On-Page SEO Priorities: Title's, Anchor Text or Meta data?
-
**Any suggestions for prioritized on-page SEO work? Relative weights of importance? **
**What is most important from highest to lowest? **
- MetaTag Descriptions?
- Titles?
- Anchor Text?
- Alt Text - for images?
- Anything else?
We might not be able to do everything at once like I desire ......but I do feel we should at least get the ball moving in the right direction.
I am looking for ideas or suggestions on what to prioritize for a little bit of on-page SEO work on our website. I personally feel that SEO is pretty important but I am a novice. I have been reading this site the past week and want to convince my webpage guy that on-page SEO is important and that we should at least do a few things and gradually get the work done.
Rightfully so our #1 priority is to redesign our landing pages (they are bad) . I also think we should do a little On-Page work concurently. (Lack of on-page SEO is also preventiing me from successfully submitting and being accepted by Dmoz, Yahoo, BOW etc)
He is mainly a back engine guy and does a very good job with that. If I were to TELL him to do a few prioritized on-page SEO things what would you suggest? He did do something on the home page at my suggestion but that is all to this point. We have over 400 pages indexed with very little on-page SEO on them.
Thank you,
UtahTiger
-
I just thought of something else. This is slightly less critical but try to keep the file size of your page under 1mb. Some say 50kb but I think that's a little extreme in the age of broadband. The site I market is 1.1mb and loads in only 1.18 seconds. But do try to stay under 1mb because of mobile phones which are slower. (Unless you have a mobile version of your site, like I do)
Also, make sure all of your code validates. http://validator.w3.org/
-
Well, a couple more simple things you can implement are:
Make sure your target keywords appear on the page a few times, but don't overdo it! I cannot stress that enough. Only use them as much as what would sound natural to a human reading it.
Give your page at least a couple of paragraphs of quality, helpful content. My personal minimum I strive for is 300-400 words--that is just what has worked for me.
Make sure all images have relevant alt tags (your web person will know what that means; If not, you have a bigger issue than being new to SEO)
Don't put too many links on the page. i.e. If you have 200 products, don't link to every single one of them from the homepage; break them into categories and sub -pages.
Use a free service like http://pingdom.com/ to check the load time of your homepage. It will offer suggestions for improvement.
Set up 301 redirects to avoid duplicate content penalties. http://www.ragepank.com/articles/3/preventing-duplicate-content/
(OK, that one's not as easy)Submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools
I hope you succeed in your endeavors!
-
Thank you for the input. lol Neither one of us know SEO but he does now how to do the back-end database stuff.
-
Your title tag is the most important out of all the things you listed. Make sure it includes you top keyword you're trying to rank for, but don't stuff any more than two keywords or phrases in there. And don't exceed 70 characters. If you find you have a lot of extra room, include your brand name.
If you're linking to internal pages from your homepage, use anchor text you want those pages to rank for--as long as it makes sense to your customers.
Meta description doesn't have much, if any, SEO value. It is what potential customers will see in the search engine results; a good description will increase your click through rate. It's been theorized that Google tracks click through rate and bounce rate and uses this information to determine relevancy of sites to tweak ranking, thus you could say the meta description indirectly affects your ranking--for better or for worse.
As far as your boss not recognizing the value of SEO, just tell him: what good will it do to build the best site the world as ever seen if no one ever sees it?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is Moz's Schema so bare
I use to use Moz as an example by looking at their site using Google's Rich snippet tool, Today I checked and it is so bare with errors https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=moz.com What happen?Why the sudden change?
On-Page Optimization | | uBreakiFix0 -
Regarding Google Title 'Width' and changing Meta Titles w/o Penalty?
A vast majority of pages on my site are now too wide (the character count was fine prior to the March update). I want to go through and update them so they display properly and are not too wide.However, I am concerned, as my understanding was that changing Meta Titles is dangerous and can have a negative effect on your rankings and can cause real issues. Is this an opportunity to change my Titles all-together without any kind of penalty? Or can I only trim the end part? In summary: 1. Can I edit all of my Meta Titles without affecting my rankings? 2. If no, how do I edit them properly to fit within the proper width and not cause any issues? 3. If yes, I can go through and change all my Meta Titles to whatever extent and optimize them to reflect latest best practices? There are changes I wanted to make to all my meta titles but I've been afraid to... due to fear of rankings drops etc Any help with this would be greatly appreciated
On-Page Optimization | | lawfirm0 -
Google Doesn't Display A Right Page Title
For some reason Google Displays a wrong page title of some of my pages. E.g. page http://www.imoney.my/home-loan The title in the search reach results says "Home Loan - iMoney", but the one I've set up is <title></span><span class="webkit-html-tag">Housing Loan: Compare Mortgages of All Malaysian Banks @iMoney.my</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title> Even when I preview it on the preview tool, it shows the full title, but when I google - again the short one. Does anyone know what the reason for that is?
On-Page Optimization | | imoney0 -
Page Title
Hi All, I am wondering if you could help me please. I am getting the following result after I run my On-Page Analysis Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements _Easy fix _ <dl style="font-style: normal;"> <dt>Page titles</dt> <dd>"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin -" and "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single page title element.</dd> </dl> Does this mean that i have 2 pages that are nearly identical or i should only name a page with one word? The reason i ask is because i have 1 page called "Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin" and another called "Aquashowers-Dublin Shower Repair" I don't have a page called "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin" (with the space inbetween the words and the hyphen) Any help would be great. Thanks again Aidan
On-Page Optimization | | aidanlawlor0 -
Adding dynamic item to static page - good for SEO?
We have a static page we want to rank for a competitive phrase. Would it help, or would it make little to no difference, if we added a small dynamic item to the page so that each time the googlebot visited the page it wouldn't be 100% the same as the last time it visited? The reason to do this would be because of the belief that Google likes pages that update once in a while. The dynamic portion of the page wouldn't be as simple as a page counter, but it wouldn't be very elaborate either. A tiny portion of the page. Think of something like current temperature or current CPU utilization (it won't be that, but it will be a small updating number that is not incrementing like current time or a page counter). Would that make any difference at all? (I know there will be responses that I should add real updating data to the page to make it dynamic; let's take that one off the table for right now --trying to see if there's something I can do that is simpler for now). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0 -
On site optimization - anchor text in body text
Hi I am learning SEO from scratch and am only a couple of weeks in. My wife has just started a website selling children clothes. In the left bar there are links to the different producers. Clicking it takes you to the products from that producer. In the body text om the main page ( epleskrinet.no) the same producers are mentioned. By time i need to opitmize for all of these. Is there any point in making them anchor text - taking them to the same URL as is given in the side bar ? Or will it get discounted ? Dan Laerum
On-Page Optimization | | danlae0 -
How long should anchor text be? Best practice for anchor text length?
site: http://www.cerritosnissan.com/index.htm On the bottom of this homepage there is an seo content area, basically right under where it says "orange county nissan" welcomes you. The internal links in this area are very long and I'm wondering why they would do this - is there any benefit to making anchor text longer? The longer the anchor text, the less each part of that anchor text passes link juice. For example, for a page about their reviews, the anchor text of the link is "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership.". If I would have done this the anchor text would be "Cerritos Nissan Reviews" or just plain "reviews" as the anchor text. Why would they be using such long keywords as anchor text?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw
0 -
Site URL's
We are redeveloping our website, and have the option to amend URLs (with 301 redirects from old URL to new), so my question is: Would 'golfsite.com/golf-clubs' achieve superior rankings than 'golfsite.com/clubs' for the search term 'golf clubs' if all other factors were the same? Should the URL reflect the intended search term wherever possible?
On-Page Optimization | | swgolf1230