Often Forgotten On Site SEO Must Haves
When it comes to optimizing your site, there are a lot of things to remember to do. You have to conduct keyword research on a page by page basis, optimize the content, write meta descriptions, include call-to-actions in the content, create unique URLS, developing an internal linking structure and much more. It’s often easy to forget one or two things from your SEO checklist when optimizing your site, especially if your site has hundreds (if not thousands) of pages.
Are you guilty of forgetting these on-site SEO musts?
Optimized Images
Search spiders can’t see images, they can only read text. That’s why it is important to optimize the most important images on any given page of your site. Chances are your company logo is an image. If you don’t include an image tag, then you are missing out on a critical branding component of your site. When properly optimized, images from your site can rank in the search engines and help drive traffic through to your site.
Footer
A footer is a great way to help develop a strong internal linking structure. Not quite a mirror copy of your top level navigation, the footer lets visitors click through your site without having to scroll back up to the top of the page. This improves the overall user-experience. A footer is all a good place to incorporate links you need to have (like a privacy statement) but don’t want to clutter your high level navigation with. You should also incorporate links to your social profiles in your footer and save valuable webpage real estate for more important information.
Repeating call-to-actions
Man sites are guilty of not being “pushy” enough. It’s understandable; you don’t want to annoy your readers and drive them away. But you have to keep encouraging them to act, otherwise what reason do they have to stay? If you want someone to sign up for your newsletter or call for a proposal, don’t just say it on your homepage and hope they remember. Repeat it throughout your site! It’s possible to be aggressive without turning your visitors away; it just takes a balance of content and call-to-actions.
Meta descriptions
While not a major ranking factor, Meta descriptions are still very important. Think of your Meta description like a miniature online ad. It is the only content a visitor will see in the SERP before they decide to click on one link over another. What does your Meta description say? Does it make your site look like it will be useful for the searcher? Your Meta description should be a unique overview of the content on the page. This informs the visitor of what they can expect to see when they click through.
6 Responses to “Often Forgotten On Site SEO Must Haves”
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Hello Nick,
I agree with you that website content is most important part. I am doing some website SEO but the client forget about the other website pages. If our website is more than 100 pages than we need to go through the content and verify all with the respect of Google Panda.
Regards,
R Peter
I think you’ve undersold the importance of repeating your call to action. We’re a society of multitaskers that are searching for the next shiny object. Even while writing this I’ve stopped to do 2 different things. Much like traditional advertising, it takes repetition to gain recognition. I wouldn’t call it pushy or aggressive to restate that you have a great offer or a way to get more information. I’d call it proactive and good business sense. Now if you pop up a new window to tell me this every 30 seconds, then you’ve crossed the line.
About calls to action: Remember, this is how you ask your customer to take the next step. If the CTA isn’t readily visible and easy to understand, you risk your customer not knowing what to do and leaving without further engagement. Make your CTA clear and obvious so that the customer knows what to do next. Just be sure that you know what the ultimate CTA is for each page and focus on that one thing. Too many calls to action can have a similar affect and leave the customer frustrated.
Nick,
Good post!
RE: Repeating calls-to-action
I have had a client ask to remove extra calls-to-action, then explained that it’s OK to repeat the call-to-action. Many times sites are optimized for search engines and leave out/remove buttons, images and other elements that help drive conversion.
It’s all about finding a balance between SEO copy and design. People enter websites through all different paths. Some come through the home page, but if your site has good SEO they will come from many different sections of the site.
-Sean
I always push to optimize the images on a site but to what end? Alt tags are the first step but to really boost an image’s worth, don’t you have to actually rename the file something relevant too?
The content is king motto is still valid. I don’t know how many times I ask a client, “On your services page, can we change “our services” to your actual services?” Use your nouns people, what is it. A search engine is not a person, it wont recognize that you were inferring.
Good post Nick.
I love to use footers to list all the locations or geographic areas the company serves. It’s another way to add “local” to the mix without stuffing the content and it’s on every page of the site!