In this short blog post I’m going to explain 5 of the best practices to better your on-page SEO. Follow these guidelines when building or tweaking your web pages. Remember that SEO is a never ending story. Once you see results you can’t just stop and think it’ll stay that way. As we all know Google is always changing and so is how search rankings work.
I’m not going to even include this as a top factor because lets be real it’s 2019 and every one should have a mobile friendly website. If you don’t and you’re reading this wake up because you’re missing out on so much potential.
1. Content is still King!
Make sure content is at least 300 words minimum. Google prefers it to be around 1,100 to 1,300 words per page. While this still holds truth it’s more about quality of content rather than quantity. Make sure you’re answering questions and solving problems. Let your content flow naturally.
Focus on providing comprehensive coverage of the topic. Make sure your content is informative and engaging your audience. Make sure you know who your target audience is so you can develop your content around the buyer personas.
Within your content focus on your city or region targeted. This means use the city name a few times. At least once in a heading and in the body of the content. This is especially true for local SEO. It will help your search rankings.
Use keywords within content and headings. Make sure to use your keyword in the H1 tag. Within your content use your keyword in the first few sentences and the last few sentences. The body of content you can let it flow naturally and use other keyword variations such as long-tail keywords.
Only use one h1 tag on each page.
Use subheadings such as at least one h2 tag and a couple h3 tags.
Stay conversational, natural, and avoid keyword stuffing. The days are long gone of throwing in your keyword a hundred times and ranking well. Google gets smarter by every hour and knows what readers like and want.
2. Images, Videos, Info graphs, & GIFs
We all like these in our content. It makes reading an article so much easier. I’ll admit I’m lazy when it comes to reading articles unless it’s something I really enjoy, like SEO, hiking, and golf. I tend to skim, look at images, and look for the info graphs. Not only do these help your rankings on search pages but it helps image and video searches.
Make sure each image’s file size is as small as can be. This is true for videos, gifs, and any other media source on your site. Keep files small so it doesn’t affect load times.
Use title tags to describe your images, videos, and more – use keyword and city/region to help better on-page optimization. Describe your image or video in more detail with the alt tags. Google bots can’t see an image or watch a video they need to be told what the image or video is about.
3. SEO-friendly URLs
Avoid bad URLs that are full of numbers and letters or dates that don’t make sense. You’ll want to have a short but sweet keyword rich page URL. It’s been said that shorter URLs rank better with Google.
4. Links – internal and external
Here is where you can show authority to other internal pages within your website or blog. When writing content make sure to try and link back to other articles previously written or your service pages. This helps build authority as Google bots and others crawl your site. They see the links and it makes those pages noticed more.
Make yourself look credible and reliable by providing evidence to your writings. Have external links showing that you’ve done your research or know what you’re talking about.
5. Structure of internal web pages
Use only 1 ‘< h1 >‘ tag and use it at the top of your pages. Keep your page readable and easy to follow down the page. Create separate pages for each service provided. Embed a Google map somewhere and offer old-school driving directions. Have an FAQ’s page. Always display contact info in header or footer for easy finding. Make sure you hire the right web designer for your project. They should know SEO best practices for websites – at least you would hope so. That’s why it’s important to know you’re hiring the right person or company.
If you want to learn more please feel free to check out our Blog.
If you have any questions or want a FREE SEO audit please contact me today!.