On-Page SEO: Optimizing Pages For Search
So now we're going to talk about optimizing pages, what we call the onsite for search. So there are really a whole host of things that you want to do, and this is the best thing that you can control in terms of your website for SEO purposes.
So a title tag is--I'll show you what that looks like here in just a minute--but it's a really important signal to the search engines to tell them what that page is about.
An H1 tag, which is the title on the page. The title tag is the title of the page; the H1 tag I kind of refer to it as the title on the page. You only want to have one of those. And that's a common mistake. We see that people either don't have any or they have multiple.
And then every image that you have on your website should have alt descriptions that tell Google what that picture is. Google can see there's a picture there. It doesn't know what it is. That's why you need the description on each and every picture.
If you don't, then Google is going to see your website as being incomplete, and incompleteness implies that maybe there are other things that might be wrong with your website. I'm a big believer you don't give the search engines any reason to doubt your authority and your credibility.
Anchor text. So this is where you would see an underlined piece of text on a page. When you click on it, it takes you to another place. Do that to link in between your pages, what we call internal links. That's great for SEO, but you also can do that to link out to an external website.
Make sure you have an XML sitemap, and you submit that to Google and to Bing. This is what's going to help those search engines know what content is on your site and how frequently you want them to crawl it.
And then make sure you have all your tracking and analytics code installed so that you can measure and track everything.
So here's what I mean by the site or the page title. You can see Miami painting contractor, and then you have this vertical bar right here, and then it goes into a house, whatever it says. And here's the beginning of the URL.
So this is in the upper left-hand corner of the website or on the tab. If you have multiple tabs open, sometimes you might need to hover over a tab, to be able to read this. But it'll give you a little display of what that says is a little popup. This is a really big signal to the search engine though, to help them understand what this page is about.
And then you want to do it in a way that is optimized for SEO. So if you just list your company name, that's a missed opportunity. From an SEO perspective, it's more important to state what you are, which would be, you are a Miami painting contractor, a house painting service in Miami. Those are things that people search for. They probably don't know your company name. And so they're not going to type in your company name for search unless, again, it was somebody who referred you. But if they're just doing a search to try to find a painting company or painting service, they're not going to probably type in your name. Here are just a couple more examples.
You can vary that based on starting with the city and then listing the service that you offer; having a variety of different ways that you phrase the service. So painting contractor versus commercial painting company; Atlanta drywall contractor; drywall repair, Atlanta. These are semantically similar keyword phrases. And then you would follow that up with your company name.
H1 tag. When you look at a website, there are ways that you can see what the H1 tag is. It’s the title that's on your page. So if you were looking at a Word document for example, and you were reading that Word document, there's going to be one thing that tells you what the title is and everything else is a subtitle or subheading. This is the primary thing that tells the search engines, in terms of the content on the page, what that page is about.