrifice quality in favor of possibly boosting SEO a tiny bit. Write your content for users, not for Google.
Vary your terms
Rather than repeat the same key term or phrase throughout your piece, consider alternate terms/phrases people might search for, and sprinkle some of those in there too. I'll give you an example from the industry I've spent the most time in; pharmaceutical marketing. It was standard for many years for pharma brand websites to have a page or section about "Dosing," always using that term. At some point some SEO consultants noticed that users (doctors, patients) are more likely to search for the term "dosage," as in "[brand] dosage." So an easy little SEO win was to either change the Dosing page to be called Dosage, or simply start sprinkling in instances of the word dosage on the Dosing page.
Page title, aka title tag
The title tag of your page is important for two reasons:
1. Google will use it (along with all these other things) to decide what your page is about and rank it accordingly in search results.
2. The title tag is also what users see when they're viewing search results. Your title tag is the blue link in Google's search results page.
So in a way the title tag has to be persuasive to two different audiences: Google's algorithm, and a user who's making a decision about which link to click in a Google search results page. Your title tag might be the thing that convinces a user to tap/click on your link rather than someone else's.
Just fyi, your page's title tag is also what's displayed in the browser tab at the top of the browser interface when a user is viewing the page. This is less important than the above two points; just something to know.
My rule of thumb is to use whatever my h1 heading is for the page and just paste that into the title tag. If you look at the browser tab above, you'll see this page is called "My SEO formula," which is the same as the title at the top of this article.
Meta description
This piece of content is hidden to a user who's looking at your page, but it also serves a double purpose, a lot like your title tag. Google uses the meta description as part of how they index and rank your page, and Google also displays the meta description in their search results page; it's the black text under the blue link (aka the page title). So, just like with title, the meta description can help a user decide to tap/click on your link rather than another.
Keep in mind, for both page title tag and meta description, a longer piece of text may become truncated (with "...") in Google's search results. This is fine, but remember to keep your most important words toward the beginning if possible, for both. Take a look at some examples in a real Google search to get a sense of how many characters are displayed before the "..."; this has changed a bit over the years. (And I just now confirmed they're truncated the same on mobile and desktop; at least on my devices.)
Og title and description
My understanding is that og title and description do not factor in to SEO, but they are very important for engagement. We should include them every time, so that when users share your page on social media, viewers will see a good accurate title and description and hopefully be persuaded to tap/click.
I mention these non-SEO bits because, in most cases, your og title and description can just mirror your page title and meta description; you can just paste those same pieces of content into the og tags. There may be a good case for making these different for certain pages, but I've never encountered an instance that warranted it.
Url
Your domain name and the text of your full url — i.e. the names of your website's directories and the file names of pages — count toward a web page's SEO. My rule of thumb is to make the file name of the page essentially the same as the h1 title of the page, converted to all lowercase, and with dashes instead of spaces. Take a look in your address bar and you'll see this page is called "my-seo-formula.php" (with the ".php" set to be hidden). That's the same as my h1 at the top of this article, and I also use that exact same text as the page title tag and the og description. Nice and simple.
Good use of headings (h1, h2, etc)
This one is probably pretty obvious; it's always been best practice to use proper markup for headings, although some web developers and some website frameworks don't do it, for whatever reason. Google still places a lot of weight on what's in your h1, h2, h3, etc. Not only should you always use them, it's also a good idea to make sure your most important terms or phrases appear in them — so long as it's not clunky or weird-sounding.
Bold and italicized terms
This is another one that I'm not sure Google still cares about, but it can also help with engagement, so it's worth doing. Bolding and/or italicizing some of your important terms or phrases can help draw the eye and keep users engaged and reading. It makes the most important words pop a bit when a user is skimming. This is another one you don't want to overdo; a decent rule of thumb is to do this with the first instance of your important terms/phrases when they appear in paragraph (non-heading) text.
Cross-linking between sites
I try to promote my websites and articles in my other websites and articles, as well as on social media, etc, whenever I can. Does Google still care about this? A quick search says yes. I know that many years ago, a lot of unscrupulous websites got busted for using link farms, which basically would create tons of fake websites to link to the unscrupulous one, thus making Google think it's a more important site than it is. I recommend Googling what happened to JCPenney back around 2011; they got removed from search results entirely for a while as a result of using this dishonest tactic.
Anyway, cross-promoting sites and articles in a way that's honest is 100% fine from Google's perspective, and of course it's also great for driving engagement regardless of SEO. For these reasons I try to do it as often as possible.
Image best practices
Don't include tons of unnecessary decorative images, as this can slow down your page load speed, and Google pays very close attention to this. Not enough people are aware of how critical page load speed is for SEO, so I wrote an article about it: Page load speed.
Make sure images are sized to the correct dimensions they need to be; not larger (and shrunk down in the html code) or higher resolution. Again, this helps with page load speed. Don't use double-resolution (aka retina) images unless absolutely necessary, like for readability of small text (but really, your text should never be embedded in images; that's terrible for SEO as well as accessibility/ADA compliance).
Make sure images have been compressed for the web, so the file size is as small as possible. Tinypng is a great (free!) tool for this. Again, page load speed is critical for SEO.
Give your images file names that are semantic and useful — so, not "image1.png". And don't go with "chart.png" when you can go with "[brand]-efficacy-chart-showing-improvement-over-ten-weeks.png" Google looks at this stuff! All of these little things help build a case for Google to consider your page important and relevant for a certain search topic.
Alt text! This is so important, both for SEO and (I'd argue, even more so) for accessibility. Don't write your alt text like only Google is looking at it; remember that people with visual impairments who use screen reader software will hear the alt text, so you don't want to cram tons of extra search-friendly junk in there, as this could sound weird or tacky (or even annoying) to users who are hearing it. Check out my article about alt text basics!
Programming best practices
This can be a tricky one, especially if you're using a CMS platform or a website framework that creates a lot of your website's code for you. If you're creating a site from scratch, or you have access to edit a good deal of the website's code, there are several simple best practices that can give you an edge from an SEO perspective.
Keeping the website's code as brief and lightweight as possible helps with page load speed. Avoid bloated javascript libraries with tons of unused functions. Don't implement bells and whistles that don't provide any real value to the user; they just slow the site down, and Google will punish it in search rankings.
I already mentioned the correct use of h1, h2, etc tags above; that's crucial too.
If you're a dev who happens to be working with a team of non-devs (e.g. a project manager, designer, copywriter, etc), and your colleagues haven't provided things like alt text for images, content for og tags, page title and meta description, etc, then it's your responsibility as the developer to raise your hand and ask for these pieces. They team may not be aware of their importance, or even that they exist. As the owner of this digital knowledge, a dev can save the day by acting as a partner and consultant and sharing this info.
Other things
Reading level
This is one that I admit I don't consider very much or very often in my own work. It's true that writing content that's at a simpler reading level is very good for SEO (and for accessibility!). Personally, I find that the various topics I write about — from digital best practices to paper maché — are often complex and need to be discussed at a higher reading level in order to achieve the required degree of precision to properly elucidate them. (Whew, that sentence came out fancier than usual; I swear that wasn't on purpose!) Or maybe this says something about my abilities as a writer, or lack thereof; could be! On top of all that, I mainly write for my own pleasure, and this is simply the style in which I enjoy writing. However, I recognize it's something I can and should work on, especially for better accessibility.
What about meta keywords?
There's no point in bothering with meta keywords. Google stopped looking at them in 2009. It was too easy and too tempting for unscrupulous web content creators to stuff them with too much stuff, irrelevant but highly searched stuff, etc etc. Bing kept crawling them for a long time after Google stopped, but it looks like they've knocked it off too.
Personal anecdotes about SEO
I first got interested in SEO back when I lived in Paris and wrote a website about my favorite things there. I launched it in 2009 or so, and it's still live but it's very old and outdated: Cool Stuff in Paris.
This site was my first experiment in earning ad revenue through Google AdSense, and although I had been generally aware of SEO through my career as a website designer/developer, suddenly SEO became very important to me; my earnings depended on it! I read up on it and learned all of the guidelines that I described above; they really haven't changed much in all these years! And I was able to see the results pretty quickly; I'd search for one of my topics, find that my page didn't have a great ranking, and then I'd tweak the page's SEO, upload it again, and wait a couple weeks, and boom, I often had a much better ranking — and I'd often see a bump in my ad revenue as well. I still play this game once in a while with my various websites; it's fun!
A great compliment I've received a few times is that a colleague in the US will be searching for some info for their upcoming Parisian vacation and they tell me they were surprised to land on an article with my name on it. The same thing has happened for my site about my paper maché work, and even my positively ancient website about visting the original Dracula's castle in Romania. (Cross-linking is good, remember?)
No need to overthink it!
Whew, that's a lot of words for a topic that I truly believe can and should be pretty simple. There's a lot to know about SEO, but the writing and implementation of these elements is easy to do. If you don't currently create your web content with these guidelines in mind, give it a try! You may see some real improvement. Google re-crawls and re-indexes websites frequently, so you could see results in a matter of weeks!
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.