The Most Important Factors for On Page SEO | EP 821

The Most Important Factors for On Page SEO

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, my name is David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: Today in episode 821 we’re talking about the most important factors for on-page SEP. And if you haven’t listened to any of our other episodes and you don’t know what on-page SEO is, Tim’s about to tell you.

00:53 Tim Strifler: Yeah, so SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it’s very complex and there’s a lot of things that go into it but on-page SEO has to do with everything that happens on your page on your site. So it’s called on-page SEO, but actually it encompasses things that are kind of more on the site and then off page or off-site seo is everything that happens outside of your your site. So basically meaning links so on-page seo is really important because it’s the basis for seo and so uh there’s we’re gonna talk about what the factors are. But it’s there’s a lot to it and um at the same time, it’s there’s not one thing that’s important it’s a collection of a bunch of things and um you can’t sometimes people think that if you do one thing wrong you’re just not going to rank and that’s just not true. But um yeah these things are important and we’re we’re going to discuss what they are.

01:49 David Blackmon: Absolutely what’s the well I mean, do we want to just kind of give a list or i don’t want to?

01:56 Tim Strifler: Just give a list tackle this.

01:59 David Blackmon: Yeah, so first one on our list you’re going to want to make sure that your url your structure has a keyword in it for on-page seo. So if you are a plumber in a certain city you’re going to maybe want to have plumbing in the in as you know if if your keyword that you’re focusing on is plumbing. You’re going to want to have that word in your title your url and you want to keep your urls as short as possible. Tim what’s another one

02:28 Tim Strifler: So another one is proper header tags. So we talked about a few episodes back, we talked about um how many h1 tags you should have episode 815. And so um you can definitely refer back to that episode for more information but basically you want good hierarchy of content down your page. Have your one header tag generally that encompasses the main point of that page and then you have your supporting points which are your h2 tags and then you might have some h3s h4s. And so on um in between all those and so having good hierarchy helps the search engine know what your page is about, and what you consider to be the most important content on the page. But then it also helps lay out the page to tell the user the same thing what’s important, you know here’s the headers here’s the paragraph content that sort of thing so um yeah header tags are super important.

03:23 David Blackmon: All right. And next on our list is going to be…. let me see here… meta descriptions. Tim and i talked about meta descriptions a couple episodes ago I believe. They’re important as well, those are going to let the search engines know what the page is about. Again if you um if someone searches for plumbing Knoxville Tennessee your meta description is probably gonna gonna work if someone searches for plumbing you know leaky fixing a leaky toilet in Knoxville Tennessee there’s an up there’s a there’s an off-site chance that google may pull some description from the page itself that better describes the long tail search that they’re doing. So search engines are very smart and depending on what the searcher puts into the box is going to determine where they’re going to grab that data from, but most of the time it’s going to be from the meta descriptions.

04:32 Tim Strifler: Yeah and uh did you do you did title tags already right?

04:38 David Blackmon: I did yeah. I just kind of lumped it in you know title met you know those things.

04:41 Tim Strifler: Yeah so the next uh factor for on-page seo that’s really important is internal linking. Right you want to link to other places in your site and the reason is that helps the search engines find those pages and get them indexed properly. And but it also helps the user be able to navigate the other pages of your site. So internal linking is kind of twofold one is having good navigation menus that link to all the different areas of your site and then the second part is linking to pages within your paragraph text. Right or you know within your your the page content itself. And so for example if you have a blog post that is all about fixing a leaky toilet but you reference how to install a toilet and you have another post on that well you can link to that and that’s good internal linking. That google loves, that you’re linking to your own content that’s going to help the other con piece of content that you’re linking to rank better in the search engines, because you’re basically telling google that hey this is important because i’m linking to it. So that’s why it’s important. Um so internal linking is is really important you can’t underestimate the importance of it, and it’s one of those things that a lot of people kind of forget about when it comes to on-page seo.

06:00 David Blackmon: Absolutely! And the last thing that we want to discuss is kind of two-fold but i think i feel like it it comes down to the same thing and it is mobile responsiveness and site speed. You want to make sure that your your web page is definitely optimized for mobile devices because the majority of users that are probably searching and looking for your content is going to be on their phones. Everybody has a phone it’s a computer in their hand that’s what they’re using to solve all of their problems and stuff. And piggybacking on top of that is site speed how fast the page loads really really matters. It’s well documented and known that these two factors definitely play into Google’s and Bing and the other search engines algorithms as far as like ranking. So it’s not the most important thing but these two things definitely factor into it. So when you’re doing the on-page seo make sure that your images are optimized and your your page loads super fast because not only are you going to get penalized from the search engines people aren’t going to hang around waiting for your stuff to load. They’re impatient we have high speed internet they’re going to be moving on to the next website on the list and you’re probably not going to get on the list anyways for them to click it if your site runs slow and stuff. All right it’s awesome. Tomorrow, tomorrow we’ve got another great topic and it is drum drumroll please… is WordPress still popular in 2022. I know that sounds like a crazy question but guess what we’re diving into it tomorrow. So until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

07:47 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.