What You Will Get :
- Essential On-Page SEO Factors and on-page SEO services.
- Title Tag Optimization.
- How to create a Meta Description.
- Tips to write Headline and Drive Traffic & Clicks.
- SEO tips for improvements.
Essential On-Page SEO Factors
The reality is, off-page SEO won’t do much good if you don’t pay attention to the fundamentals – on-page SEO.
Smart SEO practitioners know that on-page optimization should be constantly prioritized.
And because the search landscape is ever-evolving, it’s important to make sure your on-page SEO knowledge is up to date.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) refers to the practice of optimizing web pages to improve a website’s search engine rankings and earn organic traffic.
In addition to publishing relevant, high-quality content, on-page SEO includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images. It also means making sure your website has a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
It takes into account various aspects of the webpage that, when added together, will improve your website’s visibility in the search results.
Why On-Page SEO Is Important
On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines understand your website and its content, as well as identify whether it is relevant to a searcher’s query.
As search engines become more sophisticated, there is a greater focus toward relevance and semantics in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google, with its plethora of complex algorithms, is now much better at:
- Understanding what users are actually searching for when they type a query.
- Delivering search results that meet user intent (informational, shopping, navigational).
Adapting to this development is essential, and you can do it by ensuring that your website and its content – both what is visible to users on your webpages (i.e., text, images, video, or audio) and elements that are only visible to search engines (i.e., HTML tags, structured data) – are well-optimized according to the latest best practices.
Additionally, you can’t simply ignore on-page SEO because you have more control when optimizing for on-site elements – as opposed to off-page SEO that consists of external signals (i.e., backlinks).
If you put effort into on-page strategies, you’ll see a boost in traffic and a rise in your search presence.
Enhancing your website’s on-page SEO elements is only half the battle.
- The other half lies in making sure that users will not bounce – but instead, they’ll continue viewing your content, interacting with it, and keep coming back for more.Retaining engaged users is a great challenge in itself, but it’s certainly doable. To increase user engagement, focus on aspects such as site speed, user experience, and content optimization, among others.
- Adding images is a good way to make your webpages more appealing. But not all images are created equal – some can even slow down your website.Optimizing images properly will help you make the most of a valuable SEO asset.Image optimization has many advantages, such as:
- Additional ranking opportunities (show up on Google Image Search).
- Better user experience.
- Faster page load times.
- Auditing your existing content is crucial because it helps you:
- Evaluate whether your existing content is achieving its goals and gaining ROI.
- Identify whether the information in your content is still accurate or has become stale (or even outdated).
- Determine what types of content are working for you.
Content audits can greatly help your SEO strategy and they should be done on a regular basis. - E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is the framework that Google raters use to assess content creators, webpages, and websites as a whole.Google has always put a premium on high-quality content. It wants to make sure that sites producing high-quality content are rewarded with better rankings and sites that create low-quality content get less visibility.There is a clear relationship between what Google considers high-quality content and what appears in the search results.Call it correlation or causation – whatever it is, E-A-T is somehow playing a role in Google’s organic search results. This means E-A-T must be a consideration in your SEO strategy.
Images shouldn’t be an afterthought. Make sure to incorporate images that support your content and use descriptive titles and alt text.
Title Tag Optimization
What Is a Title Tag?
The title tag is an HTML tag that exists in the head section of each webpage. It provides an initial cue or context as to what the topical subject matter is of the respective page it is on.
The title tag is featured prominently in the search engine results pages (typically it is used as the clickable link) as well as in the browser window.
Other than those two places, it isn’t as visible as other web content on a given page (e.g., body copy, image content, and other aspects) that a user will see immediately when landing on the page.
Title tags aren’t visual element users will see on a webpage, so the title tag can sometimes be overlooked.
At the same time, the title tag by itself has little impact on organic rankings. No one item alone is magical or powerful – especially if your content is low-quality or you’ve neglected technical SEO.
Here are eight important aspects to consider when optimizing your title tags for search.
1. The Page’s Context Within the Site
Before you can write an optimized title tag, you need to know where the page fits into the overall hierarchy of the website.
A home page title tag is going to be much different than a blog post or product page.
For websites that have a lot of pages, it can be challenging to come up with tags that are different from page to page. That’s why mapping out your site and knowing where each page fits into the context of your subject matter is important.
Each page deeper you get into the site, the more specific you can and should be.
You can repeat words and phrases but should be more detailed each step down into the site you go.
An eCommerce example of title tags at different levels of the site that have appropriate context:
- Home Page: Groomsmen gifts and unique men’s gifts by The Man Registry
- Product Category Page: BBQ sets and utensil gifts for groomsmen by The Man Registry
- Product Page: 5-Piece Customized BBQ utensil set by The Man Registry
2. Topical Relevance Within the Page
The next step of understanding where the page fits in the hierarchy of the website overall is to evaluate the content on the page.
The title tag is most impactful for search engines and users when it introduces the topic of the page and the same important keywords are used in body copy, image alt attribute, the meta description, URL, and other aspects of the page.
It is a wasted exercise to ignore the page content when writing the title tag if it contributes to a higher bounce rate and can’t lend more relevance to the topic of the page.
You should use words in the title tag that are also used in other parts of the page to tie the topic together.
3. Unique Tags
Duplicate title tags are not helpful to searchers or search engines.
If you have duplicate tags you’ll see them in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools reports and you’ll often find that the search engines have chosen to ignore your title tag and use other content it found on your page for the blue link text in the SERP.
When multiple pages have the same tag, those tags are useless to the search engine.
You can use the data provided in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to find where you have issues as well as run your own tests through any number of on-page auditors and crawling tools.
If you have duplicate tags within your site, add writing custom tags to your SEO action plan.
4. Use Dynamic Options When Possible
If you have a large website or one that features a large amount of dynamic data – like an eCommerce website – find ways to semantically code your tags.
Most content management systems and website platforms will automatically generate the title tag to start with.
If you want to override or customize the default title tag at scale, work with your developer or within your website platform settings to find ways to add more detail and customize at different levels.
The more you can scale and not have to manually manage hundreds or thousands of tags, the better.
An example of a dynamic structure could include some standard text in all product page tags but with the specific name of the product populated from the database.
For example, it could be “[product_name] groomsmen gifts from The Man Registry.” The bracketed “product_name” would be a variable that would populate that part of the title with the actual product name in the database.
In this case, you wouldn’t have to manually write all product title tags and can ensure they are unique. For cases where you have the same products with variations or attributes like different colors – you can also look at ways to add more variables from the database.
5. Searcher and Keyword Use
We can all relate to times we really want to find an answer to something specific, yet the top ranking sites are answering a different question. The same goes for great content that gets unnoticed.
Knowing what your audience is searching for, and how they are searching, is critical for title tag optimization.
If you don’t know what words and phrases people are using when they are searching, then you’re at risk of guessing wrong.
Don’t skip keyword research or ignore it when you are optimizing title tags.
You don’t have to worry about every literal version of a keyword or phrase in the current context-based era of SEO, but you also can’t ignore the searcher and their intent.
Your goal for an optimized title tag is to match the wording that you use with what is being searched for as long as the perceived intent is the focus of the content of the page.
6. Call to Action in SERP
Remember that the title tag will be shown as the text in the blue link in the search results page (SERP).
This is prominent real estate and the message featured here greatly impacts the searcher’s decision on whether to click through to your site or move on to the next search result.
Your focus must be on answering the question, need, or desire of the searcher.
Having a clear vision of what your page is about and what the desired outcome is for you and your visitor are critical.
If you’re trying to accomplish too many business goals on a single page, it can be hard to focus clearly enough on what the call to action (CTA) should be. If you find this to be the case, consider breaking your content out into more topics and pages.
Much like the art of writing a solid PPC text ad headline, the title tag needs to match the intent of the searcher to earn their click.
When writing your title tag, keep in mind that the tag is truncated by Google at 70-71 characters. The user won’t see any word past that character count.
Get your important words and phrases in there. Be concise, be direct, and prioritize the important words to appear as early in your title tags as possible.
For example, you might have the average sounding home page title tag of: “Groomsmen gifts and unique men’s gifts by The Man Registry”.
You could test out more actionable language like “Shop the best groomsmen & unique men’s gifts at The Man Registry”.
7. Don’t Try Too Hard
Avoid repetitive and spammy looking titles.
Resist the temptation of overdoing it with your title tag.
The search engines are focused on context – not literal keyword use, frequency, and density.
Pick words that are clear to the topic of the page and intent and stick with them in the title tag.
You can use longer form areas of the page to elaborate and build on that context.
An example of a dangerous title tag would be: “Illahi mera jee ayee, chiki chiki buum firrre.., , Unique Title”.
Overplaying and repeating words is a quick way to find trouble.
8. Keep Perspective of the Title Tag’s Impact
While you might see a small bump from optimizing all the title tags on your site, you can’t expect that the title tag alone is your key to SEO success.
Holistic search optimization is much more important.
In many cases, title tag optimization is just the start or an entry point until you are at the top of the SERP – making small adjustments and have the luxury of spending time obsessing over minor wording changes to see how they impact rankings one position at a time.
How to Create Meta Descriptions
the meta description is a meta tag that provides a description of what the page is about. This meta description is displayed in the SERPs underneath the title of the page.
Why Are Meta Descriptions Important for SEO?
In the olden days of SEO, meta descriptions were important parts of optimization to get right.
Did they help rankings back then? Google has said and continues to maintain that they do not help to rank and that they are not a ranking signal.
According to a recent in-depth, performed by Yoast(one of the Best Plugin):
- Google automatically creates many of the meta descriptions on their own, regardless of the ones they wrote and regardless of whether or not the page appeared in the segmented groups they created for the study.
- It did not matter that Yoast created long or short meta descriptions and whether a high or low keyword density was implemented for them.
- In two-thirds of cases that they examined, Google used sentences from the first paragraph. Of course, this particular assertion is not a guarantee Google will do the same for your site, but the indication is there that an article introduction should be completed with the meta description as a focus.
Be that as it may, there are other important considerations for meta descriptions beyond their SEO value.
In addition to SEO, meta descriptions can drive clicks, traffic, potential conversions, and revenue by:
- Increasing a site’s CTR in the SERPs: There is evidence that meta descriptions that have been well-written and properly optimized are directly responsible for increased “website curb appeal”.
- Traffic: By increasing a site’s CTR through proper optimization, increased rankings can result in more traffic to the site.
- Potential conversions: Crafting a well-written meta description that is closely related to the topic of the page, is interesting to users, and is highly optimized for user intent can increase conversions significantly. In addition, when you do this, there is anecdotal evidence to support that the increased traffic and CTRs will cause Google to promote your site.
- It has been considered a standard SEO best practice for years to keep meta descriptions at around 160-165 characters maximum (or 156-160 characters, depending on who you talk to).The reasoning behind this is that this optimization helps to avoid the truncation of the meta description in the SERPs and as a result, helps to avoid high bounce rates.Late last year, Google announced a change to the SERP snippets, taking them up to 300 characters, more than double the usual 150-165 character limits that are recommended.
- Keywords Your Audience Is Searching for Should Appear in the Meta DescriptionGoogle continues to maintain that they don’t use keywords in the meta description for ranking purposes. But, when you perform SERP research, what is it that you see? Highlighted keywords in the meta description.Because the reader is looking for search results that nail their query. If their query is personal injury lawyers, they may go to that result over others. but it depends on whether that result satisfies their intent and what they really are searching for.
Make Your Meta Description Specific
Generalized meta descriptions and hollow phrases such as “best widgets” and other sales speak is usually something that can turn off prospect customers.It is important to inspire confidence, the confidence that your result is something that will satisfy their user intent for the query.You want to speak about what your readers are really after, not attempting to persuade them into your own sales funnel.Optimizing Meta Descriptions Requires Striking a Balance
All of this has to be done while also observing character limits, including power calls to action in the meta description, observing proper branding and tone of voice, and also including targeted optimizations for specific pages.It is a delicate balance that must be maintained while also interweaving common SEO elements.
Tips to write Headline and Drive Traffic & Clicks
The best headlines are:
- Extremely relevant to the content
- Contain a keyword
- Generate interests
- Attractive
- Full content/post summary which defines in a single sentence(14-20 words).
There’s plenty of room to be creative and demonstrate value, right off the bat.
While there’s no exact science to writing a headline, there is useful headline writing tips that will help you whip up brilliant headlines.
1. Let Keywords Drive You
If you’re writing a piece of evergreen content, always do keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for.
A slight difference in wording can make a huge impact on traffic.
Let’s take this content, for example.
As with all content, I did keyword research beforehand to pinpoint what people are actually searching for.
I narrowed it down to these keyword phrases, based on their monthly approx search volume:
- Headline writing tips: 420
- How to write a headline: 390
- Good headlines: 400
- How to write a good headline: 169
By choosing a relevant keyword phrase with the most search volume, I can boost the ROI of the content.
Accordingly, I chose “headline writing tips” as my main keyword (and, of course, I can use the others as supporting keywords).
As you can see, the headline on this content is “11 Headline Writing Tips to Drive Traffic and Clicks.”
2. Come up with Multiple Headlines
If you find yourself with a bout of writer’s block and can’t come up with a headline that really strikes your fancy, try writing a bunch!
The act of brainstorming multiple headlines will really get your creative juices flowing, and you’ll land on something great eventually.
In easy words make sure your page contains all <h></h>tags
<h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>, <h4></h4>
<h5></h5>, <h6></h6>
Sometimes we need to get straight to the point.
Not every headline needs to be lengthy – sometimes being punchy and straightforward is a better approach, so don’t automatically discount a potential headline just because it’s short. Look at Competitors’ Headlines, If you’re stuck and can’t come up with a good headline, look to your competitor’s content for inspiration.
3. Keep Your Header Tags Consistent
When a site achieves that down to the finest detail, it’s impressive.
Aim to impress with consistent header tags.
If you choose to use title case format, stick with that across all your pages (and vice versa if you choose sentence case).
Also, keep your headings on the shorter side.
A header tag is not the place to emphasize a block of keyword-rich text for Google.
Treat it like a mini-title for the following section of the text.
For a good rule of thumb, keep headers about the same length as your title tags (70 characters or less).
4. Put a Word in All Caps
Very occasionally, you can put a word in all caps.
This will immediately give your headline a sense of immediacy and urgency.
I like to use this occasion to punch a headline up.
Use this sparingly, however – it’s not for every article, every time.
5. Check Your Spelling & Grammar
Misspell a name and the article immediately loses credibility.
Craft your content with sloppy grammar, and the article loses credibility.
After you’ve checked for spelling and grammar errors, check again.
6. Keep Writing Free of Clutter
Keep it simple, Get straight to what you’re saying, Strip all useless words, Get sentences into their simplest form.
Keyword cannibalization is more prevalent today than ever before.
Ironically, its victims are usually webmasters who recognize the importance of SEO for their business, but while they intend to optimize their site, they don’t fully understand how to ‘speak’ Google’s language.
Fortunately, if your website is cannibalizing its own target keywords, solutions aren’t hard to come by, and the damage isn’t permanent.
With the right tools and a ‘can-do’ attitude, you can give your SEO a well-deserved boost.
7. Content Details Audit
The first part of a content audit is dissecting the basics of the content piece and is a one-time entry on your audit.
It looks at how the content was created, how many people it took to create the content and the basic publishing information.
You’ll want to track the following for each piece of content in a separate content details audit spreadsheet:
- URL
- Author
- Team Produced (content team, social team, SEO team, etc.)
- Total Time (how long did it take to produce the content in its entirety)
- Title
- Date
- Content-Type (is it a blog post, infographic, case study, etc.)
- Content Goal (what was the point of producing the content: backlinks, traffic, conversions, etc.)
- Word count
- Comments
- Shares (break this down by social network and total)
8. Organic Traffic
Ideally, our content would be receiving a lot of organic traffic.
We wouldn’t have to put any extra dollars towards advertising, people would just organically come across our content, love it, and engage.
If you aren’t getting a lot of organic traffic to your content that could be a potential red flag.
Perhaps there is something wrong with:
- Your content strategy.
- How you’re distributing the content.
- The content type.
- The content itself.
By evaluating the organic traffic metrics regularly in your audit, you’ll know when you can pat yourself on the back or when you need to start over.
9.Backlinks
Bring on the backlinks – but only the good backlinks that give us a lot of boost and credibility, please!
You need to track the backlinks that your content produces on a regular basis for two big reasons:
- Your backlinks will change over time. The first day you publish a new piece of content you may gain 2-3 backlinks. Let a week go by and now 10-12 backlinks have appeared. A year down the road and now you have 589 backlinks to one piece of content.
- Not all backlinks are good. Sure, 589 backlinks might sound like a good thing, but not if 500 of those backlinks are potentially dangerous to your website and lead to spam. Those 500 links need to be removed ASAP or your website and rankings could take a hit. If you don’t monitor all of your backlinks by auditing your content regularly, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to remove dangerous backlinks before they begin to affect your rankings.
SEO Tips You Need to Know
1. Choose the Right Format
Decoding all the various image formats can feel like your first time ordering at Taco Bell. But, before you can start adding images to your site, you want to make sure you’ve chosen the best file type.
While there are many image formats to choose from, the PNG and JPEG are the most common for the web.
- PNG: Produces better quality images, but comes with larger file size.
- JPEG: You may lose image quality, but you can adjust the quality level to find a good balance.
For me, PNG is the unsung hero of image formatting. Typically, I only use JPEGs for bigger, more visual images taken by a true photographer. But, for my daily use, PNG is the way to go.
2. Compress Your Images
Yep, hell hath no fury like a bloated web page after uploading an image that’s not compressed.
Search engines will look at your web page like you might look at a big vat of Crisco: You can’t seriously be considering putting that on you your website, right?
According to HTTP Archive, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight.
That’s why I highly recommend compressing your images before uploading to your site. You can do this in Photoshop or you can use a tool like TinyPNG. TingPNG also has a WordPress plugin you can use too.
However, I prefer WP Smush as my WordPress plugin. It reduces the image file size without removing the quality. Whatever plugin you use, make sure to find one that compresses the images externally on their servers. It reduces the load on your own site.
Increasingly.com improved website speed by 33% / 2 seconds by compressing images.
I mean, there’s just something sexy about faster page speed when after you compress your images.
If you’re unsure how your images are affecting your page speed, I recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
3. Create Unique Images
You want your photos to pop on your site. If you fill your website with stock imagery, you’ll look unoriginal – like thousands of other sites that don’t stand out.
Too many websites are cluttered with the same generic stock photos.
Think about a corporate website, a consulting firm, a business that prides itself on customer service. All these websites use virtually the same looking stock image of a businessman smiling.
While you may have your stock images perfectly optimized, it won’t have the same impact or potential SEO benefits as an original, high-quality image.
The more original pictures you have, the better experience for the user and the better your odds are of ranking on relevant searches.
4. Beware of Copyright
Regardless of the image files, you choose to use, make sure there’s no copyright conflict.
The Postal Service is paying $3.5 million in an image copyright lawsuit. And, Sketchers got sued for $2.5 million.
If Getty, Shutterstock, DepositFiles, or some other stock photo provider owns an image you use, and you don’t have a license to use it, then you’re risking an expensive lawsuit.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you could be issued a notice if you have violated any copyright issues. If the owner of a piece of content sees their content on your website, they can issue a DMCA Takedown which you must comply with.
Google Images allows you to filter results based on those available for reuse. And, Mindy Weinstein shares 41 different websites to find free images.
5. Customize Image File Names
When it comes to SEO, creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial.
Not customizing your image file name is like getting a burrito with nothing in it. It just plain sucks.
Image file names alert Google and other search engine crawlers as to the subject matter of the image.
Note: Always write SEO friendly alt text in your images.
6. Make Your Page Title & Description
Google also revealed that it uses your page title and description as part of its image search algorithm.
The Google support page states:
“Google Images automatically generates a title and snippet to best explain each result and how it relates to the user query… We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title, and meta tags.”
All of your basic on-page SEO factors like meta data, header tags, copy on the page, structured data, etc. affects the way Google ranks your images.
It’s like putting all your toppings on your burrito. It tastes way better with guac. So, make sure to add the guac for improving image rankings.
7. Define Your Dimensions
If you’re using AMP or PWAs, you are required to define your image dimensions in the source code.
However, if you’re not using either, it’s still a best practice to define the width and height. It provides a better user experience.
Plus, it allows the browsers to size the image before the CSS is loaded. This stops the page from jumping when it loads.
8. Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly
Oh, mobile SEO. At its worst, it can give you a high bounce rate and low conversions. But, at its best, it can give you more ranking power and better user engagement.
The problem is, how do you optimize your images for the mobile-first index?
You create responsive images. This means the image will scale with the size of the site whether the user is using a desktop or mobile. It adjusts to the size of the device.
9. Add Images to Your Sitemap
Whether you’re adding your images to your sitemap or creating a new sitemap for images, you want images somewhere in your sitemaps.
Having your images in a sitemap greatly increases the chances of search engines crawling and indexing your images. Thus, it results in more site traffic.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast offers a sitemap solution in their plugin.
10.Image Optimization Key Takeaways
So, before you begin uploading your image to your site, make sure to follow the image optimization rituals from above.
The most important thing is to make sure the image and alternative text are relevant to the page. Other key takeaways:
- Choose the right file format. PNGs are my favorite for screenshots.
- Reduce file size for faster page load speed.
- Make sure your on-page SEO elements (metadata, structured data, etc.) pair with your image.
- For crawlable create an image sitemap or make sure your images are featured in your sitemap.
Optimizing images are no joke. With advancements in voice search technology.
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