The Basics Of SEO

On-Page SEO Basics

Do you ever look around at different articles on the web, searching for some help with SEO, only to find article after article promising the world and then delivering very little?

When I am looking for information or trying to keep my knowledge up to date with the latest trends, some articles I read are confusing! When a ‘normal’ person is looking for help with SEO, it is at a basic level about how to perform SEO on a website without having to be bamboozled with jargon and technical gobbledegook.

So I thought, why not write a post that is easy to understand and will only cover the essential SEO basics that anyone can complete on their website?
Underneath are the main SEO areas to improve your website, which will greatly boost your performance!

Page Title

The page title is the number one area and the first thing you should look at regarding SEO on your website. This, unsurprisingly, is the title of your page. Often, the page’s title could use better wording for SEO purposes (An example of a bad page title on a home page would be: ‘Home – Interact Digital‘). This is where a little tweaking can be effective.

You can see the page title by hovering over the tab in your browser when searching on a desktop or laptop. However, trying to find it on a mobile device is trickier. As you can see in the screenshot underneath, the home page title for Interact Digital is: ‘Web Design & Digital Marketing Agency ‘ Chorley, Lancashire.’

When thinking of a page title, consider what words people would use to search for your page. Next, match the page title with your audience’s words to describe the services the page sells. If it doesn’t match up, there will be a disconnect between your web page and the visitor’s search term. This means many people searching for your service won’t find you on Google.

A mistake many business owners make is to use technical terms to describe their business. Unfortunately, working in the industry daily can often make it difficult to step back and understand how non-technical people would describe your offering.

What Page Title Should I Use For SEO?

Here’s an example of a search not matching up with a web page. A customer is searching Google for ‘Binman Chorley’. There is a page that would be perfect for them. However, it calls itself ‘Refuse Engineers North West’. It’s unlikely that the customer will see that page in their search results.

There is a disconnect between the wording that may allow a competitor to hijack the searches by matching up their page titles with customers’ searches.

This may seem like a silly example, but we see many page titles like this or worse. What does a page title like ‘Home Page’ or ‘About Us’ mean to Google? If that is the first thing that Google reads about your website, it will take longer to figure out what it is about.

Another mistake people make is to give strong weighting to the business name in the page title. Most of the time, you would be top of the rankings for your business name anyway, so it could be better in ranking for different keywords. Additionally, the only people who will search for your business name’s keyword are those who already know you exist.

It would be best if you were competitive for the searches relating to your business services or products rather than your brand name.

The Interact Digital home page title is:

Web Design & Digital Marketing Agency | Chorley, Lancashire

This quickly describes the main overview of what we offer.

If you use WordPress, a Yoast SEO plugin can be added to the site to allow you to edit and change the page title. Please follow the link if you need help installing a plugin.

You can change the default page title and meta description at the bottom of the WordPress page or post you edit. Yoast also provides SEO and readability suggestions for that page based on a ‘focus keyphrase’ that you enter and the content on the page. Yoast could be better by any means, but it is worth using.

Other CMSs will also have a way of changing the page title, but this may be through a paid plugin or module. If your site is in HTML and you are editing it yourself, the title is in the < head > section of the webpage and looks like this:

“< title > This text would be the page title you can edit < /title >.”

A web page is made up of three components:

< head >

content here will include style sheets and tracking codes. Page title & meta description.

< /head >

< body >

Content here will be the page content – banners, text, images, etc.

< /body >

< footer >

Content here will usually be javascript codes, additional menu links, social media icons, copyright notices etc.

< /footer >

The header and footer are usually the same on every page. Most websites will require any changes to occur in one location, which will then update each header or footer across the website. Some HTML sites require a change on every page, which, to be honest, is a pain in the backside.

The ‘body’ is the website section where the content lives and varies page by page, whereas the header and footer are static as they tend to stay the same on every page.

You won’t need to worry about this most often, as a CMS such as WordPress already makes it easy to manage. However, if you are editing an HTML site, then it is information that you will need!

Page Title Best Practises

• Keep the title under 60 characters, including spaces.
• Your main keywords should be read first – if you include your business name, put it at the end.
• Check, then double-check spelling and grammar!

Meta Descriptions For SEO

A meta description is a snippet of text you see on Google when you search. A meta description isn’t used to help you improve rankings on Google. However, it is the first text people will read on a search engine when deciding to click on your link or a competitor’s. It is, therefore, very important.

All CMS (Content Management Systems) will have the ability to edit the meta description, but each CMS works differently. We will talk about WordPress here as it is the most popular CMS. WordPress sites need a plugin (such as Yoast, other SEO plugins are available…) to edit the meta descriptions.

Without defining a meta description, Google will often use the first 160 characters it finds on your website. If you’re lucky, it will be something relevant. If you’re not, it could be anything on the page. If you search on Google and see random text where the description is, this is usually a sign that the meta description has not been filled in.

Google is improving with meta descriptions, often showing a relative part of the page relating to somebody’s search. However, it is still much better to control what is shown by default rather than leave it to chance.

Meta description best practises

• Keep descriptions under 160 characters to ensure they fit the space Google allows.
• Include the main keywords within the description. Google will highlight words in the description if they match the person’s search term.
• Include a call to action or special offers in the description, such as: “Find out more”, “Call us today”, “Book an appointment online”, “20% off new orders” etc.

Heading Tags

Google uses heading tags to describe upcoming paragraphs. To use an easy-to-follow example, the heading tags in this post are:

Heading 1: The Basics Of SEO

Heading 2: Page Title | Meta Descriptions For SEO | Heading Tags | Images For SEO | Content

Heading 3: What Page Title Should I Use For SEO | Page Title Best Practises | Meta Description Best Practises | How To Optimise Images

How To Change Heading Tags

To change the heading tags, highlight the text in your WordPress page and click on the drop-down menu above the section you’re editing. You can choose from ‘Paragraph’ for all the main content or any heading tag. The SEO priority of the heading tags lowers further down the line. This means that Google will see h1 tags as the most important information, then the h2, h3, h4 etc.

Each page should only ever have one h1 tag. H1 tags help describe the overall focus of that particular page. If you have more than one h1 tag, it can confuse Google. This can lead to promoting you higher for a term you are not interested in or even reducing rankings for your service.

Heading 2 (h2) tags split the page into different sections. This blog post can be used as an example.

‘Page Titles’ was the first h2 tag used, as that was what that section was about. I then used an h3 tag, ‘What Page Title Should I Use?‘ followed by another h3 tag, ‘Page title best practises’, as they were sub-sections of the page title section.

After this, I moved to a different subject – ‘Meta Descriptions’. Here, I used the h2 tag again, as I was changing the subject, but still stayed within the topic of the overall page – SEO basics. H2 tags can be considered subheadings.

A mistake people make when it comes to heading tags is to use them for design purposes. People who don’t know what they’re doing often place multiple h1 tags on a page. This is because the h1 tag has a bigger font size by default or uses a different style of font (Helvetica rather than Ariel, for example). This makes a section look nicer or stand out more.

This shouldn’t be done. The font size and family can be changed on the h2 or h3 tag to match your style without using an h1 tag.

Images For SEO

The SEO advantages of using images are often overlooked. A picture taken on a phone or digital camera and uploaded to a website without any alterations will cause issues.

Images on phones or cameras are at a good enough standard for print quality. However, due to the quality, the physical file size of the image is quite large. A website doesn’t need this level of detail.

There are ways to alter an image to reduce its size without losing quality. We’ll explain how to do this shortly.

Images can provide substantial SEO power but are often ignored, as people think images are solely for decoration.

Look at the Google search, and you will see a way to use Google via images, imaginatively called ‘Google image search’. This is widely used and is essential if your product or service is visual.

If you are a florist, you want examples of your work in the Google image search, as people will use images to look for pretty flowers. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t understand what is on an image; it reads a line of code to where it is stored and displays it on the screen. So, if Google doesn’t understand your image, how can it show it to people searching for flowers?

How To Optimise Images

Underneath are the three types of optimisation you can make to images. These will help improve SEO via Google’s understanding and loading speed (a ranking factor!)

1. Image Size
   The size of images – even ones taken on a camera phone – is huge! The size of these images can slow your website down significantly, often making it seem like you’re on dial-up internet. This is because the picture takes a long time to display. The size of an image doesn’t need to be so large. Screens are not that big, so there is no need for an image that would look perfect projected onto a wall hosted on your website. You can compress images using sites such as https://imagecompressor.com/ to a smaller file size without losing quality.
2. Image Name
   As descriptive as IMG_4011 is, it doesn’t tell anybody anything about the image. Google doesn’t know what is on an image. It just knows it must show the image in a particular position. Although it is getting better at understanding what’s on an image, giving a helping hand by assigning images a real name will benefit your site massively! Many people now use Google Images to search. If Google doesn’t know what your image is, it can’t put you in the mix.
3. Alt Text (alternative text)
   Similar to the name of the image, alt text helps Google understand what an image is about. It is also used for screen readers (for those with visual impairments). It is shown when there is an issue with the image displaying for whatever reason. As mentioned, Google doesn’t understand what is on an image, but it can understand the image title and alt text and use that to rank the image. If your website is visual, improving the image title and alt text could improve the number of visitors exposed to your site. Simply click on your image and type in a couple of descriptive words in the ‘alt text’ box.

Content

The actual ‘meat’ of the page! If your content is not engaging, or is full of spelling mistakes and grammar errors, not only will Google rank you lower, but people will also look elsewhere.

When I am writing content, I ask that it is proofread by a few people and ask for feedback before releasing it onto a website. I would recommend everyone do this before hitting the publish button.

Here are some pointers on how to create good content:

1. Provide Value. Try to answer a problem that someone has. For example, in this post, I tried explaining simple SEO tips you can complete on your website. I haven’t given a little teaser, then asked you to get in touch to find out more. I have considered the SEO areas people may struggle with and provided an easy-to-follow plan to improve your on-page SEO. If you can provide value in the form of an answer to questions or struggles, then you are halfway to creating great content.
2. Content length. SEO experts often tell you a blog post should be at least 300 words. This isn’t true. There is no minimum or maximum length of a post. It should be as long as it needs to be to answer all the questions and cover the entire topic. If this can be done in 100 words, then great. If it needs 5000 words, that’s how long it needs to be.
3. How people read. When people read a website, they don’t do so like they would read a book. Long paragraphs of text are a quick way to turn people off. Have you ever read a full Wikipedia page? If so, you will understand how difficult it can be to concentrate for that long. Studies have shown that people concentrate on the top left and then focus down the left spine of the page in a capital ‘F’ style pattern, as shown below. This tells us that short paragraphs with image breaks will work best to keep a person’s attention for longer. Highlight the most important sections in this layout so that skim readers can quickly find what they are looking for, and you will improve your readability.

Contact Us

Creating content is often harder than you think. For example, getting a new page or post to read well, with perfect spelling and grammar and a call to action included can take a lot of time, especially when you account for getting your worked checked by others. It can be a task that is more work than you initially thought. Using a professional copywriter can better use your time and get you better results.

If you want inspiration on what content to create or help with new keywords, look at this post, detailing some cool places to find new keywords and generate blog ideas.

If you have read this far, then WOW! Thank you. Hopefully, there is enough there to get started and make a real impact on your SEO. Please let me know if you have any questions or queries, and I will get back to you with answers or help as soon as possible. Thank you for reading.