5 Tips for On-Page Optimisation

If you’re trying to get your website found by more potential customers, search engine optimisation, or SEO, plays a really important role.

Today we’re going to look at on-page optimisation, which covers everything you can do on a particular page – whether it’s a blog post, case study or sales page – in order to help it rank higher and attract more traffic from Google.

We’ve got 5 really simple tips that can form a great basic checklist, to make your page more effective at attracting new leads, whether you’re writing new content or updating something you’ve already got.

1. Provide value to your visitor

Google is getting more and more keen on promoting websites which provide real value to the visitor, and it enforces this through constant updates to its algorithm, which is the way it decides which pages to rank in which position. So above all else, the most important thing you can do for your web page is to think about user intent. Are you trying to solve a problem, teach people something new or provide entertainment? Creating high quality, useful content is the absolute foundation on which all your other SEO improvements will build.

2. Use your keywords well

Now keyword research is a whole other topic by itself, and it’s up to you at this stage how far down the rabbit hole you want to go!
At the simplest level, you want to have each page targeting a main keyword, with a variety of other related keywords to demonstrate to search engines that you’re covering the topic in depth. Having a list of those related keywords is a good little tool to help you ensure you’re writing high quality content as well.

For example, if I was writing a page for a business bank account about setting up a new business, I might have ‘setting up a business’ as my main keyword, with related keywords including things like registering your business, building a website and finding business insurance.

Then, you want to use these keywords in some strategic places throughout your web page, such as:

• in the title tag – ideally as near to the start as possible, to catch the attention of people searching for that term and so that readers know what your page is about.
• naturally throughout the main body of text and subheadings. If you’re writing on-topic this shouldn’t need much effort – don’t feel that you need to cram it in more times than seems natural.
• in images – both as the file name and the ‘alt text’ which you should see an option for on your website builder.
• in the URL – that’s the address of where your page is located on the internet. Your website builder might do this automatically, but if not you should be able to edit it yourself.

3. Use a variety of media types

Have you ever clicked on a web page that just turned out to be a wall of text? Did you read it?

Most of us, even if we’re reading about a serious subject, find it easier to take in information when it’s presented in a mixture of ways. It provides a better user experience and again helps to demonstrate to search engines that your content is high quality. So whether you mix in some related images, an infographic, videos, podcasts or embedded social media content – try and add in something new to your page to keep your reader interested. You don’t have to add all of them to every page – keep it relevant, keep it interesting and just experiment and see what works well with your audience.

4. Create effective meta tags

Now, these sound much more technical and complicated than they really are. Your meta tags basically dictate what your page looks like on a Google search result. The meta title is the blue link and the meta description is the little bit of text that goes underneath that. Meta tags aren’t a direct ranking factor, but they can have a significant impact on how many people click through from a search result to your website – and this bit is thought to have an impact on ranking. It also gets you more web traffic, which is basically the point of us doing SEO in the first place! Your job with your meta tags is to make them interesting and make it really obvious what your page is about, so that in results where your page meets the intent of the searcher, you’re more likely to get a click through to your site.

5. Link internally to relevant resources

You’d be hard pressed to cover everything about your business and industry in one go. So it’s likely that there are other pages and resources on your site that your readers would find useful, or maybe there’s particular pages you’d like to direct them to next.

In every page you create, aim to include at least two or three links to other relevant pages on your website. It helps to keep people on your site longer, creates a better structure for your website and provides value to your user, which takes us right back to the aim of our first tip about content.

These tips are just the start of on-page optimisation, but they’ll give you some solid basics that will help you get found by more people, give them a really good experience with your site and create a solid foundation for your future SEO and digital marketing work.