Making Your Website Sound – On Page SEO
“Is your joint in tip-top shape?”
SEO has many complex and frequently moving parts. Just one of them is your website.
There are quite a few things that you can do to your website from and SEO purpose, before you even start to incorporate external factors. Collectively these “internal” factors are called On-Page SEO. While all of it will work together to form the complete puzzle, we can generally break On-Page SEO optimizations into two categories, User Facing and Machine Facing.
On-Page SEO for Your Users
Keep visitors and enhance conversions with Content, User Experience, and Navigation.
SEO efforts are traditionally thought about being for Search Engines. That’s not the case, the experience of your visitors to your website is just as important as the Search Engines. When a user stays on your website this is a signal to Google that they found what they are looking for.
First you can attract and keep users with Content.
Compelling and Useful Content
People visit your site for its content, be that information or a product, and they want to get value for their time. So a smart business or website owner will create content at every step of the sales process, or in all aspects of their niche.
Answer common or even obscure questions, provide product comparisons, or reviews. There’s many different ways that you could approach the creation of content depending on what your goals are.
Make It Easy to Navigate
Easy to read and navigate websites keep users on the page, an important factor that has only become more important since the leak of the Google API.
Avoid confusing or bloated menus, have good breadcrumbs for navigation around the site between topics, and have a robust search ability. These help users find what they are looking for on your website be it information or a product.
Use colors smartly. Harsh and bright colors should be accents, places to draw the eye to, not dominate the whole page.
Make it mobile friendly by having responsive webpages that visitors can easily navigate on their phones, tablets, and desktops.
Finally write headlines that not only use keywords naturally, but also accurately describe the content of the page and attracts readers. 80% of your effort should go into writing your headlines.
On-Page SEO for Machines
Before ever sending you traffic, website crawlers such as Google Bot need to be able to not only crawl but also understand the content on your website.
This means that there are many things that you can do to make it easier for Google Bot to understand your website, from linking to HTML structure, most of this will never be seen by your visitors but is critical to getting them to visit in the first place.
Keyword Optimization
Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of search and each page should be focused on one primary, and other naturally related keywords.
These should be used in your content naturally, hard to read, or “artificial sounding” content should be rewritten or removed. Furthermore, keywords should be used not just in the content, but also in Titles, Headers, Meta Tags, and Meta Descriptions, keeping in mind that this should all be in natural and readable language.
You may see length limits for things like Title Tags or Meta Descriptions recommended, however, these are rules of thumb and shouldn’t be hard and fast rules.
URL’s And Linking
When making URL’s for individual pages, make them easy to remember and share by keeping them short and succinct. Yet, still including targeted keywords. These clean URL’s are easier for users to read, and for search engines to index properly.
Instead of “www.example.com/page123,” use “www.example.com/on-page-seo-tips.”
When linking from page to page, consider how your content is divided and create logical content categories. Flowing from more broad topics to more refined topics naturally. Clustering related pages around categories and topics.
On pages where you touch on something related but outside the scope of the content use it as an opportunity to link to another page on your website or another authoritative source of information.
Crawling
Another critical component for Google Bot to accurately index your website is your Robots.txt file and your Site Map. Both of these play a role in how your website is crawled and pages are discovered. You should make sure that no pages you want Google to find are blocked in Robots.txt and your Site Map is up to date and accurately lists all pages you want crawled.
To make it easier to crawl each page, you should also make sure that you are adhering to HTML standards for use of the H1, H2, and other tags. This helps to give critical structure to the context of the information on your website’s pages.
Finally, you should also look for any redirect or 404 errors. Redirected pages should be handled with proper canonical tags and any issues with missing pages should be addressed.
Site Speed and Loading
Another aspect that has impact on both your rankings and user experience is your site’s speed. A highly detailed breakdown of how to accomplish faster site speeds would have to have a dedicated article. However, minifying content where possible, caching pages, and compressing images are all good ways to help your site load faster.
Images and Image Tags
Speaking of images, you should be properly tagging your images for their content with descriptive Alt Tags and File Names. Alt Tags are not only used by search engines but are also used by many assistant applications to help those with vision impairments navigate around your website.
SSL and Security
No matter what the intent of your website, you need to be securing it with a proper SSL certificate. Unsecured sites are no longer the norm, and it plays into rankings, even if you are not taking payments online. Users and Search Engines trust properly secured sites more.
Schema and Structured Data
The last major area that you should consider for On-Page SEO is Schema Markup or Structured Data. These are tags that help Search Engines to better understand the content on your website. From Products to Articles, there are appropriate tags for just about everything. Giving you a greater edge in the competition for rankings. We have a dedicated break down of Schema Markup that you can read here.
Putting it All Together
If you need assistance in optimizing your On Page SEO, or any other aspect of Digital Marketing, contact us today and we’ll help you to climb the rankings through a comprehensive Digital Marketing campaign.
