We continue our analysis of the factors that influence a website’s rankings in search results. Today, we’re looking at some of the elements that are easier to fix, as they are on-site. We sometimes refer to this as on-site SEO or page-level factors influencing SEO.
Some of the things you can do for SEO at page level
Apart from having a content that is well organized and easy to read, both by users and crawl spiders, it is the use of keywords on all of your pages that is the most important aspect for on-page SEO.
Keyword in <title> tag: If there was only one place where we could place a keyword, it would be here. The content of this tag is a major signal telling Google what to expect from the page. The title indexed by Google is only about 72 characters long, at the most. Anything beyond that will be cut from the SERP. This is why it’s difficult to include many keywords in the title and you should focus on only the most important keywords describing the page, as well as your brand name.
Keyword in Meta Description: there is some debate on whether a keyword in the meta description is a ranking factor or just something that might help increase your click-through-rates when users find an exact match between their query and the description. Whichever it is, we highly recommend writing relevant meta descriptions, up to 320 characters long, using your most relevant keywords, but without overdoing it. Keep your text clean and easy to read.
Keyword in <h> tags: if you’re not familiar with <h> tags, they are the subtitles or headings on your page, ranked from <h1> to <h6>, the <h1> being the most important one. It’s recommended that you have one, and only one, <h1> tag per webpage. Also, try to keep the natural order of things, by using the subtitles in the order of their importance. Don’t use <h4> tags if you don’t also have <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags in your content. That being said, the <h> tags are a good place to add important keywords.
Keyword density: we think this is somewhat less relevant than the previous three locations for SEO keywords, but, quite naturally, if the keyword is in titles and headings, it would only be expected to also see it in the texts on the webpage. Google may choose to impose penalties if it finds that your titles and headings are misleading with regard to the actual content. This Is why you should definitely include those keywords in your paragraphs, without overdoing it, though.
LSI keywords: Google can understand context very well. So, apart from the actual keyword you want to rank for, it looks for related terms that provide more certainty about what the content is. These related terms are called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). For example, in a post about a “curry recipe”, search engines would also expect to find words such as “ingredients”, “grams”, “tablespoons”, “boil”, “cook”, “stir fry” etc.
Content length: regardless of the discussion about keywords, the length of the content on a given page is extremely important, as it is an indicator of how serious the page is. Longer, comprehensive text is preferred instead of “thin” content. Some studies go as far as to show that the average word count for the first page results is as high as 1890 words (!!). However, this may come into contrast with the actual reading habits of users, who may prefer shorter texts.
More about how the quality of the content influences SEO in the next post. Until then, you can make your life easier, by using the services of professional SEO experts, which are also part of our team at Akby Digital Marketing.
