Updates for the week ending October 30, 2020

This week I updated some specific, on-page optimization processes.

When most people think about SEO, they think about tweaking (or maybe, optimizing) content on a page in order to rank better. If you’re part of the Curious Ants community, you know there’s a lot more to it than that.

However, content optimization is still part of an effective SEO process. In fact, there are two different parts of on-page SEO that are worth calling-out: writing title tags and meta descriptions.

People often confuse a title tag with the headline on a page. While they’re sometimes the same, these are two different HTML elements. The title tag (which makes a big difference for SEO) is what you see when you look at the tab of a web page in a browser. Google uses this (most of the time, at least) as the “blue link” in the search engine results, when it serves a page.

The meta description is also used in the search results. It’s an “invisible” tag on a page that suggests to Google what it should put under the blue link in the search results. At this point, Google seems to only take meta descriptions as a suggestion for the search results. There is a way to increase the chance Google will choose your meta description in the search results.

These are important for a couple reasons. For one, the title tag is probably the most important on-page ranking factor (although the meta description is not a ranking factor). Second, this is your opportunity to not only show a searcher that your page has what they’re looking for, but convince them to click your listing (among the others). That means a good meta description and title tag might get more clicks than a website that ranks better if these elements are more engaging.

In addition, I updated some of the processes regarding page speed improvements. This is becoming more and more important as Core Web Vitals become a ranking factor in the next couple of months.