How to improve your SEO ranking

After keywords and LUMPS and links, we cover the rest of LUMPS: URLs, meta tags, paragraphs, page speed and sitemaps.

URLs
Keep URLs short, readable and descriptive, with the main keyword of the page: /blog/seo-tips/ says more than /page?id=123. Use hyphens between words, lowercase letters and a logical structure. Once a page is live, avoid changing its URL; if you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Meta tags
The title tag is the clickable title in the search results, and it weighs heavily for search engines. Put the main keyword near the start and keep it to about 50 to 60 characters. The meta description is the short text under it. It doesn't affect your ranking directly, but a clear description that answers the searcher's question gets more clicks. Search engines sometimes write their own snippet, but a good description gives you a better chance. The meta keywords tag is no longer used by Google, so you can skip it.

Then the text on the page itself. A long text reads better in several paragraphs. Use titles and subtitles, and use your keywords in titles and paragraphs, naturally.

Search engines give more weight to keywords in titles than in plain text, so work with heading levels (H1, H2, H3…) in the right order. But write for people first: a text stuffed with keywords and titles reads badly, and search engines notice that too.

Search engines reward fast pages, and so do your visitors. Google measures the experience of real users with the Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content loads, how fast the page responds and how stable the layout is. You can't control everything, but you do control a lot:

• Avoid heavy images: scale and compress them, and use modern formats.
• Choose a smart design: too many animations and effects make a page heavy. Keep it simple!
• Work with developers who write efficient HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Before a page can appear in the search results, a search engine has to know it exists. Search engines like Google and Bing find pages by following links on your website (crawling). To make that easier, submit an XML sitemap with all your important pages, for example in Google Search Console. Without one, search engines rely on your internal links, and you can't be sure if and when every page gets indexed.

With a robots.txt file, you tell search engines which parts of your site they shouldn't crawl, for example a login area. Note that robots.txt only controls crawling, not indexing. To keep a page out of the search results, use a noindex meta tag on the page itself, and let search engines crawl it so they see that tag. And with rel="nofollow" on a link, you tell search engines not to pass value through that specific link.

At Blastic, we build sites with SEO in mind: fast pages, editors that make good structure easy, sitemaps and a correct robots.txt. Want to know how your website scores? Get in touch.