Top 5 On-Site SEO Boosters You Aren’t Taking Advantage Of

When it comes to doing Search Engine Optimization, especially for your own business, it can often be overwhelming to know what tasks to focus on. If you are doing not just SEO, but also inbound marketing, blogging, and/or social media management yourself, you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck with the tasks you’re focusing on.

Our Kansas City SEO team at Lure Creative has compiled five quick tips that you can do with your website’s optimization to increase your Google rankings this month.

On-Site SEO Boosters

1. Maximize Your Page’s Meta Title

Taking advantage of a page’s meta title is often the quickest and most impactful thing you can do with on-page SEO to increase your search engine rankings quickly. In writing the meta title for a page on your website, you usually get about 600 pixels (about 60-70 characters normally) before Google will cut your meta title off in a search engine result with “…”, which can decrease the CTR (Click-Through Rate) of your listing when displayed on search engine results.

PRO TIP: Make sure all of your website pages have a unique, keyword-focused meta title.

In writing your meta title you want to try to include the keyword that you ideally want that page to  rank for. You can also include your business name, a variation of your targeted keyword, or even your business phone number, depending on what your goal is for the page.

There are many ways to write an effective meta title, but it is important to use as many of your 600 pixels as possible to get the most value out of your meta title. Here are some examples that may be a good fit for either a service/product page or the homepage on your website:

  • (City + Keyword) by (Company Name) | (Keyword Variation or City Variation)
  • Best (Keyword) Serving (City 1), (City 2), and (City 3) | (Company Name)
  • (Product Name) by (Brand Name) | (Type or Category of Product)

You may have to try some different variations to see how they affect that page’s ranking, but having the keyword you are targeting for that page as close to the front of the meta title as possible is usually a good strategy. Also, try to not repeat the same exact keyword or city twice.

PRO TIP: Use SERP Preview Tool to see how your meta title will look in search results.

2. Optimize Your Images’ Alt-Text

Alt Text for On-Site Search Engine OptimizationMaking sure all of your images have appropriate and optimized alt-text is another quick improvement that you can make on your website. Search engines cannot tell what an image or graphic is about visually, so it is recommended to write alt-text to describe each image and what is being portrayed. For SEO purposes, alt-text can be used to input your keyword, a service or product you offer, your brand name, or a city you are targeting or are based in.

Much like a meta title, you want to have unique alt-text on each image on your website. Some  best practices for writing alt-text are:

  • Write alt-text to be relevant to the image it is describing and/or the page it is on
  • Attempt to keep it less than 10 words and never more than 16 words
  • DO NOT SPAM alt-text (no repeating target keywords over and over)
  • Include target keywords and/or brand name when appropriate

PRO TIP: Have at least one image on every page that includes target keywords in alt-text.

3. Write Longer, Quality Content!

This SEO booster is fairly self-explanatory. There was a viral study done by Backlinko that, after analyzing 1 million Google search results, stated “the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words”, and they also created a graph showing the correlation between amount of words on a page and the ranking on page 1 of Google.

Longer Content Ranks Better

(Case Study Credit: Brian Dean and Backlinko)

Depending on what type of business you have (local service, e-commerce, content creation, franchise, etc.), and what your online competition is doing, I do not think every page that you want to rank on your website has to have 1,800+ words on it.

Doing some brief competition research to see how much written content your high-ranking competition has for the keywords you want to rank for is a good first step. Then simply try to write more and better quality content than the content they have.

PRO TIP: Use bulk web page word counter to see how many words a website page has.

4. Mix in LSI Keywords within Your Copy

LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Indexing” and is used by search engines to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. Oftentimes, if you write long, quality content, you will automatically use LSI keywords, but it is good to be aware of them and “sprinkle” them within your written content.

LSI Keywords for On-Site SEO

An example of how to discover potential LSI keywords is to think about what words relate to your main target keywords. For example “SEO” relates to “Online Marketing”, “Website Optimization”, “Search Marketing”, “Website Rankings”, “Link Building”, etc. You can also think of potential synonyms for your keyword or possible well-known abbreviations as well.

If you do a Google search for anything, you may have also noticed that Google will bold certain words in the meta descriptions of the search results.  They will also have a “Searches Related To ___” at the bottom of the search result. Both of these clues from looking at Google search results are great methods for finding LSI keywords to include in your written content.

PRO TIP: Use LSI keywords in your on-page headers (H1 or H2s) when possible.

5. Use Anchor Text Links Wisely

If you are writing detailed, quality content, it often makes sense to include clickable links to either an external source you reference or a relevant internal page within your website. The anchor text of a hyperlink is simply the clickable text that is associated with the link.

For example if you click on “Kansas City Web Design”, which is underlined and highlighted in blue as you can see, it will take you to our internal page about our website design and development services, which are based in the Kansas City metro. Links can be used to help both users and search engines navigate and understand your website. The general rule of thumb is that the more quality, non-spammy links that are pointing to a page (both internal and external), the more “authority” that page has in Google’s eyes. The clickable text, AKA the anchor text, should usually somehow describe the page or company that the link points to.

A word of caution, do not overdo it when creating “keyword-focused” internal and external links on your page. This often can be seen as spammy in the eyes of search engines and users, and will decrease the value and “authority” the links give. Generally, 2-3 internal links and 2-3 external links per every 500-750 words is a healthy ratio. Just be sure to not link out to the exact same page twice in-content from an individual page or have the exact same anchor text used twice on an individual page.

PRO TIP: If possible, have an anchor-text link in the first paragraph of your page copy.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our post and can use some of our top on-site SEO boosters to help your website’s rankings and hit your 2018 business goals!

If you need help with your SEO, Website or Digital Marketing efforts, contact us online today!