Widening the Effects of Your SEO Efforts? (Part 2)

So, the second part is finally here. I am going to list the items that you should include in your SEO checklist.

I have already touched the surface on part 1. If haven’t read that yet, you better check it out.  For this post, I will explain in detail what the SEO factors are, and how it influences the search engines to understand your website better.

Of course, if it can easily scan your content, the search engines can give you a spot on the first page on the results page. Are you ready? Let’s continue on right away…

• The Meta Description
  • After the title tag, it is the meta description’s turn. If these 2 are well-written, your page gets more clicks. Because it tells the search engines that this page is constantly being accessed, the search engine will automatically bump your page up in terms of ranking.
  • The ideal number is a max of 160 characters. So, please create a meta description around that limit.
  • Same with the title, if the meta description is confusing, no one would dare click your page. It is best to give a general overview of your post. Keep the words simple and easy for everyone to understand.
  • Also, include relevant keywords to help you rank and get better SEO scores.
• The Breadcrumbs
  • Add some breadcrumbs to help everyone browsing your website to retrace their steps especially if it took them several clicks to get to that page.
  • There should be a guide on where they are, how they got to this point. So, in case they get lost while navigating, they can quickly find the pages relevant to their search. It would be frustrating to start the search all over again.
  • You can simply add text links to guide the web visitors, and these text links should be at the top so they can obviously see the URL structure.
    • I’m sure you already tried clicking the wrong page of a website. You wanted this page, but you accidentally clicked this page. Thus, breadcrumbs serve an important purpose in site navigation.
    • Also, the breadcrumbs help your web visitors and the search engines to know the hierarchy of your website. They can identify the different categories and topics. Thus, they quickly identify the articles that are related to each other.
    • Lastly, breadcrumbs ensure an enjoyable browsing experience because of the detailed URL structure. For example, you are looking for books on Amazon. In there, there text links that will tell you about the specific genre. Once you click mystery genre for example, you can easily browse for books under the same genre.
• A Link Within a Page
  • Speaking of books, it is also important to add something similar to “a table of contents” on a specific web page.
  • This is helpful when you are explaining about a topic in great detail. You can just add jump links to a specific section. So, the web visitors can just go to the section that interests them, and skip the areas they don’t want.
  • Look at Wikipedia, they provide jump links on every  web page. For example, you searched for the dog breed Akita. There will be jump links for the overview of the breed, the Akita breed history, the description, the expected health, and etc. So, if I’m only interested on knowing the dog’s appearance and coat, I will immediately go to the description section.
  • It simplifies things if you offer jump links. Not to mention, it saves you a lot of time! No need to scan a page from top to bottom.