This is a quick reference guide for setting up your on-page optimisation. This is about 30% of an SEO campaign, but will make the remaining 70% (link building) much more effective a lot more quickly.
TLDR: At the bottom of this post there’s a handy infographic that summarises it, though it doesn’t give quite as much detail. Up to you!
URLs
Should be readable by humans, contain your keywords AND topical variations of your keywords. Take a look at some of mine.
Images
Make the file size as small as possible and strip all meta data so it’s not still whispering to Google about the stock image site it originally came from. ImageOptim is a great free programme for doing all of that very quickly. (Pro tip: Add your own meta data including address, URL and GPS coordinates if a local site)
H Tags
Keyword in H1 and modify it, so it becomes ‘keyword 2017’ for example. Maybe add it with another modifier in an H2 or H3 and definitely add variations of keywords in other H tags. Think ‘solicitor’ vs ‘lawyer.’
Outbound Links
Link out to industry bodies, government sites etc – anything that’s relevant and has an international reputation, really. (Pro tip: lots of SEOs link out to Wikipedia. Google generally don’t like SEOs, so don’t do what other SEOs do!)
Keywords
Add your keyword towards the beginning of your body content. Use keyword synoyms (also known as LSI or latent semantic index – see what I did there?) to leverage the semantic web and display topical relevance.
Length
Post long content – you want at least 1000 words on your home page. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying that in this short little ‘quick guide!’ I just want to keep this one to the point!)
Load Speed
Generally should be shorter than 3 seconds for a web page to load. Get the best hosting you can justify spending on, compress images as mentioned above and redirect your DNS to a CDN (Content Delvery Network) like Cloudflare, too. Load speed is a significant ranking factor thanks to our society of instant gratification!
Social Media
Share your own content with a link on social media and add share buttons to encourage others to do so as well. A site that’s getting links but isn’t getting them from social media looks unnatural.
Reduce Bounce Rate
Write good content, link it well and embed a video at the top of your home page to encourage people to stay longer on your website
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Make it obvious what your site is about with a clear heading above the fold (as in no need to scroll down) and make it easy for a visitor to slide into your sales funnel with a clear call to action and opportunity to make contact (or whatever you want them to do next is).
