Although Google has continued to evolve and ranking on the first page of Google is harder now than ever before, on site optimisation is still a huge factor in ranking a website. If your on site optimisation isn't up to scratch then you will be harming your websites search engine visibility. Meaning, you will never rank to your full potential. Is your website optimised in the best way?
Review your title tags
The title tags should be one of the first things that you analyse on your website. To do this, make a list of all of your website urls. You can either do this manually or use a crawling program like Screaming Frog. This will download all of your website links for you and will also give you some useful information on your meta tags.
Once you have got a list of your urls you need to make a note of what your current title tags are. You could do this in a word document, Excel or another similar program. To check your title tags, right click on a page you want to check on your website, then click view page source. Press CTRL and F together to do a search. Type in the word ‘title’ into the search bar that comes up. This should bring you directly to the meta title of that web page. It should look something like this...text.
An easier way to make a note of all your website meta titles is to use Screaming Frog. Once you have entered your website it will generate all of your title tags automatically among other useful things. This will also tell you which duplicate tags there are, if any are missing, and if any are over the 65 character recommended limit. These are three of the main things you need to look at. Finally, with your title tags, make sure they aren't stuffed with keywords. It is good practice to include one or two keywords and your business name. For example, “Keyword 1, Keyword 2 – Business Name”. This also must make sense to a person reading it making it user friendly, as well as pleasing the search engines.
Review your website content
This will be easy to do once you have got a list of all of your website page urls. There are a number of things you should be looking at when reviewing your website content and a few questions you can ask yourself...
- Will the content be useful for readers?
- Is the content informative and tells the reader what they want?
- How much content is on the page? (Pages that have more content on them are proven to rank better than ones with little content on them. In general, anything over 500 words is excellent). Not all pages should have this much content on however, as your home page will probably have something around 200 words plus.
- Is the content relevant to the page it’s on?
- Are the main keywords mentioned naturally in the content?
- What content don't I have that people would find useful
After reviewing your website content you will realise which pages on your site need work and where you can potentially target more keywords with new pieces of content. By doing this you can further enhance your presence in Google.
Review your meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are another important part in the on site optimisation of your website. They can be found the same way as the title tag can be but instead of searching for 'title', search for 'description' in the source code of your website. You will then come across something that says "<meta name="description”. This is where your description will be. Please see some useful tips for meta descriptions below.- Make sure they are all under 156 characters. If they are over this then anything after the 156 mark will be cut off in the Google search results.
- Make sure they include relevant information and maybe a keyword or two for that specific page.
- They should also include a good call to action. This could be something like “get your free quote today” or “call us today on...”.
- There should be no duplicate meta descriptions across your site.
If you implement the above in your websites optimisation and use this information to analyse whether or not yours is up to scratch, you will start getting more out of your SEO campaign. However, not everything is covered in this article and there is a lot more on site factors you can review. Please read our article for some extra factors to look at: 9 Different On Site Optimisation Factors for-your-website
