Perfect page structure for SEO – Why content and page structure matters
It stands to reason that the more appealing your site is to users, the more appealing it is to search engines too. Google’s algorithm uses information from searchers to rank your site. If your site has poor call to actions (CTRs) and low dwell time (the time people spend on your site), it will not appear high up in search results as it would if it had the perfect page structure for SEO.
By contrast, when a user finds a site that they like — i.e. a site with an intuitive design structure and great content — they stay longer, leading to improved rankings.
Hyper-relevant content rules
Relevant content for your target audiences is the single most important part of your page as it’s almost always the reason visitors arrive there in the first place – the content should be created for the sole purpose of serving their needs. It follows that the content needs to be written in the right ‘language’; that’s the language your customer or prospective customer naturally types into search.
Shareable assets
Consider including shareable assets like videos and infographics (like ours below) that people will find useful to link to and embed in their blog. Every link back to your multimedia content helps improve your visibility online.
By creating authoritative, actionable and high-quality content you can easily include internal links. These are important for SEO because the more internal links you have pointing to your important pages, the better chances you will have to get them ranked higher up in the search results.
Keyword research
The content determines which keywords the page ranks for. Content that is unique and relevant to the intent of the person searching will rank higher than content that does not fully satisfy the keyword search.
We advise that before you even start writing content make sure you have a comprehensive list of the right keywords and key phrases you are going to use. These must be the search terms your target customers and clients are most likely to use when trying to find you or your competitors.
It may sound obvious but before you publish your content check to make sure that you’ve actually used your focus keyword phrase in your content and it must be a keyword that you’ve not already assigned to another page on your site.
Intuitive design
Engaging content needs to be backed by intuitive web design and a positive UX (user experience). Does your page look appealing from a user’s perspective in every way and on every device? Is it fast and secure?
Perfect page structure for SEO – Demystifying SEO – glossary
We’ve pulled together a simple guide (and glossary) for service-based companies on how to structure the perfect page structure for SEO.
Alt Text (short for alternative text) provides search engines with information about your images. Google can’t ‘see’ images so you need to add text to explain the subject. Adding alt text enables your images to be found on Google Images Search, helping to bring more traffic to your website.
Bounce Rate is the rate of visitors that enter your website and choose to leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate will have a negative impact on your SEO.
Content that is relevant to your target audience is the key to appearing high up in search results. This can either be copy, images, videos, infographics, etc.
CTA stands for ‘call to action’. They are instructions to the user designed to provoke an immediate response, such as ‘book now’, ‘find out more’ or ‘contact us’.
Heading tags (from H1 to H6) are the SEO terms for titles and headlines. They help make your content easy to scan, give your page structure and hierarchy for site visitors and Google robots.
Internal links are links that go from one page on a website to a different page on the same domain. They’re important because they help the user navigate the site, establish information hierarchy, increase dwell times and spread ranking power across pages on the website.
Keywords are words or phrases that your potential customers would type into a search engine when looking for a business like yours. Selecting the right keywords for your web pages is essential to attract specific audiences with a specific intent.
Keyword density is a percentage that is calculated by taking the amount of keywords that appear on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page. Google will penalise you for over usage of your keyword. As a rough guide aim for 2.5%.
LSI keywords are phrases that are similar to your keywords. LSI, which stands for latent semantic indexing, are simply words that are frequently found together because they share the same context. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t maintain keyword density for your keyword, but over optimization can cause issues. Google views related keywords as critical to proving to them that your content is relevant to the searcher’s query.
Meta description is a snippet (up to 320 characters) of the content on the page that appears only on the search page (i.e. not on the actual webpage). Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO.
Organic Traffic defined as visitors coming from unpaid search results. SEO is built around organic search traffic.
SEO title can be viewed at the very top of your web page (in a browser’s tab), in your website’s source code, as well as any time your website shows up in search.
Sitemap is a plan of your website, telling Google about your pages and how they are connected to one another.
If you would like any help creating the perfect page structure for SEO on your website; please contact us on 020 3633 4694.