5 Important Strategies For On-Page Optimization
Our Atlanta SEO Company emphasizes results. Our main goal is to achieve high rankings for each and every one of our clients. However, we are also experts in the field, as well as die-hard SEO fanatics. We live and breathe this stuff, and we are consistently learning and teaching all that the Search Engine Optimization world has to offer. This is why we love to speak at conferences (and we do so often) and blog; in fact, we try to compose meaningful posts on a daily basis, covering all that is going on within the industry, so that we may share the things we know and the things we learn with whoever wishes to read what we have to say. We make it our mission to do so because we believe our passion, thirst for knowledge and desire to share that knowledge is what keeps us on our toes. Not only do we try to share new knowledge with our readers, but we also learn with them as we go.
With that being said, let’s turn our attention to on-page SEO. This is an element of Search Engine Optimization whose importance has intensified since the Panda update. Your site’s on-page factors include anything you control on your page. Makes sense, right? This includes such factors as your page title and title tag, meta-tags, header tags, and your site’s content. Here are some tips for optimizing important on-page factors.
Page Title and Title Tags
These show up at the very top of your site above where you type in a URL – and they are the first elements that Google sees when crawling the site. There is a 64-character limit for these. Since these are the first things Google sees, it is important to do thorough keyword research to ensure that you are utilizing the correct keywords. It is definitely important to use keywords when devising your page title and title tag; the keyword you wish to rank for should be at the very beginning of your title tag and should be relevant.
Meta-Tags
With a 160 character limit, meta-descriptions are important yet sometimes can be difficult to optimize. The meta-description is the second thing Google sees when viewing your site, and can be found in the SERPs directly under the title-tag. It is important to include a call-to-action with a phone number and at least one keyword if you can. This description should also read well and make sense; after all, it is a bird’s eye view of what your site has to offer. If you want people to visit your site and then take the extra step to do business with you, you have to make your meta-description good.
Content
We have focused on content in several blog posts on this site because it is simply essential in a Post-Panda SEO world. Content is extremely important, and may possibly account for up to 30% of your entire SEO strategy.
Not to sound like a broken record, but remember that for content to work for your on-page strategy, it must be unique, relevant and high-quality. That means the content must be well-written, easily readable, unique to you (not plagiarized or duplicated) and useful to the user. This content should be informative, as opposed to a paragraph of words haphazardly strung together with important keywords stuffed among them like a loaded baked potato. While everyone loves a baked potato full of delicious ingredients, no one likes to land on a page with content that makes no sense but somehow manages to fit keywords in every other sentence.
2 More On-Page Strategies
Text tip: First, you should always make sure you research and use the best (and most relevant) keywords possible. Use these keywords in your title tags, header tags (h1, h2) and meta-descriptions. Additionally, when it comes to optimizing text, try to use your keywords (and bold them) in the first 200 characters of the page.
Image tip: Google cannot actually see an image. All Google sees when there are images on the page is the on-page text (i.e., the name of the file) and alt. text (alternative tags for the image). This means that you should name your images whatever keyword you are trying to rank for on your site. See our earlier post, “How Are Image Rankings Calculated on the Search Engines?” for more tips on how to best utilize images on your website.
What You Should Also Consider
Page Speed is integral. With Google placing ever-more emphasis on quick load times (with an end-goal of producing a faster internet altogether), it is important to ensure that your site loads as quickly as possible. A fast load speed will only complement and possibly even help your SEO efforts. Why? Because user experience is a top priority over at Googleplex, and users want to be able to access web pages quickly. Use Google Webmaster Tools to understand the factors that may be keeping your website from loading as quickly as it ideally can load.
404 Errors – Preempt them! This “Not Found” message indicates that the server cannot find what your users are trying to access. Something with the link is broken, and you need to fix it right away. If you are an active user of Google’s Webmaster Tools, you know that you can use this feature to detect 404 errors. You can find recent 404 errors on your site by visiting “crawl errors” in the “Diagnostics” section of Webmaster Tools and make changes accordingly (you can implement 301 redirects to redirect broken links to your working URLs).
Get More Information
If you have any more questions about on-page SEO best practices, strategy or Google, keep checking our blog for daily blog posts about the goings on within the search engine and SEO worlds. For more tips specific to your own website, contact our Atlanta SEO company at 770-481-1766.
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