Help Visitors Find You: SEO Best Practices in Decoupled Environments

Pages on a website typically focus on a particular topic and thus contain topic-specific terms or “keywords.” Keyword optimization is about using terms and phrases in your content that people are likely to search for.

Why is keyword optimization useful for SEO?

It’s unlikely that people will search for an exact match of your page title. They are more likely to use their own words and terms to describe the topic they are interested in. To capture this traffic, you need to prioritize including the terms and keywords in your text that people most often search for.

How to optimize your texts with keywords

How do you know what keywords are most frequently used for the topic you’re writing about? You can make a sophisticated guess, but a more successful method is to use a keyword research tool. Some of the platforms offer a free tier, such as Moz.com or Ubersuggest.

Note down these keywords, choose the most relevant ones for your purpose, and integrate them into your content so that they appear in their natural context. Don’t pack too many keywords in the text, nor repeat them too often. Search engines might consider this as keyword stuffing.

For the same reason, avoid placing keywords in HTML <meta> tags for managing keywords because search engines often ignore them or view them as keyword stuffing because they appear out of context.

Focus on naturally integrating keywords into your content, striking a careful balance between too few and too many.

Great content keeps your readers engaged. Therefore, your content is the first place for applying search engine optimization, even if this sounds counterintuitive.

Why is on-page optimization useful for SEO?

An article can be short or long, and it can be structured or a large wall of text. If you structure your article so that relevant information stands out, search engines can better determine the relevance of your article.

How can you optimize on-page information?

First, write your headings and subheadings so that they already convey the most relevant facts about your article. If your readers, or a search engine, only scans the headings, they should already get a clear idea of what your content is about. Take the heading of this section as an example. It could have just read, “On-page optimization,” but this does not clearly communicate what this section is about. Go a little extra step and make the headings explain what’s inside the section.

Second, the aforementioned meta tags, while they shouldn’t be used for storing keywords, are a great place to add a summary of the article and an SEO-friendly title. Go to Sulu’s SEO tab, and you’ll see the Meta Title and Meta Description fields.

The meta title can be different from the title on the page! You can, for example, have a short, catchy title on the page and a longer title in the meta title field with additional SEO-relevant keywords. On the other hand, if your page title is quite long, you can create a shorter meta title while retaining—or even adding—relevant keywords. In both cases, ensure that the meta title stays below 55–60 characters, or it might get clipped on a search engine’s results page.

The meta description is a brief summary of the article. The length is fairly limited because meta title and meta description are also used when sharing an article on social media platforms. Those platforms pull the meta title, meta description, and a social media image (if one exists) and build a small badge from the contents. So try to create a concise but accurate description of your content within 160 characters, ideally also containing relevant keywords.

Sulu’s metadata page provides helpful warnings if the meta title or description exceeds the recommended length.

A web page URL can be short and cryptic or long and descriptive. While descriptive URLs are generally better, avoid making them too long.

Why is URL optimization useful for SEO?

A URL like 
https://sulu.io/blog/accessibility-and-structured-content-creating-inclusive-digital-experiences 
is much more informative than a cryptic one like this: 
https://sulu.io/4FG8HI643KM
Search engines may acknowledge this additional piece of information, but length alone is not a factor. Rather, it’s (again) the use of keywords that counts.

How to optimize a URL

Good CMSs give you full control over the slug—the part of a URL that comes after the domain. A well-crafted slug can contain useful information for the user and the search engine:

• It describes the content of the page
• It shows the content structure (like the “/blog/” part in the above example) so that the user knows where in the content hierarchy this page lives
• It is human-readable and more memorable than a cryptic slug

Many CMSs, including Sulu, can automatically derive the slug from the article’s title, so if you craft a great title, you have a great slug for free. However, if the title is (intentionally) kept short, consider extending the slug with a more descriptive version. Conversely, if the title is very long, you might want to shorten the slug by removing irrelevant words. The slug does not need to read like a complete sentence. Just add enough words to get an SEO-friendly description.

Users increasingly consume web content on mobile devices. Search engine providers observe how your content gets delivered, and if your site isn’t responsive, it can negatively impact your search rankings.

Why is having a mobile-friendly site useful for SEO?

A mobile-friendly site not only benefits your users but also the ranking of its pages within search results. Google’s move to mobile-first indexing means that the mobile version of a website is now the primary version used for indexing and ranking. Therefore, a page that works well on mobile devices gets a higher ranking than a page optimized for desktop monitors. Measurable factors that can influence the ranking include the page loading speed (see also the page speed optimization section below), better user engagement (resulting in lower bounce rates), and increased sharing.

How to make your site mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendliness includes several factors: content, interactive features, and the theme.

First, ensure that your site delivers mobile-friendly content to mobile devices. Our preferred approach is to use responsive design, where page content automatically adapts to the screen size. Alternatively, the server could deliver different content to mobile versus desktop users. The latter can be done by serving mobile content at different URLs (as you may already have seen with sites whose URL path contains an additional “/m/” when requested by a mobile device), or by inspecting the user-agent settings of the incoming request, which can help determine the requestor’s screen size.

To keep users engaged, verify if your web page’s features are mobile-friendly. For example, if a certain action is triggered by a mouse hover, it would not work on a mobile touchscreen. Replace the hover event with a different trigger, such as an extra button, or consider removing the hover action altogether.

Finally, choosing or building a mobile-friendly theme helps increase user interaction as well.

Thanks to its open and decoupled architecture, Sulu CMS supports any of the above techniques through flexible templating for structuring and presenting content, theming, or running Sulu in headless mode with a React frontend.

Your primary goal for page speed optimization should be to delight your visitors with fast page loads and no jitter. A side benefit is that search engines also appreciate high page-loading performance.

Why is page speed optimization useful for SEO?

Search engines measure page loading and page rendering times, and faster speeds not only signal a commitment to user experience, they also potentially boost your search rankings.

How to speed up your pages

Even if you only focus on raw page load speed, there is a lot you can achieve.

• Strive for an efficient page design with few lightweight elements. For example, smart use of CSS styles and SVG graphics can make a page look great while keeping the transferred data at a minimum.
• Leverage the available options for asset optimization:
  • Use advanced attributes of the img tag, like srcset and sizes, together with pre-scaled images, to deliver images at the right size for the target screen. (Tip: Sulu supports dynamic image sizes and compression out of the box.)
  • Minify resources: Text-based resources like HTML, CSS, or JS typically contain comments, whitespace, and other content that only exists to make the resource human-readable. Run these resources through a minifier to deflate them as much as possible.
  • Compress images: The JPEG format is astonishingly tolerant of high compression rates. Try out quality settings that are lower than what you are used to. If you tend to use JPEG images with an 80% quality setting, try 50%. The image might still look good while the file size shrinks dramatically.
• Leverage caching. Content caches can mitigate or even remove bottlenecks in the content delivery process, especially if traffic spikes. Sulu is cache-friendly and allows you to deploy various caching strategies using Symfony HttpCache or Varnish.

Page load speed is not a single measure, and it is not the only factor for a smooth browsing experience. Another consideration when loading a page is the jitter that can occur when images or fonts are loaded later. The first rendering of a page may happen with a default font and with no space for images until fonts and images are fully delivered. Switching to the new font and inserting the image makes the page layout shift up and down, which can be an annoyance for the user who has just tried to start reading.

Such factors are included in the Core Web Vitals, a set of measurements that Google created to determine how smoothly a page opens. To get the best ratings at Core Web Vitals, use the aforementioned techniques to optimize raw page load speed and ensure that the page layout does not shift during loading. For example, you can use image placeholders that are set to the same size as the final image. Sulu supports this by providing Media Properties Providers that can return the width and height properties of images or videos.

f your pages are extensively linked to each other, your visitors will stay longer and explore more of your content.

Why is internal linking useful for SEO?

A site whose users stay for a long period of time and navigate from page to page looks more valuable to a search engine than a site where users bounce off after a few seconds without clicking any links. When users stay on a site for a long time, it is a clear sign of high content relevance.

How to achieve high internal link density

This is primarily a question of good content planning. Broad topics can be split into smaller ones and presented to the reader as multiple pages linked together in a meaningful way. Common definitions can be collected in dedicated glossary pages that articles can link to.

In the Sulu editor, set your internal links using the special Internal Link feature. Rather than setting the link as a plain URL, you select the target page in the editor. If you move pages later, internal links won’t break because Sulu keeps them in sync with your content structure.

When following the above best practices, one aspect of your writing is often underrated: The quality of your text and its relevance to your readers.

Why is quality and relevance useful for SEO?

The rise of generative AI has led to an inflation of mediocre content on the web. To stand out from the bland mass of content flooding the web, ensure your content is high-quality and relevant to your target audience. The ranking algorithms honor texts that are truly helpful.

How to achieve quality and relevance

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to writing high-quality content. Practice a lot, and ensure that you always listen to constructive feedback from readers and peers. If you can, establish an editing workflow and have an editor (a real person) read over your text and provide corrections and improvements. Professional teams even use systems like editing codes to collaborate on their writings efficiently.

Search engines track page quality by looking at how many serious websites link back to your page. So, write content that your readers love to share.

SEO is a skill to master, and the above list might seem overwhelming. By taking one step at a time, you can significantly improve your site’s visibility iteratively without stressing out. Sulu’s features are designed to make this process easier, helping you climb the search rankings and reach your audience effectively.