How your web­site pages are struc­tured tech­ni­cal­ly makes a world of dif­fer­ence to how the search engines under­stand the con­tent. Hav­ing con­tent that delights your users keeps vis­i­tors on the page longer, impacts your KPIs, and builds your brand and your com­mu­ni­ty.

Here are eight ways you can improve your page con­tent and struc­ture, start­ing now.

1. Read Google’s Search Quality Handbook

Google’s search qual­i­ty hand­book is the guide Google pro­vide to its team of human raters who eval­u­ate web­sites in the search results. It serves as a feed­back loop for engi­neers who build algo­rithms that seek to yield the high­est qual­i­ty results. In Novem­ber, Google pub­licly released their hand­book, with updat­ed guide­lines for a mobile world and a heavy empha­sis on user expe­ri­ence. The 160-page doc­u­ment is a trea­sure trove of price­less mate­r­i­al that show­cas­es how Google thinks about and rates qual­i­ty – and how you should, too. So start hon­est­ly eval­u­at­ing your con­tent and pages are up to stan­dards.

2. Clean Up Your Code

You want a page with clean code that’s easy to crawl and pro­vides the infor­ma­tion the search engine bot needs to under­stand and rank it. So, the code that makes up your pages can either hold your page back or help cat­a­pult it into the lime­light. HTML5  is the lat­est markup lan­guage for struc­tur­ing con­tent, and is designed with mobile friend­li­ness and the seman­tic web in mind (check out some of these new tags). If you aren’t ready for a new site in HTML5, there are things you can do to clean up the cur­rent code – specif­i­cal­ly with page speed in mind (as that’s a sig­nal in Google’s rank­ing algo­rithm). Espe­cial­ly in a mobile world, Google wants you to ren­der your above-the-fold con­tent in 1 sec­ond or less. To learn more about how to make your site faster, check out these tools to ana­lyze your web pages.

3. Relevant, Responsive, Targeted Content

The star of the show, the con­tent on your page, should be the best answer to your searcher’s query it can be. But your con­tent strat­e­gy also needs to be dri­ven by:

• Search and audi­ence demand: What are the top­ics your audi­ence is talk­ing about right now?
• Respon­sive­ness: Con­sid­er the needs of the mobile user when it comes to hav­ing respon­sive and dynam­ic con­tent, and how it’s for­mat­ted for a mobile device.
• Engage­ment: More than just words on the page, con­tent is how you will achieve your page’s goals through all assets avail­able, from visu­al mar­ket­ing to video to call-to-actions and just plain enter­tain­ment.
• Ever­green and top-per­form­ing pages: What per­cent­age of your pages per­form well his­tor­i­cal­ly? How can you make them even bet­ter? Make a plan to update those ever­green pages every so often to ensure they have the most recent and fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion.
• Brand and tone: Writ­ing trends are chang­ing for brands, and right now, com­pa­nies have a lot of free­dom to explore their per­son­al­i­ties ful­ly through fun and hon­est con­tent.
• Relat­ed con­tent: How will you keep vis­i­tors on your site longer? What else can you show them?

4. Rethink Your Ads

Google eval­u­ates web pages against hun­dreds of sig­nals, but there are some spe­cif­ic algo­rithms that you want to con­tin­ue to under­stand as you try to improve page struc­ture. Google’s page lay­out algo­rithm tar­gets pages that have too many ads above the fold and force users to scroll down too far to get to the con­tent they orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to click through to. This is a user expe­ri­ence issue, and along with the rise of ad block­ers, sends a mes­sage to brands and pub­lish­ers that it’s time to focus on the user or suf­fer the con­se­quences.

5. Make Content Mobile-Friendly

For years, “going mobile” meant you were ahead of the game. Not any­more – now it’s essen­tial for vis­i­bil­i­ty and cap­tur­ing the grow­ing num­ber of mobile users (about 63 per­cent will access the Inter­net from their phone by 2017). There are plen­ty of ways you can assess the mobile-friend­li­ness of your site con­tent, espe­cial­ly with free resources from Google like this one.

6. Do Some Serious Content Quality Assessment

The Pan­da algo­rithm is specif­i­cal­ly aimed at chop­ping poor-qual­i­ty web pages from the results, and has gone through mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions over the years. We typ­i­cal­ly hear about it each time a new update is on the hori­zon, so it’s been impor­tant to stay proac­tive and make mod­i­fi­ca­tions as nec­es­sary – but when the Pan­da algo­rithm becomes part of the core rank­ing algo­rithm, it will be hard­er to iden­ti­fy if and when your site has been hit. Refer back to the first sec­tion on this list for a bet­ter idea of how Google thinks about qual­i­ty con­tent.

7. Top-To-Bottom Content Optimization

Sim­ple best prac­tices for on-page opti­miza­tion still help the search engines under­stand what your page is about. This means ensur­ing your meta infor­ma­tion is cor­rect­ly imple­ment­ed on the page in the head sec­tion, and that each page con­tains title and descrip­tion tags that sum up what the page is about. Unique meta infor­ma­tion ensures there isn’t any per­ceived dupli­cate con­tent by the search engine, and depend­ing on how entic­ing it is, can increase click throughs from the search results (espe­cial­ly impor­tant in an era of click-bait head­lines a la Buz­zFeed). Schema markup will con­tin­ue to be some­thing to explore on your pages to give more con­text to the search engines as to what the con­tent is about.

8. Make Your Pages More Secure

While HTTPS is more of a site-wide con­sid­er­a­tion, it impacts your site at the page lev­el. Google announced HTTPS as a light­weight rank­ing sig­nal in 2014 with the poten­tial to have more weight in the future. Con­sid­er HTTPS not only as a rank­ing sig­nal, but part of the user expe­ri­ence – as it will make buy­ers in an ecom­merce envi­ron­ment feel more secure. Here’s how to get start­ed if you aren’t already there.