Written by masontowne This tutorial will walk you through the steps you should take on your pages to boost your Search Results ranking potential.
By structuring your content in a way that appeals to search engines like Google, you can ensure that more people see your pages within their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This means more site traffic! Also, this tutorial is designed to help you optimize for a specific keyword phrase. You’ll want to make sure you’re targeting solid keyword phrases that will actually generate results for you. If you’re unsure if you have good keywords selected, check out our guide on choosing good keywords here!
Keep in mind that you don’t want to rank ALL of your pages to rank in search results! You only want to optimize the pages of your site that are set up to convert a visitor into a lead, which is when they submit their information through a form. These are pages like your Homepage, City Landing Pages, and other landing pages that you may have created for campaigns you are pushing. You don’t need to worry about optimizing pages like your privacy policy, FAQ page, etc… Optimizing these pages will actually cause them to compete with your more important pages, making it more difficult for the more important pages to rank well.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Step 1: Meta Title, Description, and Page URL
A page’s Meta Title and Meta Description can be located and altered within the SEO Tool, which is found at the bottom of the editing area for each individual page. The Meta Title and Meta Description will appear within search results as depicted below:
- Meta Title Optimization: Include the chosen keyword phrase you would like to rank for in the front portion of your Meta Title. This is not only great for your rankings, but it will showcase the topic of your content. This helps to stir up interest within people that see your site on their Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
- Meta Description Optimization: Include your keywords and/or keyword phrases (or at least a very similar variant) in your page’s Meta Description as well.
- URL: If possible, include your keyword phrase (or at least a very similar variant) in your URL for the page you’re trying to rank. This is applicable to any page that’s not your home page, as you can edit your URL slugs for any page you’d want to rank outside of your home page. To edit the URL of a page click the permalink dropdown within the panel that’s on the right-hand side of your editing page, shown below:
Step 2: On-Page Content
Introduction: Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the first 100-ish words of your content on your page. This makes it clear what the content on your page is going to be about.
Keyword Density: We include this because it’s a commonly talked about optimization topic, but the jury appears to be out on keyword density (how often your keyword phrase shows up in your content). A good rule of thumb is to just write content that would be beneficial for the person searching the phrase you’re trying to rank for, and the keywords should show up enough. That said, it’s safe to be intentional about including the keyword a couple of times in your content. You absolutely want to avoid “keyword stuffing” however. Keyword stuffing is the practice of plugging the keyword phrase in your content for the express purpose of trying to fool Google into thinking your content is valuable to those searching said phrase.
Page Title/H1: You’ll want to include your keyword in your page title/H1 tag on your site. I’ll spare you the full explanation, but there’s a ton of power in including your keyword phrase in header tags (specifically your H1 tag, which also happens to be your page title).
Other Header Tags: Also include your keyword in other header tags like your H2 tags as well. Remember to not keyword stuff by plugging your keyword into every single header tag, but a well-placed phrase in an H2 tag can be good for your rankings.
Image Optimization: Your images on your Carrot site can also be optimized! Not only is optimizing your images good for your SEO, it’s also a great way to make sure your site follows ADA online usage guidelines. You can optimize your images by ensuring your images have alt tags. These alt tags can be great places to include your keyword phrase if it’s relevant. Additionally, it’s a good idea to name the image’s filename as one that is descriptive of what the image is.
Step 3: Linking
External Linking: Including a couple of links that link out to other reputable sites (Wikipedia is a popular choice) tells Google that the content on your site is of quality.
Internal Linking: That said, it’s also important to link to other pages within your site ecosystem (like blog posts!) that are relevant to the content you’re optimizing! As always, ensure you use anchor text like the above-referenced “ADA online usage guidelines” link instead of just plugging the link in.
Conclusion
Those are a few tips and tricks you can use to optimize your on-page SEO! It’s worth noting that our SEO audit tool found at the bottom of your page editor will guide you towards taking a lot of these steps!
We hope this tutorial has given you some clarity on what you can do in order to boost your page’s rankings!