Digital Marketer

From New Zealand, lives in Spain.
Servicing clients from all around the English speaking world.

How To Optimize A Page For SEO

This checklist is to help you ensure site content is optimized and to give an understanding of some important parts of a page. Once the target keywords of a page are decided follow these steps to ensure you are maximizing the SEO opportunities to rank for that search term. Remember that Google is smart and jamming a keyword in wherever you can on the page will not help, it should be part of the page in natural speech and you should also use similar common phrases.

How To Optimize A Page For SEO

Ensure you give attention to these elements on the page:

  • Page Titles
  • Meta Description
  • Header Tags
  • Image Names & Alt Tags
  • Internal Links
  • External Links
  • Schema Markup
  • Show Related Products or Services
  • Post On Google My Business

Page Title

One of the most important SEO actions. Make sure your keywords are here but still make sense, it should sound natural – ideally have them at the beginning of the title. Have your business name at the end. Keep it to around 60 characters in total.

Meta Description

This has no direct SEO benefit but is your chance to capture a searcher with an engaging and relevant blurb about the page. Done well it can entice more people to click the listing which in turn Google likes sites with high Click Through Rates. Keep characters to around 140 characters.

Header Tags

Have 1 H1 tag per page (your blog title) then move down from most important to least important for H2, H3 etc. You are telling Google the most important topics of the page and their hierarchy. You can use this heading checker tool to check what they are on the page.

Image File Names & Alt Tags

Call the image something relevant to the page topic. Use an Alt Tag which describes what the image is in normal English – Vision impaired people have this text read out loud to describe the image, also google bots read this.
Note: File names should use dashes ‘-’ and not underscores ‘_’.

Internal Links

It’s a good idea to link to pages from other pages on your site, if you capture someone into your site it’s great to push them onto another page once they have finished reading. It increases page views and decreases bounce rate. It also helps the Google spiders get around your site.

External Links

It is also good to link to other authoritative sites as it helps prove that the information you are providing is accurate and true. Often if touching on a topic it is good to have a link off to another site for more in depth reading for the user if they want to. Also if making statements of fact it is best to link to proof of that point from an authoritative source.

Schema Markup

This is adding code to the site in a universal way so Google can recognize it, for a blog post it is best to ask and answer questions in the content and specify them in the schema markup code which you add to the page. This is a great free tool for creating your Schema Code.

Show Related Products (if applicable)

After talking about a topic if you sell online it is good to show some of the products which align with the content, this should not be very sales orientated but just feature at the bottom of the page should the user want to check them out if it interests them.

Google My Business

All posts added to your blog should also be added to the GMB post section to help with ranking at a local level when users are searching keywords that are mentioned in your article.
I have detailed post on improving your Google My Business profile.

Conclusion

These are all the most important elements to ensure your page is well optimized for your chosen keyword(s) and doing this for all your existing pages and new pages will put you in good stead to rank well. SEO takes a long time to take effect so don’t expect to see positive results right away but if you are consistent with it you should start to see improvements in 3-12 months (depending on how the competition is).

Categories SEO

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