What You Should Focus on to Optimize Your Website
What "On-Page" SEO Means
Search Engine Optimization is the optimization of individual pages on a website to improve their visibility and ranking in search engine results pages. It is essential for improving website rankings, providing a better user experience, increasing relevance, and gaining a competitive advantage over other websites. In this article we will focus specifically on On-Page SEO, and how to fine tune your website to not only rank better on search engines, but to also create a user-friendly experience for people visiting your site.
Prove Your EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness
Not only do you want to prove to search engines that you meet the E.E.A.T standard, but you want to prove this to anyone searching the web for information that you can provide. Adding high quality content and structuring your website so that search engines and people can effectively understand your purpose is the goal of on-page SEO.
E.E.A.T is a framework used to evaluate the credibility of a website. By demonstrating these characteristics, your business can show website visitors that you are reputable and trustworthy.
Here’s how each element of EEAT can contribute to your business’s credibility:
- Experience: By showcasing your experience, your business can demonstrate your expertise in their industry. This can be achieved through highlighting your years of operation, the number of customers you have served, and any awards or recognitions you have received. Additionally, including customer testimonials or case studies can help demonstrate how your business has successfully solved problems or met the needs of your clients.
- Expertise: Your business can establish your expertise in your field by providing valuable, informative content on your website. This content can include blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and other resources that demonstrate the company’s knowledge and understanding of your industry. Additionally, your business can highlight the qualifications and credentials of your staff, such as certifications or degrees.
- Authority: Authority can be established through demonstrating that your business is a thought leader in your industry. This can be achieved through publishing original research, speaking at industry conferences, or being cited by other authoritative sources. Additionally, you can leverage your partnerships and collaborations with other reputable organizations to further establish your authority.
- Trustworthiness: Trustworthiness can be established through several means, including highlighting any industry certifications or memberships, showcasing positive customer reviews and ratings, and demonstrating transparent business practices such as clear pricing and terms of service. Additionally, including a privacy policy and secure payment options can help build trust with website visitors.
In this article we’ll take a look at the most useful strategies to showcase how your business meets the E.E.A.T standard while simultaneously enhancing your website’s content and layout. You’ll provide customers with a great user experience, and you’ll rank higher in search results.
Here Are The 5 On-Page Optimization Best Practices We Will Cover:
- Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
- Multimedia & Featured Snippets
- Mobile Responsiveness & Site Speed
- Internal Links
- Hierarchy & Navigation
1. Optimizing Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
After searching for a keyword in a search engine like Google, the first thing a user will see is the title tags. By choosing the best title tags you increase the chances that a user will click on your site.
Here are some tips on optimizing your title tags:
- Keep them short: If your title tag is longer than 70 characters, Google will abbreviate it.
- Focus on search intent: Make sure your title tags reflect the search intent of your intended audience. Use those keywords that your research found are most searched for by your audience.
- Include a keyword: Since Google analyzes title tags to determine a page’s topic, attempt to add your target keyword there.
- Utilize the power of Power Words: Power words elicit emotions in readers and can make your title tags more engaging.
2. Incorporating Multimedia
Multimedia is essential to optimizing a website. It can enhance user experience, improve accessibility, increase shareability, and therefore boost SEO. By incorporating multimedia into your content, you can create a more engaging and compelling website that attracts more organic traffic and keeps users coming back for more.
- Enhances User Experience: Multimedia can improve user experience by making the content more engaging, interactive, and visually appealing. By incorporating multimedia, you can make your website more interesting and compelling, which can keep users engaged and increase the time they spend on your site.
- Improves Accessibility: Multimedia can help make your content more accessible to a wider audience. For example, adding alt text to images can make it easier for visually impaired users to understand the content. Incorporating captions and transcripts to videos and audio files can make them accessible to users who are deaf or hard of hearing.
- Increases Shareability: Multimedia can increase the shareability of your content. Users are more likely to share content that is visually appealing, interesting, or informative. By incorporating multimedia into your content, you can make it more shareable and increase its reach.
- Boosts SEO: Incorporating multimedia can also improve your website’s SEO. Search engines like Google consider factors such as engagement, time on site, and bounce rates when ranking websites. By incorporating multimedia that keeps users engaged, you can improve these metrics and increase your website’s visibility in search results.
Get creative with your multimedia! Photos are good, but consider also adding infographics that give readers an overview of an in-depth topic, or step-by-step illustrations for tutorials or recipes. Create a video to add directly to your website. Video content may include things like answering questions received from customers, discussing a topic already on your FAQ page, introducing employees, or for tutorials. Head over to our Video Production page for some great examples of content that we have produced for our clients.
Optimizing your website for featured snippets involves making sure that your content is structured in a way that makes it easy for search engines to extract and display in a featured snippet. The point is to directly answer a user’s search query. Having content that Google will use as a featured snippet showcases your authority to users, and will lead to a higher click-through rate to your website.
Here are seven ways to optimize your content for featured snippets:
- Focus on answering specific questions: Research common questions related to your content and make sure to provide clear and concise answers to those questions in your content.
- Use headers to organize your content: Use headings (H1, H2, H3) to organize your content into sections, making it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your content.
- Create lists and tables: Creating lists and tables can help make your content more scannable and easier for search engines to extract for a featured snippet.
- Optimize your content for long-tail keywords: Focus on long-tail keywords that match the queries for which you want to appear in a featured snippet. Use the question in the content of the webpage and provide a clear and concise answer.
- Provide a summary of your content: Use a brief summary or introduction to your content that includes the question you’re answering and the answer itself.
- Use schema markup: Schema markup can help search engines better understand the content of your webpage and can increase the chances of your content appearing in a featured snippet.
- Ensure your content is accurate and up-to-date: Search engines prefer content that is up-to-date, accurate, and provides a high-quality user experience.
3. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness & Site Speed
Did you know that approximately 60% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices? That is why it is essential to ensure mobile optimization for your website. Users are more likely to stay on a website that is easy to use and navigate, and more likely to leave a website that is difficult to use or navigate. You’ll miss out on opportunities to showcase your expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness in mobile users won’t stay on our webpage.
Here are three tips on how to optimize your website for mobile users:
- Use a Responsive Design: A responsive design allows your website to adjust and adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions, ensuring that your website looks good and is easy to use on any device. Using a responsive design is essential to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices.
- Optimize Images: Large images can slow down the loading time of your website on mobile devices. To optimize your website for mobile devices, make sure to compress and optimize your images for the web. This can help reduce the loading time of your website on mobile devices, improving user experience.
- Simplify Navigation: Navigation on a mobile device can be difficult, so it’s important to simplify it as much as possible. Make sure that your navigation is easy to use and that the most important pages and information are easy to find. Simplifying navigation can make your website more user-friendly on mobile devices, and can also improve SEO by making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website.
Are you old enough to remember how sloooow the web used to be? In the early days of the internet you could click on a website link, walk away to make a sandwich, and when you came back the site was just finally loading. We don’t have the patience for that anymore! Site speed matters. A slow, clunky website will result in a negative experience for users. This will cause the bounce rate to go up, and search engines won’t be happy. The following tips can improve your website’s speed and provide a better user experience for your visitors, which can lead to higher search engine rankings, more traffic, and improved conversions.
- Optimize images: Large image files can slow down your website. Optimize your images by compressing them without sacrificing too much quality. Use appropriate image formats such as JPEG or PNG and reduce the file size before uploading them to your website.
- Minimize HTTP requests: Every element on a web page, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets, requires an HTTP request to load. Minimize the number of requests by combining files, removing unnecessary files and code, and reducing the number of third-party scripts and plugins.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can help to distribute your website’s content across multiple servers, which can reduce the load on any single server and speed up content delivery to users.
Enable browser caching: Enable browser caching to reduce the number of HTTP requests made by the user’s browser. Caching stores frequently accessed files in the user’s browser, reducing the need to download them again on subsequent visits. - Use a fast web hosting provider: A fast web hosting provider can improve your website’s speed and performance. Choose a hosting provider that offers fast load times, high uptime, and good customer support.
Minimize code and scripts: Reduce the size of your website’s code and scripts by minifying them. Minifying involves removing unnecessary characters, such as whitespace and comments, to reduce the size of the file. - Test website speed: Regularly test your website’s speed using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Identify areas for improvement and take steps to optimize your website accordingly.
The speed in which your website loads may not have anything to do with E.E.A.T, but customers will immediately form a negative opinion about your website if the load time is too slow.
4. Add Links to Relevant Internal Pages
Linking to relevant internal pages benefits SEO by increasing crawlability, improving user experience, distributing link equity, and enhancing topical relevance. By incorporating internal linking into your SEO strategy, you can improve the overall visibility and rankings of your website. You’ll also be highlighting more reasons why your business has E.E.A.T. Linking to internal blog posts to provide more content, or other product pages to show what else you have to offer, will build upon how customers and search engines view your website.
Let’s overview the reasons why this works:
- Increases crawlability: When search engine crawlers visit your website, they follow links to discover and index new pages. By linking to relevant internal pages, you can help search engine crawlers discover and index more pages on your website, which can improve your overall search engine visibility.
- Improves user experience: When you link to relevant internal pages, you make it easier for users to find related content and navigate your website. This can improve the user experience, increase engagement, and reduce bounce rates.
- Distributes link equity: Link equity refers to the value or authority that a page passes to other pages through links. By linking to relevant internal pages, you can distribute link equity and help other pages on your website rank higher in search results.
- Enhances topical relevance: By linking to relevant internal pages, you can signal to search engines that your website is topically relevant and authoritative on a particular subject. This can help improve your website’s visibility and rankings for relevant search queries.
5. A Hierarchy of Pages That Makes Sense & the Navigation to Get You There
Creating a logical hierarchy of pages on a website means organizing the pages in a way that makes sense and is easy for users to understand and navigate. This typically involves creating a clear and intuitive structure for the pages, with a homepage at the top of the hierarchy, followed by main sections, and then sub-sections or individual pages within each section.
A logical hierarchy of pages can help improve the user experience by making it easier for users to find the information they’re looking for and navigate through the website. It can also help with search engine optimization by providing a clear structure for search engine crawlers to follow, making it easier for them to understand the content and context of the website.
Some key considerations when creating a logical hierarchy of pages include:
- Using clear and descriptive page titles: Page titles should accurately describe the content of the page and include relevant keywords to help with SEO.
- Grouping related pages together: Pages should be organized into main sections and subsections based on their topic or content, making it easy for users to find related content.
- Providing clear navigation: Navigation menus and links should be clearly labeled and easy to use, with intuitive categories and sub-categories.
Ensuring that your website is easy to navigate is essential to providing a positive user experience for your visitors.
Here are some tips to help you make sure your website is easy to navigate:
- Clear and consistent navigation menu: Use a clear and consistent navigation menu that is easy to find and use. Your navigation menu should be prominently displayed at the top or side of your website and include the most important sections and pages of your site.
- Logical site structure: Organize your site in a logical way that makes sense to your visitors. Create categories and subcategories to group similar content together and make it easy for users to find what they are looking for.
- Search function: Provide a search function on your site so that users can easily find specific content. Make sure the search bar is prominently displayed and easy to use.
- Use descriptive and meaningful labels: Use descriptive and meaningful labels for your navigation menu items and links. Avoid using generic labels like “Products” or “Services” and be more specific about what visitors can expect to find when they click on a link.
- Breadcrumb navigation: Use breadcrumb navigation to show users where they are in your site’s hierarchy and to provide an easy way to navigate back to higher-level pages. If you have multiple category pages on your website that then branch off into sub-categories, and maybe even further individual pages (like a specific product page that is linked from a particular category. Think: Clothing ➡️ Men’s Clothing ➡️ Men’s Sweatshirts).
- Mobile-friendly design: Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices, as an increasing number of users are browsing the web on their phones and tablets. Ensure that your website is responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens.
- Test your website’s usability: Conduct user testing or ask for feedback from your users to identify any issues with your website’s navigation and usability.
Putting it All Together
Optimizing these 5 components of your website will not only allow users to have a much more robust and enjoyable experience on your website, it will simultaneously allow search engines to understand why your site deserves to be on the top of the results page. By effectively demonstrating your Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, you will rank higher, and users will be much more likely to find value in your website.
On-page SEO is a complex, ongoing process. Search engine algorithms are always evolving, and your competitors are trying to keep up, as well. We’re happy to share these tips with you so that you have an understanding about how you can improve your own website. We also know how much time it takes to manage a site. Keeping up on those algorithm changes, regularly adding new and useful content, optimizing site speed, and running website audits, all take time. Our staff is ready to do this work for you, freeing up your time to concentrate on your business. Arcane Marketing has years of experience in SEO, and we can execute a precise strategy for your unique business needs in a timely and accurate manner. Reach out now to speak with one of our SEO experts!
