How 4 simple on-page optimizations can enhance your Google's organic rankings

Google is the king of search engines, and year after year they create smarter algorithms to ensure that anyone using their service can find quality and related content.

Whether you or someone else created your website, you must take the time to find out if your website is search engine optimized.

It may take you between 30-60 minutes to check all your pages and make sure they all are set-up correctly.

#1 - Header meta tags

Setting up a website is time consuming and it can be frustrating if you're not familiar with basic web design knowledge.

However skipping these simple, yet very powerful website optimizations can be the difference between being nowhere the first Google page or having a better chance.

Don't get us wrong, this won't guarantee that you'll website will ever make it to the first Google page, but it's one of the easiest things you can do to have better chances at making it there.

It takes more than meta tags to having a search engine optimized website, so make sure that when you set-up your website, you create plenty of original and quality content.

The four most important tags you can optimize are the following:

• 1. Title tags
• 2. Description tags
• 3. Images alt tags
• 4. Keywords tags

Make sure the these tags include only keywords related to the page.

For example, if your page is related to cleaning services around Indianapolis, the title tag should read Indianapolis Cleaning Service | Your Business.

A customer of ours had a great website and they created a lot of high quality content in their blog, however their website's SERP's position jumped between the 1st and 2nd Google search results page and it had never made it past their competitors. After reaching out to us, we noticed that their services as well as their home page lacked both title and description tags, so we just added them and that's it! They moved from 10th/11th place to 3th/4th spot!

#2 - Create Sitemap

A sitemap can be compared to your website's page directory for search engines. A sitemap pretty much tells search engines how many pages your website has, what their hierarchy is, how often you update your website, etc. so it's very important to set-up a sitemap correctly.

You can use online tools such as www.xml-sitemaps.com for generating sitemaps or by simply installing a plugin if you are using WordPress or Joomla. Just make sure you take a couple minutes to set it up correctly.

#3 - Use SEO friendly URL's for your pages

It hurts me to see so many websites set-up incorrectly. I get it, not everyone is a search engine optimization wizard, however many small business owners hurt their chances by trying to do everything themselves just to save a couple hundred bucks.

Using SEO friendly URL's for your entire website might be tedious if your website has already been created and is live, however you should at least focus on your most important service/product pages and optimize them.

Make sure you also update your website sitemap once you're finished so that you reduce the number of 404 pages.

If you plan on updating your website's URL's to make them SEO friendly, consider following these modifications:

• 1. Never use underscores, only hyphens.
• 2. The URL must look like the pages' keyword. For example, if the pages' focus is residential cleaning service, your URL should look like this: residential-cleaning.
• 3. Try to keep your new URLs as short as possible but never ignore the keyword.
• 4. Make sure both the title and description tags for each page matches the URL.

#4 - H1 titles and overall SEO friendly content

Make sure that if you're taking the time to update your website to make it more SEO friendly, that you will also take the time to create better and more SEO friendly content.

Make sure your h1 titles match the URL, title, keyword and description tags. Also make sure that the content is original and of high quality and that it revolves around a keyword.

If for example you were creating a page for The Simpsons, the url, title, description, keyword and h1 tag should include the word "The Simpsons", however the rest of the content should be "The Simpsons" related. You'd mention Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa Simpson, Springfield, Mr Burns, etc. You wouldn't want to repeat The Simpsons all over the page in an attempt to fool Google by stuffing keywords. It doesn't work any more.

There should be no doubt that making it to Google's first page will be challenging, particularly if your business is in a very competitive industry, however not taking the time and preferably making an investment in your website's SEO can cost thousands of dollars in the long run.

If you still need help, get a hold of us and we'll be happy to help or leave a message and we'll try to answer your question a soon as possible.