What are on-page optimizations? They’re any actions executed on the website that optimize for increased traffic and/or conversions. They’re kind of important and the good part is they are 100% within your control.
In this 5-part series we’re going to break down a few on-page optimizations that you can do that will improve not only where you show up in search, but also your chances of capturing click-throughs to your website. If you’ve watched our Advanced Keyword Research video, you know ranking for the right keywords, as in those with a high benefit score, is important when you want to match your site with your preferred users and/or buyers. However, just ranking for keywords isn’t enough. You also need to consider how to capture the click from the search engine results page (or the SERP) to your website, and then how to keep users there!
Here is the first of five on-page optimizations you can make that will improve your standing in Google’s eyes and in the eyes of the users and buyers searching for your stuff.
Let’s get to it!
#1: Title Tags
First let’s look at an example. Here’s a SERP for leadership skills:
The title tag is an HTML element that you populate on your website. You may have seen a field for inserting a title tag when creating a new page or post in your website’s content management system, like WordPress or Magento. Whatever you plug into the title tag field in the backend, this is what Google pulls, and this (image) is where and how it shows up in your SERP:
Keep in mind that you are limited to about 50-60 characters before the copy is cut off and you see those ellipses, like in the second post of this SERP from Inc.com.
Customize your title tag to encourage action. One tactic the Huffington Post used in this example was to add a pipe character and then the author’s name. A well-written article on leadership skills is good, but an article written by a thought leader on the topic is far better and more likely to capture the attention of those scanning the SERP.
For Part 1’s challenge, go back through your website and make sure that:
- You are writing title tags for all your landing pages and blog posts
- You are staying within the 50-60 character count, and
- Your title tags are as captivating and compelling as possible.
Now before you start combing through your website page by page, there’s a tool that will crawl your entire site for you and serve up a well organized report in an Excel or CSV file. That tool is Screaming Frog. Once ready, simply plug in your website URL and hit Run. It will crawl your website and pull all the missing and duplicate title tags for you.
And that’s it, Part 1 of the 5-part series down! Stay tuned for Part 2 and the next on-page optimization in the line-up. Until next time!
