Best Practices for SEO Elements on Your Pages

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So you know you need to improve your tags and elements: here are Conductor's general recommendations on the best practices for your on-page SEO elements. 

Title Tags

  • Limit title tags to 50 to 60 characters, up to 512 pixels. This is the limit Google uses in its search engine results pages.

  • Include high volume target keywords in the first 60 characters of the title tag. Exceeding this character limit might cause your page title tag to be truncated on results pages.

  • Avoid multiple occurrences of a keyword, which might reduce the perceived quality of the content.

URL

  • Try to keep URLs straightforward and simple. This creates a better user experience and makes it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your website.

  • Try to target a keyword in the URL.

  • Render URLs in lowercase.

  • Avoid unnecessary "stop" words like: "the", "a", "an", "in".

  • Use a hyphen to separate words, rather than spaces, underscores, or other special characters.

Meta Description

  • Limit meta descriptions from 120 to 158 characters, up to 920 pixels. The meta description is truncated at about 920 pixels on desktop and at about 680 pixels on mobile. Bing and Yahoo cut off the description at about 980 pixels.

  • Include your target keyword in your meta description.

h1 Tags

  • Each page should only have one H1 tag.

  • Target high priority keywords in your header tags.

  • Try to use different keywords from the title tag and meta description.

  • Use short phrases to keep your header tags succinct and distinct from your paragraphs.

  • Avoid repeating keywords in header tags.

Other Header Tags

  • If necessary, you can use 1 to 2 H2 tags, 2 to 3 H3 tags, et cetera.

  • Try to place headings in order, H1 should appear first in your content's markup.

  • Use short phrases to keep succinct header tags and distinct from your paragraphs.

  • Avoid repeating keywords in header tags.

Body Copy

  • Try to use targeted keywords naturally. Avoid repeating keywords excessively.

  • Vary your keywords to help rank for multiple variations of keywords.

  • Try to use 3 to 4 keywords for each 1,000 words in your content.

  • Use internal links to connect users and search engines to relevant content on your website.

See our video lesson on Best Practices for On-Page Optimization to learn more!