How to optimise a website for SEO

How to optimise a page for SEO

If you don’t optimise your web pages for keywords then you won’t show up in Google for those keywords. Google isn’t telepathic – they need you to tell them what your webpages are about. Their algorithm then does the rest.

Optimising a page for SEO is called ‘on-page SEO’. On-page SEO includes optimising the metadata, content and HTML code of your pages.

Here’s how to optimise a page for SEO. Brought to you by Beanie Media SEO Services:

Plugins

First of all, if your website is built on WordPress, download All In One SEO, Rank Math, or Yoast SEO so you can edit your metadata.

Rank Math and Yoast SEO are the standout plugins. They can help you optimise your web pages in real-time. They provide real-time recommendations when optimising on-page SEO. All you need to do is enter a keyword.

Rank Math and Yoast make optimising a page for SEO easy. We use them and most people we talk to in digital marketing use them too.

URL structure

Your URL should contain your focus keyword and it should be as short as possible.

A good rule of thumb is to eliminate conjunctions, prepositions, repetitive words, and superfluous adjectives. You should always remove the three articles – a, an, the – because these serve no purpose to search engines.

Page title

A page title is the most important element of an optimised webpage.

Here’s an example (the page title is the big blue text):

The format is simple:

• 50-60 characters in length
• Target your focus keyword only (this is important)*
• Mention your keyword at the beginning of your page title
• Separate your site name or secondary keywords with a ‘|’ or ‘–‘

*The reason we target only one keyword per page title is that we don’t want keyword dilution. We want Google to prioritise your focus keyword.

The Vodafone example above is a perfect example of a great page title. In this example, the focus keyword is “best iPhone 12 deals and contracts”.

Meta description

This is an HTML attribute that provides a summary of your webpage. It is not a Google ranking signal, but it does help Google determine content relevance. It’s also an opportunity for you to entice searchers to click your search result.

Here’s an example (the meta description is the text below the blue text):

The format is simple:

• 120 to 160 characters in length
• Mention your focus keyword
• Make it actionable (to entice clicks)
• Make it unique from your page content

The Screaming Frog example is a perfect meta description for a business page.

You may be wondering what happens if you don’t create a meta description. What happens is Google will show a text snippet from your webpage instead. The snippet they show will be their choice, taking editorial control out of your hands.

Content

When optimising the written content, you should follow this format:

• Ensure perfect grammar (use Grammarly to make life easier)
• Keep your paragraphs short
• Mention your focus keyword in the H1 (title tag)
• Use descriptive H2 and H3 tags to describe content sections
• If your content is long (over 1,000-words) embed a table of contents at the top with clickable scroll elements for user experience
• Deploy a keyword density of no more than 1% for your focus keyword (for example, mention it a maximum of 10 times in 1,000-words)
• Use variants of your focus keyword to safely increase keyword mentions (for example, if your focus keyword is “iPhone 12 sim-free”, use “sim-free iPhone 12” and “no network iPhone 12”
• Always link to sources
• Build authority by linking to authoritative content, such as census data, medical research, consumer surveys and economic reports
• Link to other useful internal pages on your website
• If you embed an image, set the filename and alt text to your focus keyword (do this for all the images you embed without exception)

Hopefully, this guide will help you get started with optimising pages for SEO. For further reading, Backlinks has a more in-depth guide to creating SEO content.