Most important onsite SEO elements
Onsite SEO is not hard to get right. There are a number of things you can check and fix and a few mistakes to avoid to ensure that everything is set up in the way it should be.
Your page titles and descriptions
If you are into SEO, you must have read this a million times and this is because it is one of the most important SEO factors.
The page title and description are what the search engines ‘read’ first when crawling a page.
If your titles and descriptions are not optimized in the way search engine crawlers want, you are making their task more difficult and this is not working in your favor.
How do you optimize your titles and descriptions?
There's more to SEO than just writing great titles. You can use Vellume Innovation, our SEO keyword research tool, to find new keywords and discover which terms are driving searches across your site in order to optimize your titles.
- Think of search terms users may use to find your page
- Pass those queries through Google, Semrush, google keyword tool to find out the search volume, keyword difficulty and what others are using as titles for those queries.
- Identify which keywords (preferably long-tail keywords) are appropriate for your page
- Try to include those keywords in your titles while at the same time giving the title a friendlier and interesting tone.
For example:
Search Phrase: ‘benefits of bananas’
Keyword (after research): ‘banana health benefits’
Title: ‘10 Amazing health benefits from eating bananas daily’
Description: ‘Eating bananas on a daily basis offers a number of health benefits. Number 3 is amazing and will definitely surprise you! Read on to find out how.’
The H1 Tag
A well-optimized page should have only one H1 tag and several h2,h3 tags. The h1 tag is usually the same as the page title (although it doesn’t have to be exactly the same).
A quick way to find out if your page follows this rule is to right-click anywhere on your page and select VIEW SOURCE from the pop-up menu.
Then click CTRL-F to open the ‘Find’ box and search for H1. if you see more than two instances of <h1> and </h1> then ask your developer to fix it so that the page has only one H1 tag.
ALT text for images
If you use images within your text (and you should), you need to make sure that the ALT text has a meaningful value that will give a good indication to search engines about the content of the image and how this is related to your page.
For example for the image below, I have set the ALT text to ‘onsite SEO principles’.
Other onsite SEO factors:
Besides the above, other SEO factors to consider when doing onsite optimization are:
Well formatted URLs (words separated by ‘-’)
- Proper use of breadcrumbs
- Use of structured data
- Website Speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Transparency (who wrote the post)
- Broken links
- Properly configured 404 pages
