10 Tips for On-page SEO Management

10 Tips for On-page SEO Management

So, you’ve read dozens — if not hundreds — of SEO articles on the web. You’ve digested countless tips and tricks for improving your websites’s SEO. you’ve even (over)paid that self-proclaimed “expert” to help you develop an SEO strategy that aligns with your business’ goals.

Especially when it comes to on-page SEO, there’s no excuse for dragging your feet. After all, you get to establish what the topic and/or goal of a particular page will be. You get to decide on the target audience for the page. And you get to choose the target keywords and phrases you want to focus on.

Crawl Your Site

Start by getting an overview of all of the pages on your website that search engines have indexed. For HubSpot customers, their Page Performance tool (under Reports) will allow you to do this. If you’re not using HubSport, you can try free tool like Xenu’s link crawler.

After Crawling your site and exporting the results into an Excel (or .CSV) file, there will be three key columns of data that you should focus on: The web address (a.k.a. URL), the page title, and the page meta description. Copy and paste these three columns into your template.

Do an SEO Audit and Define Your Site Architecture

Now that you have a basic index of your site pasted into the template, you’ll want to start organizing and prioritizing your web pages. You can start by defining where within your site architecture your existing pages currently sit.

Note whether a page is your homepage (ideally you’ll only have one of those), or a page in your primary (or secondary) navigation menu, or an internal page, etc.

Update URLs, Page Tittles, and Meta Descriptions

Review your current URLs, page titles, and page descriptions to see if they need updating. This is the beauty of using a template to organize your SEO: You get a larger overview of the type of content you have on your website.

Notice how column D and column F automatically calculate the length of each element. The recommended length for page titles is anything under 70 characters. (And actually, a quick and easy optimization project is to update all page titles that are longer than 70 characters.)

Establish a Value Proposition

A very important next step, which is often overlooked, is establishing a value proposition. Define What the purpose of a page — and ultimately, your website — is. The page itself should have a goal aside from just ranking for a particular term.

Plan New Page Titles

Now that you’ve documented your existing page titles and have established value propositions and target audiences for each of your pages, write new page titles (if necessary) to reflect your findings. People usually follow the formula of “Keyword Phrase / Context.” The goal of the page title is to lay out the purpose of the page without being redundant.

Post Permalink Structure

Making sure your URL is displayed correctly is an important on-page metric. Again, you should use your target keyword in the URL, and avoid using special characters, symbols, brackets, commas, etc. within the actual URL.

Use dashes to differentiate the strings in your URL structure. These are called “pretty” permalinks and are supported by most web browsers.

Heading Tags

You should use heading tags to highlight various headings, sub-headings, and important points.

In WordPress, the tittle tag is set at H1. You don’t really need to use any more H1 tags anywhere in the article. One is enough. For section breaks, stick to H2 and H3 tags.

Also, don’t use too many H2 or H3 tags as Google algorithms won’t like that.

Keyword Density

You should keep the keyword density around 1.5% percent with a mix of LSI keywords. But as Matt Cuts explains, there is no real magic formula.

Use your main keyword once in the first paragraph and again in the last paragraph. And use it in the content where it makes sense.

Images

Image optimization does a lot in driving traffic from image searches.

Keywords in the “image tittle” and the “alt text” help to make your blog post more focused and targeted.

But more important than that:

images creates agreement.

And the more engaged a user is, the more likely they’ll stick around, thus increasing your overall rank.

Write Engaging Content

You should write engaging content. Period. If you’re trying to get by with low-quality content and “trick” search engines, you will surely fail.

Your post should be a complete manual for that keyword. You should learn how to engage your audience in a way that works for them. Try asking your readers questions and answering them. Understand what they want to read, and then write them