Increase your web traffic by writing content for SEO
Search engines don’t see websites the same way that people do. They can only read a website’s code (crawl) so they need prompts to help identify what information it has, in order to determine which search queries it might be relevant to.
What is On-Page SEO?
As the name suggests, On-Page SEO is the process of optimising the content of your website that is visible to users. The two main parts of this are Keyword Targeting and Information Architecture.
Before we get started, if you missed the blog on Keyword Research, be sure to check that out first.
Keyword Targeting
This is where all the keyword research you did comes into play. Identify the 2-3 search terms you want to target on each webpage and place them in the page title, H1 and H2 headings, file-names, alt-text (image description) and URL slug. The body text of a webpage is also important but these areas have more weighting for rankings.
As a comparison, consider these two pages:
URL slug: www.xyzcompany.com/products/t-shirts/1a432kj2
Title: Product 1 | XYZ Company
Heading 1: T-Shirt With Print
Heading 2: Buy Now
Image: IMG_23995
Image Alt-text: blank
Do you know what this company is selling? You can tell it is something to do with T-Shirts but that’s about it. Now, what about if it looked like this:
URL slug: www.xyzcompany.com/products/t-shirts/cat-print-design
Title: Cat Print T-Shirt – Organic Cotton Tees | XYZ Company
Heading 1: Organic Cotton Cat Print T-Shirt
Heading 2: Buy This T-Shirt Online
Image: cat-t-shirt-black.jpg
Image Alt-text: Black Organic Cotton Tee with Cat Design
It’s much clearer to see what the company is selling on this page. It is clear which page will Google be able to read more easily and will be more likely to rank on page one.
Be sure you don’t make the writing too spammy, though. Try and find a balance where it’s not just useful to Google’s web crawl software but also to a human user as well.
Information Architecture (IA)
Basically, just keep content simple and readable. Here are a few quick questions to think about:
Menu
Is the menu easy to find on desktop and mobile?
Does your menu contain all the key sections of your website
If you have drop-down menus, are they short (6 or less items)?
Pages
Are they visually interesting with images and clear headings?
Do they have links to related information, either on your site or externally?
Are the layouts of each page on your site consistent with one another?
For a comprehensive overview of IA, see this guide to information architecture.
Now you’ve completed your on-page SEO, it’s time to run through some tips to get your off-page SEO humming.
Check out the rest of our ‘How to do SEO’ series:
Increase your web traffic by writing content for SEO (current article)
Don’t have time?
If you need a hand, we’d love to work with you on implementing a tailored SEO strategy for your business. Contact us.