Here are some actionable tips and basic on-page SEO factors to make users and your search engines love your website. This presentation is designed for SEO beginners or those getting started to optimizing their websites. These best practices are not an exhaustive list but can get a great starting point for optimizing on-page.
More than Just Lines on a Map: Best Practices for U.S Bike Routes
On-Page Seo Best Practices
1. On-Page SEO Best Practices
Tips to make users and search engines love your website
@HUGrichmond
2. So, what is SEO anyway?
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and
quality of traffic to your website through organic search results.” ~ Moz
3. SEO Strategy: On-Page vs. Off-Page
Off-Page
What other sites
communicate to a search
engine about your site
● Links
● Trust
● Social
On-Page
What a site communicates
to a search engine
● Content
● Meta data
● Site architecture
9. How do you write great page titles?
Keep titles concise around 50-60 characters or so to ensure the entire title is visible.
Put the keyword at the beginning of the page title (you don’t want to risk searchers not seeing it if it gets
cut off)
Do not duplicate page title tags. This affects your search visibility!
Make sure the keywords on your page title accurately describe what the user expects to find.
11. How do you write great meta descriptions?
Keep them to optimal length for search engines which is roughly around 155 characters.
Use keywords intelligently and naturally
Make them compelling to get searchers to click (use questions, mystery, call-to-action, offer value to the
searcher)
Make sure the meta description is relevant to the page and page title.
Don’t forget to make them unique!
13. This is an example of a good page title and meta
description
Keyword phrase in the meta
description
Meta description is enticing, uses
great adjectives.
Keyword phrase in the page title and closer to the beginning
14. This is an example of a poorly optimized page title and meta
description
Page title does not have keyword phrase in it;. Losing valuable real estate to optimize for other terms.
Original meta description is short.
The rest of the meta description is cut off.
16. Use the Right Anchor Text When Linking Internally
Anchor text are the visibly clickable words within a webpage or blog post.
Avoid saying things like “click here”, instead use keywords related to the page
you’re linking to.
Search engines use anchor texts linking to a page as an indicator of a page
topic or which keywords the page should rank for.
If your anchor text says “most delicious burgers in Richmond” the page should
definitely point to a page that discusses that.
17. Use Keywords in Image Alt-Text
Alt-text’s purpose: this attribute provides alternative information for an image if a
user cannot see it (slow connections, errors or if the user is seeing a screen
reader).
Use keywords naturally within the image alt-text.
Make sure the keywords are relevant.
Avoid keyword stuffing!
Low impact on SEO, but still worth optimizing when you have time.
Image courtesy of National Geographic.
18. Make Sure It’s Linkable and Shareable
Make content accessible
(not all content should be
gated)
Content that’s not linkable
will be unlikely to rank
Include ways to share on
social
19. Works Cited and Helpful Resources
On-Page Factors: https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors
On-Page SEO 101: Tips for Keyword Optimizing the Most Critical Parts of
Your Website: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-site-keyword-optimize-
ht#sm.0001fj5tejvc1f7tqxq1v7obml9dn
Basic SEO Best Practices: http://www.rickwhittington.com/blog/basic-seo-best-
practices-google/
A Data Driven Guide to Anchor Text (And Its Impact on SEO):
https://ahrefs.com/blog/anchor-text/
So let’s break down this definition even further.
Let’s start with quality of traffic. If you’re familiar with the inbound methodology you might have heard the term “qualified leads.” This refers to garnering traffic to your site from visitors that are more likely to become customers. So if you’re optimizing around a keyword on your site that doesn’t make sense to your business like gel pens when you’re really selling pencils that’s not qualified traffic.
Quantity of traffic means you have the right people clicking through the search engine results pages (or SERPS for short) and the more traffic the better.
Organic search results means any traffic that wasn’t paid for like ads.
So, now that we know what SEO means let’s talk about the two types of SEO strategies there are out there.
Generally when you hear people talking about SEO they’ll mention on-page and off-page tactics. HubSpot does a great job of differentiating between the two and they do it by thinking about how these two tactics communicate with search engines.
On-page tactics refer to how a site communicates to a search engine. Ways to accomplish this is by creating great content, ensuring meta data is optimized and you have a good site architecure. This isn’t an exhaustive list but touches on some on-page tactics.
Off-page is how other sites communicate with a search engine. Your backlink profile has a lot to do with off- page optimization. This takes into consider the quantity and quality of the links pointing back to you. Are the links coming to your site spammy or are they high quality? Do your links and share make your site a trusted authority? How long has your domain been up? For social do you have ltos of shares on social networks are you highly reputable?
These tactics are by no means, the only things you can do to better rank in the SERPs. But, these tactics can improve your inbound marketing immensely bc they’ll ensure that you’re properly optimizing your content and webpages so that users really understand the purpose of your site and its webpages. Remember: the better the user experience, the better chance you’ll have to rank higher in Google.
This presentation will assume that you’ve already done keyword research for your business and will guide you on what to do with those keywords and where to put them. So, let’s dive in!
The first step is to make great content. We’ve done our keyword research and we have great ideas for topics, but is it great content and is great content defined?
Great content should satisfy a demand. There’s no point in creating content that isn’t useful to people.
As a marketer or an entrepreneur you’re most likely always looking to the internet for ideas on how to grow your social platform following. This marketer wrote a case study and how-to guide on how to grow your instagram followers quickly. He saw that there was a demand on Reddit and posted it onto the platform. The post was successful and he has been receiving inquiries to work with his marketing business from it.
So, how do we apply this to us? Think about your customer personas. What are their challenges, what problems do they have? Once you figure those things out you can easily brainstorm types of content that can satisfy a problem they have.
Now that we’ve determined that our content is a great one we create, write it and design it … now it’s time to ensure that it’s optimized. Before hitting publish we have to make sure our targeted keywords are in the right places. In addition to having them spread within the content we need to ensure that they’re found in our metadata. The first to consider are our page titles.
Titles are an HTML element to describe the topic of a webpage. You’ll notice these whenever you search for something in Google. This result comes up when you search for “Richmond HubSpot”
So, you’re probably thinking why is this so important? Is this really going to have a great impact? Absolutely, yes! Having the right page titles can be the difference between having someone click through to your site or deciding to skip it and find something better to click on.
Updating page titles can depend on your content management system. If you use HubSpot you can easily. Some content management systems like WordPress have SEO plugins like Yoast that allows you to update your page titles easily and lets you know if you’ve optimized it for your targeted keyword.
First you’ll want to write concise titles, the amount of characters has been contested so I would say about 50-60 characters to be safe (this also includes spaces).
Next, you’ll want to ensure the keyword is at the beginning of the title. If you were in eCommerce and were selling discount Apple products you’d want to ensure that was at the front of your title and not at the very end. You want to catch the searcher’s eye quickly and you don’t want to risk having a search engine cut out the keyword (more than likely the searcher will end up skipping your search result and click through to something that seems relevant to them).
DO NOT DUPLICATE page title tags. This is terrible for your search visibility, meaning your site rankings will suffer and you’ll lose traffic. When all your pages are competing with each other to rank for the exact same phrases search engines will end up providing less relevant results to users.
Meta descriptions are an HTML attribute that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets of a given page.
While meta description tags aren’t important to search engine rankings they are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs.
So, let’s say you’re craving a burger. What kinds of keyword phrases might you type into Google? You might search for something like “burgers in Richmond” “best burgers in richmond va” best burgers RVA”
So I’ve decided to search “best burgers in richmond, va” and this is one of the results that come up. Not bad, right?
You see that the keyword phrase is in the page title and is visible to the user. It’s used naturally.
The keyword phrase is found in the URL and the meta description has the keyword phrase in it. It also is written in an enticing manner. You could make a slight tweak to it so that there’s more of a call-to-action to it. As we’ve mentioned before, good meta descriptions use a sense of mystery to entice people to know more. I would rewrite this to say, “We’ve tried the juiciest, most delicious, best burgers in Richmond so you can eat the best buns in town. Learn which places made the cut.”
Way far down on page 2 we find this search result. This page is poorly optimized for the keyword.
You’ll notice that the page title does not have the keyword phrase and even has the word “home” in the page title. This is a waste. Instead of bogging down the page title with a word like home it could have inserted a highly searched key phrase like “best burger in richmond va.”
The meta description also falls short. It’s distracting and doesn’t have one key message. You might want to click on it because it was voted best fries, but you might not have noticed it since it was so far off from your search results.
Next, you should ensure that your URLs are optimized. So going back to our best burgers in Richmond example let’s take a look at the better search result. What do you notice about this URL? It has the keyword phrase? It’s a good length. There aren’t stop words in the URLs and it’s clear what the page is about.
Now look at this second example this is an example of a bad url. Could you have guessed what this page was about just from the url? Also notice the hierarchy of the information. Search engines and users can determined that the page relates to titles and is on the IMDB domain but can’t determine what the page is about.
Google fights back against manipulative anchor text. In 2012 Google launched a penguin update that targeted webspam. Anchor text was one of penguin’s primary targets and many website that had been overly aggressive with their exact match anchor text (with irrelevant content) saw rankings tack.
How would you describe this image? National geographic’s alt-text is “meerkat group on rock.” It’s short, to the point and accurately describes what you’re seeing.
The second element to great content is that it’s linkable and shareable.
If the content is not linkable search engines will be very unlikely to rank it and as a result the content won’t drive traffic to the given website. This includes content that is accessible only after logging in or doesn’t allow to be shared.
So, we’re coming to a close on the presentation here. Here are some of the works I’ve cited throughout, which also makes for a great list of helpful resources when optimizing your on-page SEO factors. We’ll email this deck to everyone who attended today.
