Building out a successful website is like a science, in fact it's the science of SEO. If you wish to improve your websites performance and increase the quality of your traffic, then there are a number of on-page strategies that you need to apply to each page of your site.
Read on below, for a brief but, effective master class in on-page SEO.
Accurately titling your page is essential in telling both search engines and your users what topic the content of your page is focused around.
This title is what will be displayed in search engine results, so keep your title short and concise, as to not lose part of it in the search engines display. The general rule of thumb is to keep each title under 55 characters.
Where you title needs to be short, your meta description does not. The meta description will most often be displayed below your page title in the search engines results (unless a snippet of your content matches a users search inquiry more accurately).
Your meta description should be a brief summary, once again, of what your page is about and should include targeted keywords. Your meta description should not duplicate the content of your title and should max out at 150 characters.
Search engines cannot read an image, that is why it is essential that you include Alt Text on all of your images. Each image should have a relevant tag so that search engines will know what the image represents.
Google counts quality and unique content as their number one SEO driver. That is because your users/customers are more likely to direct other users to it, through sharing, blogging or emailing and this is what builds your sites online reputation.
Embedded within this quality content, should be thoughtful keywords. By thoughtful keywords, we are referring to the phrases or words that your customers might type into a search engine to find the content on your website.
Tip: always create your unique content with your customer in mind, ensure that it is something of value.
The structure of your page, is so important in providing great customer experience. You can easily organize a pages structure by including heading tags and you can improve your pages SEO by including keywords within these heading tags.
The importance of H1 tags has diminished over the past few years, but the fact remains that the H1 tags are one of the first things a user sees when they land on your page. Your H1 tags are a chance to convince users that they’ve found the right page, decreasing the chance of that user bouncing.