Quick wins and long-term strategies: How to prioritize your SEO efforts
Looking to understand how you can prioritize SEO efforts when time or resources are limited? Always prioritize pages with the highest traffic and consider your SEO strategy as a phased approach.
Phase 1: If you’re short on time, resources or both, prioritize these critical SEO foundation items.
Title tag
These 55 characters in your HTML are a key SEO factor. The title tag is what's shown as the webpage title in search results, as well as link previews in social sharing, and they are critical for both SEO and user interest.
All page titles should:
- Be unique. Title tags should summarize the page content, and should be different on every page.
- Be descriptive but concise with 50-60 characters. Longer titles will get cut off in search results.
- Include relevant keywords. When possible, include the ASU brand name at the end.
Example: Cronkite Journalism Major Program | Arizona State University
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Meta description
While not a direct factor in search ranking, meta descriptions are often shown as the descriptive copy for search results and link previews in social sharing. Compelling, descriptive copy can drive user clicks which can have a positive impact on ranking.
Meta descriptions should:
- Be unique and descriptive
- Be kept to 155-160 characters, as longer descriptions may get cut off
- Include keywords, but be written to be compelling to search users and invite clicks
- If using non-alphanumeric characters, be sure to use the HTML entity version to prevent display issues.
Example: Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ is a public research university ranked #1 in the U.S. for innovation, dedicated to accessibility and academic excellence.
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H1 and header tags
Sensible use of header tags (H1–H6) can provide structure and context to content that helps search engines better understand it. They also serve as an important part of content accessibility for users.
Header tags should:
- Have just one H1 tag, used to represent the main page headline if possible. While not mandatory, having a single H1 can help control search results when it is occasionally used in lieu of the title tag content.
- Be deployed in a consistent and hierarchical manner. For example, if you use H2 and H3 tags for section headings and subheadings, try to do so on all your associated pages.
- Be descriptive of the content they contain, as they can add relevance.
Example:
- H1: Majors and degree program
- H2: Customize your academic experience
- H3: Minors and certificates
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Sitemap
Sitemaps are directories of your website’s content that help ensure that all of the pages of your site are discoverable by search engines. They can also signal when content is recently changed so a current version can be indexed (added to pages available for search results) again.
Things to consider:
- Sitemaps are XML files. Proper and consistent XML formatting will help ensure there are no issues reading the file.
- You can submit sitemaps through Google Search Console.
- Do not include pages in your sitemap that you do not want potentially indexed, including pages you have marked “noindex” or blocked in your robots.txt file.
- Sitemaps are suggestions to help search engines but do not guarantee pages get indexed or ranked. They also don’t prevent search engines from indexing pages not in the sitemap.
- Be sure to keep sitemaps current to reflect new and updated content. There are a number of tools which can help you generate XML sitemaps and automate this process.
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Images
Optimized images can support a page’s keyword relevance, and get discovered directly through image search results. They also affect a page’s load speed, which has an impact on search ranking.
Image file size considerations:
- Page load speed is a ranking factor, so pages with large images to load may see their search performance drop. Reduce image file size as small as possible while retaining overall quality.
- Consider the right format for the image. Some image formats (e.g., JPG, PNG) can provide comparable appearance with a much smaller file size.
- Reducing an image’s display size in HTML settings does not reduce file size. For example, if a 1500-pixel source image is displayed at 300 pixels, the full 1500-pixel image still gets loaded. Consider making a copy of the image resized to the final display size if possible.
Image optimization considerations:
- Include alternate (alt) text — an HTML attribute that describes the image’s content. This should include relevant keywords.
- Alt text should also be written in a natural style, as it is also used for accessibility purposes for those who cannot see the image.
- While less critical than alt text, title attributes can also reinforce an image’s keywords. Titles define the text that appears when your cursor hovers over the image. For this reason, focus on helpful user context when selecting text.
- The image filename can be optimized to include descriptive keywords. Name the image with hyphen-separated words that align with the alt and title attributes. For background images, titles are extremely important components of SEO as images and alt text for background images are not crawled in the same way as standard images.
Example:
<img src=”asu-tempe-campus-map.jpg” alt=”ASU Tempe Campus Map” title=”Map of ASU Tempe Campus”>
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Link anchor text
Anchor text — the words in a text link — can provide useful information about the page it links to. Search engines look at the way that a page is linked to by other pages as a signal about its relevance. For image links, the alt text serves as the anchor text. Look at how other pages are linking to the page you want to optimize.
Anchor text considerations:
- Be concise and relevant to the page you’re linking to, including page content topic.
- Avoid generic terms like “click here” or the page address.
- Don’t use keywords excessively or unnaturally. This can be a spam signal to search engines. Focus on naturally relevant and varied text.
Examples:
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