Matt Farber
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to any marketing departments digital strategy and even more so if a company is looking to implement an inbound marketing campaign. How do you know if your SEO strategy is missing anything? There are some critical elements to optimization that could put your website over that of your competitors, resulting in your website being higher in search results. Let’s take a look at some on-page SEO tips that can help you leap over the competition in a Google search.
Using SEO Friendly URLs
It’s easy for us to think we need to go straight to the content on the web page and begin our optimization there, but a URL strategy is where it should all begin. Regardless of what your website is all about having a consistent , keyword driven URL strategy. Here’s an example:
Use SEO-friendly URLs like:
http://www.smartbugmedia.com/inbound-marketing/attract-visitors
Rather Than:
http://www.yourdomain.com/online.store/products/74963/index.htm
The more keywords you can target in your URLs the better. The keywords you’re targeting should match those of your title tags, which brings me to the next tip.
Writing Search Friendly / Keyword Optimized Title Tags
Title tags have been a major factor in SEO for as long as websites have been around and will continue to be in 2015 and beyond. Think of a title tag like a news headline, short and straight to the point. It’s important to include keywords in your title tags, ideally you should use the same keywords used in the SEO friendly URLs you just optimized. There are other parts of the page you should add your targeted keyword too as well. It should be used as an alt-tag for any photos on the webpage. Simply putting an image on a page isn’t enough, Google and other search engines aren’t able to understand what the image represents. So adding an alt-tag to the image will ensure Google understands what the image represents. All these things combined will give your site more credibility as the engines can see the same keyword and content throughout the page.
Having A Fast Load Time
This is an aspect of SEO that is often overlooked but just as important. How quick the webpage loads affects the rank given by search engines. The web server is the biggest factor in affecting the load time. If you notice the webpage takes a bit too long to load, have the IT department check the server and consider changing servers to increase the load time and search rank.
Page Performance In HubSpot
If you’re an existing HubSpot customer, you should use the page performance tool to check for any SEO errors. The tool is fantastic at highlighting any issues found on any pages the site.
A green check mark is what you’d like to see. If a yellow or red icon appear, be sure to click into those specific pages and address the issues found by HubSpot. It may be a load time issue, a lack of a targeted keyword in the title tag, or simply an image lacking an alt-tag. Either way, the tool makes on-page SEO optimization as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Have you found any SEO issues with your website that you’re struggling to fix?
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