Utilizing best practices for on-site SEO.
If you’ve ever ventured into any exploration of the SEO world, you probably know by this point that there’s a lot to do to get to the top of the list. It starts with On-site SEO. Even with On-site your best hope is that it is done right. Being that you may have someone create your website for you, I’ve always believed in taking matters into your own hands. Especially for SEO purposes, this is important just in case a few things were missed. With this, I’ll go over 5 things that you should always check for when doing an on-site optimization that may end up propelling you to the top in the end.
Up To 5 keywords Selected
The first thing that needs to be done is research on (what I recommend) up to 5 keywords. The 5 keyword mark comes from the idea that you do not want to over-saturate your content to try and rank in everything. By oversaturating everything, it will put you at a disadvantage since Google doesn’t know exactly what the meaning of the page is. The idea here is to be concise so that your rankings are focused in specific areas instead of being spread out too thin. This will help with the overall idea that visitors can find exactly what they were looking for when coming to your site. Initially, I always recommend that someone starting out should begin with keywords that are not highly competitive. By doing this you won’t have to compete with the giants of the industry quite yet and have a chance at ranking number one so as to pick up customers still but without losing out on them to bigger companies. From here you can build a base to work on your overall reputation.
Content With Keywords
Now that you have your selected keywords, it’s time for content. Needless to say, content on each page should be specific to what the page is about. For our Search Engine Optimization page, we have our focus keyword as Denver SEO. Mind you, it’s only there a couple times (just enough to be relevant on the page). The idea behind structuring your content with your keywords is not to overdo it so it seems like your “keyword stuffing”. Add the keyword a few times so when Google scrapes the content, it can know exactly what the page is about and rank for a specific keyword.
H1 Title Tags On Each Page
Another key factor in determining what your page is about is the H1 tag (you only need one) on the top of each page. Google will read this tag with the intention of gathering what the page is about. Make it short, sweet, and to the point. Consider putting your keyword into your H1 tag once and maybe one more time somewhere on the rest of the page.
Metadata
For those of you not familiar with HTML, then let me describe this. The basic structure of HTML on any page comes with a <head></head> tag and <title></title> tag. These are metadata; this means that this data will not show up on the page like the rest of your content, rather, they are for search engines to read what your page is about. These are important parts of each page being that it gives your page a title (with the correct keywords it can determine your ranking) and with the right description it will give a perfect summary in the search results so visitors searching for something specific will know that this is the right page for them. Again, this plays into Google’s assessment of your page so that it knows exactly what it’s about so as to direct searchers to it.
Amount Of Content
There’s not an exact answer as to what the perfect amount of content is on any given page. If you look at the top spots for any keyword, chances are you’ll find a variation in the amount of words written on each page. One thing we do know though (given the general context of increasing the likeliness that a user will find what they’re looking for) is that more is definitely better. Don’t get too crazy and start trying to throw whatever you can into your content, but the more you have on a page the more specific you can be. With that specificity, chances are that a visitor will find what they’re looking for.