Many of you know that having solid on-page SEO combined with link building is crucial if you want to have SEO success in 2015. On-page SEO best practices change regularly meaning it could be easy to fall behind the curve. Today we are going to look at a top-level overview of what a well-optimized page looks like.
Content is the Core
Having well-crafted content on your website is crucial if you want to attract traffic and drive conversions. Even if you manage to rank a website with poor content; how will you monetize that? If you have read anything about content creation you have probably heard "write great content" a time or 10! What does that really mean though?
In other words, how can Google's software determine if your content sucks?
When you look at content from a strictly numbers standpoint, you can make a list of things that Google is definitely capable of understanding and evaluating. Those things include:
- Length of content
- Overall content topic based on primary and LSI Keywords
- Number of shares content receives
- Number and velocity of inbound links
- Number of links or citations of content from authority sources
- Bounce rate or dwell time for your content pages
When you consider the list above it becomes pretty clear that "great content" needs to be able to attract readers, keep them reading and prompt them to share what they are reading. "Great content" should also contain information or insights that make it worth linking to by others sites, especially authoritative sites.
Making Your Content Easily Accessible
Once you have worked your tail off to craft content that is creating a buzz, you need make sure that it is accessible to people who want to read it. How can you make it easily accessible though? Here are a few tips:
- Make sure your site loads quickly
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly
- Offer your content in more than one format (blog, podcast, video, etc.)
- Share summaries of content on social to intrigue and attract readers
Making Your Content Search Friendly
Do you have to write content for readers? Yes! Does that same content need to attract search traffic? Yes! If combining the two effectively was easy, more people would be professional content writers. When you are writing new content for a landing page, blog post or service page on your site, you need to keep in mind:
- Who is my target audience?
- What is my geographical target? (Is my solution local, nation, international?)
- What problem am I solving?
- How are people searching for the solution?
Finding how people are searching is part of keyword discovery and you can read a full write-up on finding keywords in The Keyword Research Guide here on Website Magazine.
Is That It?
Unfortunately you will need to do a lot more if you want to make your site a dominant force. For those of you in a time crunch who want to take advantage of SEO, I suggest checking out SEO in 60 Minutes Per Day or the 30-Minute Per Day SEO series.
Over to You
What is one thing you have done on-page that made a big improvement to your site? Blogging more? Increasing social Promotion?
