Vital on Page SEO Factors You Should Be Thinking About – Part 2

Following on from part one of this piece covering the vital on page SEO factors you need to keep in mind this year, here we’re sharing a few additional considerations to keep front and centre throughout your journey to better rankings and cost-effective web traffic. Remember we’re focussing on individual page by page factors when we talk about on-page SEO and not so much the bigger picture, which of course includes considerably more ranking factors.

Worthwhile Page Content It’s adolescent to think that in this day an age you can get away with producing a website which has been geared purely toward achieving high organic search rankings and expect to run a successful business through that asset. Yes, SEO is a huge traffic delivery channel and for those achieving well it will become one of the most cost-effective delivery methods also, but that doesn’t mean you can afford for it to be your only focus.When it comes to producing web copy for your site pages, the user or the reader should come first. Yes, we want it to be keyword rich where possible and with meaningful headers and title tags and everything else we’ve mentioned, but these should work in tandem with producing for the user and not in isolation. Don’t create copy for the sake of it just because you want to keep Google happy, write for the user and make sure it has a purpose.By all means refine your copy to take into account your keyword focus but prioritise the quality of the content from a reader perspective to ensure it is strong and worthwhile. SEO for Images It’s not just text that contributes to your SEO power, images play a part too. In fact, images for many can be a negative factor because using the wrong format or simply abusing image files sizes slows down the page loading times and seriously hampers your overall SEO effectiveness elsewhere.On the plus side, images naturally make web pages more appealing, break up text content and can potentially see you rank within Google image search.For body text images keep file sizes around or below the 100kb mark unless they’re premium placement or functional assets. Use file names, alt text and image descriptions which are accurate to the image and create your page with keyword focus in mind. Choose to be Focussed You may or may not have heard of the term ‘keyword cannibalization’. This refers to having a website with multiple pages ranking or trying to rank well for the exact same keyword or phrase. Popular opinion is that the more pages you have dedicated to a keyword, the better overall chance you have of your site ranking for this term. This is actually not exactly true and what can happen is that the multiple pages of your own site ranking for the same keyword end up competing with each other.You need to have a plan and know which high profile pages on your site you want to dedicate to a given keyword or phrase. What you then need to do is use additional pages supporting this keyword as internal support structures. To do this, link your support pages internally to your dedicated page in order to pass the SEO power onward internally to your focus point. This process is also known in the industry as creating cornerstone content pages.