1. Write a compelling Title Tag and Meta Description

Your page title and meta description are two of the most important meta tags on your page. Let’s cover title tags first.

Title Tags

Title tags are clickable headlines that appear in search results and are extremely critical from an SEO perspective. Search engines like Google typically display the first 50-60 characters of a title. Google will display the full title to your page as long as you keep your title tag under 60 characters.

Here are some other best practices to keep in mind while creating title tags:

• Include your target keywords.
• Write a title that matches search intent.
• Avoid creating duplicate title tags.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Keep it descriptive but concise.

Meta Descriptions

The second most important meta tag on a page is the meta description. A meta description is a brief summary of a page in SERPs it displayed below the title tag.

Meta descriptions do not directly impact search rankings, but they can influence click-through rates.

Google typically truncates meta descriptions to 155–160 characters, so make sure you provide an accurate summary of your content while keeping it under 160 characters.

Here are some best practices to follow while writing your meta descriptions:

• Write unique meta descriptions for each page.
• Use action-oriented copy.
• Include your target keywords.
• Match search intent.
• Provide an accurate summary.

2. Optimize Your Images

Images play a crucial role in improving the user experience of visitors on your site. Chances are you spend a lot of time selecting the right images to enhance your blog posts, product pages, and other important pages on your site.

But do you spend an equal amount of time optimizing the images on your site? When used the right way, images can contribute to your site’s overall SEO and boost organic traffic. Below are four things you can do to optimize your images.

Choose the Best File Format
Site speed is an important ranking signal, and images are often the largest contributor to overall page size. As a result, you need to optimize images for speed in order to improve the overall performance of your site. The first step involved in optimizing images is picking the best file format, so let’s look at JPEG vs. PNG. vs. WebP.

The most commonly used image formats on the web are JPEG and PNG. Both of these formats use different compression techniques, which is why the file sizes between these two can be dramatically different.

Looking at the difference in file sizes above, it would be easy to declare JPEG as the clear winner. But it would be a mistake to use JPEG as the de facto image format for your site.

WebP is another option, which Google breaks down here. They state, “WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.

• WebP lossless images are  26% smaller in size compared to PNGs.
• WebP lossy images are  25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent  SSIM quality index.”

Compress Your Images

The larger your image file size, the longer it takes the web page to load, which is why it is imperative that you compress your images before uploading them on your site.

Luckily, there are several free tools out there that can help you compress your images.

• TinyPNG: TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG and JPEG files.
• ImageOptim: If you’re a Mac user, you can download and use this free tool for all your image compression needs. ImageOption is a tool recommended by Google as well. It’s by far the best tool for compressing JPEGs, but not for PNGs. For compressing PNGs, you’re better off using TinyPNG.
• ShortPixel: If you run your site on WordPress, you can install this plugin to compress your images. ShortPixel’s free plan allows you to compress 100 images per month.

Provide Alt Text for Images

Despite advances in Google’s abilities to understand images, adding alt text to images is still a necessary step. Adding alt text to images improves web accessibility and helps browsers better understand the images on your site.

Lazy-Load Your Images

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-critical resources (images, videos, etc.) at page load time. Instead, images and videos are loaded only when users need them.

3. Optimize Your Page Speed

If your site takes a long time to load, you are going to have a lot of frustrated users, and your rankings will drop.

There are several free tools that can help you check your page speed, including Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights; you can learn how to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score here on Semrush.

The tool I recommend for this task is GTMetrix. This free tool provides insights on your page speed and gives recommendations on the steps you can take to improve your load time.

You can also use Semrush to perform a site audit and fix all the performance issues with your site. Here is how:

• Login to your Semrush dashboard and navigate to Projects > Add New Project > Enter your domain.
• Enter all the details here and hit “Start Site Audit.”
• Within a few seconds, Semrush will generate an audit report showing all the on-site errors you need to fix to improve the overall SEO health of your site.
• From the audit report, navigate to Site Performance and click on the “View details” button.

Now you can view all the performance issues on your site that are preventing it from loading faster and take steps to fix them.

In addition to image compression, here are some other things you can do to help your pages load faster:

• Enable browser caching.
• Delete unnecessary plugins.
• Reduce server response time.
• Reduce the number of redirects.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript files

4. Improve the User Experience on Your Website

Google keeps a close eye on how users behave with your content. As such, user experience is one of the key factors in improving your search rankings.

Page speed plays a vital role in improving the user experience of visitors on your site
Here are a few other tips to ensure that users have a good experience when they visit your site:

Proper use of subheadings (H1, H2, H3) helps Google understand your content better and makes your text more accessible to readers.

Make your content visually appealing: Several studies indicate that visuals help people understand your content better. Use relevant images, videos, and screenshots to illustrate your points.

Avoid using intrusive popups: Popups are not just bad from an SEO perspective, but they also end up annoying your visitors. Since 2017, Google has been penalizing sites that use intrusive popups. So use popups sparingly. If it is absolutely necessary for you to use them to grow your email list, use exit-intent popups, or display them to users who have spent at least 5 minutes on your site.

Use white space: White space is a fundamental aspect of good design. According to Crazy Egg, white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by 20%. So consider using white space to make your content more legible and grab user attention.