We understand how as a business owner, you can get overwhelmed with the day to day routines, schedules and meetings everyone in any business gets to have. If you have a website, busy schedules often do lead to you having to abandon your website making it a little rusty in the long run. Think of your website in terms of a grocery store whose shelves you should never neglect to avoid getting them dusty. There is always a good reason you have a website and getting traffic that converts into customers is one of them. Today, we will talk about On Page Optimization and get into the details of what it is and why it is important.
Imagine you are looking for an answer to let’s say, a question like “How does one learn to play the piano in a few weeks?” Most people on the internet are always searching for answers to questions and the search engines direct the searchers to the websites they feel best answer a question. Therefore, if I am a piano tutor and have a page about Piano Basics, it would be wise for me to write a whole page about piano basics and not only a paragraph. As you write your article, think about all the possible questions people might have about Piano Basics: What are scales? What are intervals? How do you form chords? Why think in terms of numbers? What is the circle of fourths? As a piano tutor, you have a definite advantage because you know what questions customers are asking. Take your time and come up with a list of possible questions your customers could have about your products or services if your article or page is about that.
Once you have structured your content, you will now have to come up with a catchy title for the web page. As you are coming up with the title, make sure it is about the content that’s on the page. Each content page should reflect one keyword (or keyword phrase) people are searching for.
Next up, internal links. These are helpful as make your site visitors browse around just like they would do in a grocery store. Ever wondered how store owners place certain groceries like bread at the very back of the store? The strategy there is to have you notice a few other bread related items like milk, sugar, etc as you walk towards the shelf that has the bread. You can also use this strategy on your website by including useful links to other pages of your website encouraging people to browse around. Who knows, perhaps the person searching for a new website will also realize they want to have their website maintained and configured for search engines. And while they’re at it, perhaps they want a nice business card designed for their business.
The final step are the meta descriptions of your pages. These short paragraphs of information (“snippets”) are what search engines display in the search results so you know whether you want to click through to a page. If you don’t write your own, the search engines will write them for you, but generally, they will take the first 150 words from the first paragraph of your web page. It may be what you want, but perhaps it doesn’t precisely convey what your page is about.
In brief, a well optimized page will include:
- Content that is worth sharing, with enough detail to thoroughly answer questions.
- A catchy page title.
- Internal links to encourage visitors to view other parts of your website.
- Well written meta descriptions.
The benefits of taking a few minutes to create a well optimized page is the potential to rank higher in search results, which hopefully leads to more customers.