SEO remains a critical component in the marketing mix for success online. If you’ve not jumped on the bandwagon just yet, well chances are your brand may be suffering and not utilizing untapped potential. SEO visibility helps put products and services at the fingertips of potential customers as they utilize search engines to scope out such information. Targeted search visibility stands of critical importance in establishment of brand awareness, trust, relationship building, and most importantly revenue generation. The sole focus of this particular blog post is to outline the importance of SEO on-page factors when it comes to setup or optimization of individual pages on your website.
Key Factors for SEO On-Page Optimization
After working in the digital media marketing industry for over 7 years, I have to admit that I’ve seen a vast amount of suggestions and best practices for optimal SEO on-page on the internet. Many have merit and actual validity to their approach and others are deflated suggestions or skewed perceptions. Thinking back to my early days of SEO, the Google Search Engine Optimization Started Guide served as a great resource for acquiring a holistic understanding of SEO and particularly SEO on-page factors. In my opinion these are some of the most important aspects of on-page optimization:
- Ensure rich, informative, & insightful content structure on each individual page of your website
- Focus on keyword insertion and density for optimal search visibility and target in major search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo
- Headings and subheadings stand of value and importance. Ensure those are properly optimized
- Anchor text with internal and external links to supportive resources compliment relevance of content
- Permalinks establish association and companionship with internal site matrix. Make sure those are SEF optimized and keyword rich
- Visuals are essential and sometimes help establish a clear picture of the objective
Naturally, I too browse the internet for some inspiration. A couple of my favorite spots to frequent are the Rand Fishkin Blog and Moz Blog. As I was surfing thru happened to stumble upon another awesome graphic by the master himself pinpointing a holistic understanding of an optimal landing page fueled for SEO domination.
User experience most definitely plays a vital role in conversions. Something that has become an essential component of good SEO especially of the last few years. Unfortunately it’s not an area of emphasis in this particular article.
Permalinks of Individual Pages
When it comes to search engine indexing, urls play an important part for relevance. An industry term such as SEF urls refers to user-friendly permalinks that are not only easy to remember but also optimized for SEO as part of the SEO on-page factors. For example, let’s assume that the page you’re optimized focuses on “chocolate donuts”. Those users looking for delicious and mouth-watering donuts will use a keyword or phrase of such relevance to look for a donut shop in there area. Therefore, the permalink of your page optimized around “chocolate donuts” should probably be structured in this fashion:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/stlouis-chocolate-donuts.html
Multi-level hierarchy obviously plays a role in how the entire structure of your site is built. So therefore, you’ll need to follow the structure accordingly but nonetheless ensure that each permalink of a page consists of the primary keyword term for which you’re attempting to optimize around.
Content Substance
One of the largest selling pieces of properly optimized page consists of targeted, informative, insightful, and educational content of value to your visitors. This could be a product or service specific page discussing the benefits or advantages of using your product or service. Ultimately addressing the need of the user. Chances are their arrival to this particular page was sparked by a search of a keyword or phrase they use on a search engine of their choice. Ensure the content meets the user’s demands and retains them on the page or site as a whole for as long as possible.
- Keep in mind keyword density within your content section. A 3-5% gauge of keyword usage should suffice for proper on-page content optimization.
- Build an internal matrix from page-to-page by utilizing keyword-rich anchor text. Don’t got overboard on this one though.
Title Tags
This particular tag of an individual page is perhaps the second most important element when it comes to rankings in search. Relevance, length, keyword richness, readability, and emotional engagement are a few of the intricate essentials of a targeted title tag. A while back SEOmoz published a great article on composition of targeted title tags. Definitely worth the read especially for those at an elementary stage of understanding SEO on-page factors.
Description Tags
As part of the Meta Data umbrella, Meta Description tags are an intricate component of SEO on-page factors. Engaging description tags help provide users with an insight about the content. Informative and concise description tags will invoke a click into a page of your site if the descriptor provides useful and relevant information to the user. The description tag is perhaps the second most important tag when it comes to SEO on-page factors.
Use Those Keywords in the Keyword Tag
Many will argue that the SEO keyword tag has lost weight and perhaps irrelevant at this point. However I do have to admit that from personal experience I’ve had success with ranking several pages on Google by incorporating relevant keyword terms for each corresponding page. The keyword tag of each static page or blog post should include the most relevant keyword terms used within the body content area to provided a correlation in SERPs.
Tags in Blog Posts Boost Visibility
Most folks these days utilize WordPress or an equivalent platform for their content management needs. Another great way to squeeze some value out of SEO on-page factors is to utilize tags within your blog posts. As you compose new content in the form of a blog post, consider incorporating relevant tags to your content. For example, if your blog post is about “chocolate donuts” than use the same phrase as one of your blog post tags. Surprisingly I’ve had several pieces of content in the past ranking on Page 1 of Google simply by utilizing a specific tag within a post.
ALT and TITLE Tags in Images Snippet
For those visually driven sites, it’s important to optimize the <img> tag of each image for additional SEO value. Google Image Search presents untapped potential for additional traffic opportunities particularly for those visual users.
- <img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/image.gif” alt=”Chocolate Donut” title=”Brown Chocolate Donut”>
Google will pick up on the snippets of your images and provide additional search potential as users look for a product or service relevant to that particular image. Image optimization is significantly beneficial in case of e-commerce sites or entities containing a vast amount of imagery.
Social Media Integration & Sharing Capabilities
While relevant and authoritative content gets users engaged it’s important to offer additional options to these users for amplifying content exposure. As part of SEO on-page factors it’s important to integrate social sharing capabilities for networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Such options gives users the ability to share content across their own networks and therefore provide additional avenues for traffic potential back to your content. The WordPress Digg Digg Floating Share Bar is a great addition for posts and pages. It even comes with several configuration options to customize the user experience.