On-Page SEO

What Exactly Is On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is when you optimize a specific page of your website to rank higher for keywords that are related to the topic of that page.

To better understand the message you are attempting to share with users that discover a page on your site, Mach 1 Design will conduct an On-Page Audit. With the data collected from the audit we can determine areas to improve:

• Ensure the page is utilizing all SEO tools or not
• Find quick and instant fixes
• Know your website’s SEO health
• Understand the issues that hinder your business’ online visibility
• Find out if search engines can crawl and index your entire website
• Come up with a strategy tailored to the specific page

Performing An On-Page Audit And What To Look For

You can do an audit yourself, or you can hire an expert to do an on-page audit for you. An on-page audit can be pretty exhaustive. If you choose to do it yourself, create an Excel sheet with your site’s pages and categories as rows. Be sure to include each element of your audit as header columns.

Here are our top 8 factors for auditing a webpage for SEO effectiveness

Title Tags

Title tags and meta descriptions are essential for good SEO. Each page on your website should be unique, which means you need a different title tag for every page. Title tags tell search engines what subject each of your website pages is about. Title tags appear as the hyperlinked words in a Google search. Title tags carry weight in Google rankings, so Mach 1 Design takes the time to create good ones. Title tags should include keywords relevant to the page’s content, but also sound natural and not keyword-stuffed.

Meta Description

Meta descriptions should describe what your page is about, convey the page’s value to the reader, and have a call to action. Like title tags, meta descriptions should be short (150-160 characters) and contain relevant keywords. Meta descriptions don’t directly influence your Google rankings, but a well-written description can help generate more clicks to your site. When google displays your meta description the keywords in your description will be bold if the keyword was used in the search query.

Content

To take advantage of the best possible SEO, your content should be unique and original. Use Copyscape to make sure you don’t have any duplicate content. Remove or de-index any repeated content you find. Mach 1 Design offers Content Writing Services as well if you need help. Your content should be useful, informative and engaging for your ideal customer. Stick to a steady posting schedule, but remember that quality is better than quantity.

Internal Links

Linking your pages together improves user experience and can also impact your Google search ranking. If you have internal links, make sure that you use exact match anchor text. Additionally, make sure that the pages you are linking are related to each other. Your website should have about 2-10 internal links per page.

URL

Ideally, URLs for each page should be unique and properly formatted. A good URL includes keywords and is brief and descriptive. Please note that, while descriptive URLs are awesome, if you don’t have them, this is a difficult website aspect to change. Suddenly changing your URLs may have the opposite effect on your search engine rankings than what you were hoping. Make sure you talk to an SEO expert before making any big URL structure updates.

Links Working

Broken links create a bad user experience and can negatively impact your Google rankings, depending on their severity. Make sure all your links are working! Use a tool like Online Broken Link Checker to ensure you only have functioning links.

Organization

A clean, intuitive website structure promotes good SEO and a friendly user experience. Content should be grouped into relevant categories and pages. Additionally, your website should have a privacy policy, disclaimer and about page. Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages are legally necessary in some states and certain states like California require additional information.

Images

To optimize your images for SEO, make sure your images have an ALT tag defined. Search engines use ALT tags as part of their image search algorithm. All images should be compressed to reduce their size. If you use a lot of images, you may need to consider using a content delivery network (CDN). Having too many large image files on your site can drastically slow it down.

What Is My Page Load Time?

How fast your page loads can determine if users stay on or click off out of frustration. Plus, Google favors websites with quick loading times when determining organic rankings. Google provides a free tool to check your website’s speed. Any webpage that takes longer than three seconds to load can use improvement.

With On-Page SEO done properly your web pages will load quickly, have relevant and unique content, and help the page and your domain rank higher. Every page you link to your home page feeds it with its own rank health. This is why On-Page SEO is so important for your business and entire website.