Transcript
In our last lesson, we spoke about keywords and how to work out which ones are worth targeting. Now, we need to talk about where to actually put these keywords so Google can understand what your pages are about and improve your rankings.
Now, there are three main things when it comes to your on-page SEO, and that’s your title tag, your H1 tag, and your URL. If your target keyword isn’t in these three places, it’s often going to be very difficult to rank for that keyword.
But if it is there, you’ve laid a solid foundation for your page. So, in this lesson, I’m going to explain exactly what those things are, how to use them most effectively, and also cover some of the other important on-page SEO factors to help you rank your website higher in Google.
Let’s start by taking a look at the H1 tag. Put simply, this is a HTML element that appears at the top of your page. It’s usually going to be the biggest, boldest text on the page, and it’s designed to let users know what it is that your page is about.
It also plays a big part in helping search engines to understand, too. Think of it like the title of a book chapter. It appears right at the beginning, and it tells you exactly what it is that you’re about to read.
Now, it’s important for me to note here that in almost every instance, you’ll only ever want to have one H1 tag per page. This keeps it clear to search engines what it is that your page is actually about.
And when it comes to what to write in your H1 tag, this is where your keyword research comes in. You’ll want to include the keyword that you’re targeting inside of your H1 tag, ideally at the beginning.
But it’s important to note that you should always write it so that it makes sense for real people, too.
Next, let’s look at the title tag. This is the title that appears in Google search results, and it’s one of the most important factors when it comes to your on-page SEO. This is because it’s the first thing that people see when they’re browsing through the SERPs. So, it needs to do two things.
First, it needs to help you rank, and second, it needs to help you convince people to click. Now, you’ll want to keep your title tag under around 60 characters to avoid it getting cut off in the search results. And from an SEO perspective, it’s important to try to get your main keyword inside your title tag. Again, ideally at the start, just like we looked at earlier with the H1.
Right now, here’s where it gets interesting because your title tag can actually include modifiers that your H1 doesn’t have. And these modifiers can really help increase your click-through rate and also help you rank for additional keywords as well.
For example, while your H1 tag might simply be washing machines, your title tag might be cheap washing machine deals followed by your company name.
Notice how I’ve included some of those transactional phrases that we looked at in the last lesson to help us rank for more transactional keywords.
Another good example when it comes to increasing the click-through rate would be to have a page that has a H1 tag of emergency plumber Manchester.
And then in the title tag, you could include the phrase same day call out since that’s going to be a really good incentive for many people who are searching for that to go ahead and click on your listing.
Now, if you’re wondering why we generally don’t use modifiers inside of our H1 tag, that’s because it can look a little bit messy or spammy on the page. And that’s exactly why the title tag exists.
So, think of your title tag as an advert headline that should also include your main keyword that you’re trying to rank for.
The last of the three core on-page elements is the URL. This is simply the page address, which is the bit that you see in your browser’s address bar.
From an SEO point of view, it’s another clear signal that helps Google understand what the page is about. Your URL should be short, clean, and have your target keyword inside of it. In fact, most of the time, the shorter your URL is, the better.
Both Google and users prefer URLs that make it very obvious what the page is about. Now, typically URLs use hyphens to separate the words instead of underscores or spaces, but this happens automatically on most platforms like WordPress and Joomla, so you don’t really have to worry about it.
Using our example from earlier with our emergency plumber Manchester same day call out title tag, our URL should be emergency-plumber-Manchester and not emergency-plumber Manchester-same-day-call-out.
Search engines prefer this. It’s a lot cleaner and it also makes it a lot easier for people to type that URL in manually. Now, you might come across URLs that also look like yourdomain.com/?p=4021. These are called query strings or database IDs and they’re examples of bad URLs. If Google looks at that URL, it’s got no idea what the page is about. But if it looks at a URL that says emergency-plumber-manchester, Google can immediately understand the topic.
Another situation you might run into is when you’ve duplicated a page to create new content using the same template, but you haven’t updated the URL.
So, let’s say you had a page that was originally about emergency plumbing in Manchester, and then you duplicated it and edited it to be about boiler repairs, but you left the URL as emergency plumber Manchester.
What will happen if the original page is still there is the URL will likely become emergency-plumber-manchester-2 if you’re using a CMS like WordPress. That’s not ideal because again it doesn’t tell Google or the users what the page is truly about.
So in this scenario, you’ll likely want to update the URL to be boiler-repairs and then set up what’s called a 301 redirect from the old emergency-plumber-manchester-2 URL over to the new boiler-repairs URL.
The next thing to understand is the meta description. This is the short piece of text that appears underneath your title tag in Google search results. Now, while this doesn’t directly help with your rankings, it can make a huge difference to whether somebody decides to click on your result or not, which indirectly does have an effect on your rankings.
So, it’s often good to think of your meta description as like your ad copy. Now, when you’re writing it, you’ll want to make sure that you keep it under 160 characters. You’ll also want to include your main keyword and write something in there that will encourage people to click through to your page.
So, an example of a well-written meta description from our emergency plumber Manchester page earlier would be, “Our 24-hour emergency plumbers are ready to help across Manchester 7 days a week. Fast response, fully equipped vans, and no long waiting times.”
One important thing to be aware of is that Google doesn’t always use the meta description that you write. Sometimes it’s going to show your meta description in the search results, and other times it’s going to pull a completely different snippet of text from the page that it thinks is going to be a better match for that search.
Even so, it’s still well worth writing a strong meta description because when Google does use it, it gives you that chance to sell the page and convince somebody to click.
Your page’s content is incredibly important when it comes to ranking in Google, but how you approach it depends heavily on the type of keyword that you’re targeting. Now, as a general rule, you’ll want to include your main keyword in the first paragraph of the page.
From there, you should naturally include it in other sections of your content, as well as some keyword variations and LSIs as well, which we’re going to talk about more in a moment. The goal is to make it very, very clear to Google what the page is about without trying to force anything.
And if your content reads like it was written for a real person, then you’re usually going to be on the right track.
Using your keyword multiple times throughout the page helps to reinforce the topic, but this is an area where people often go very wrong. You don’t want to be repeating the keyword excessively or in a way that feels in any way unnatural.
Overoptimizing can actually hurt your rankings rather than help them. Now, you might hear advice saying that you should aim for somewhere around a 1 to 2% keyword density. But in reality, there is no universal number that works for every single keyword.
Some keywords naturally require higher usage while others don’t. A simple way to work this out is to have a look at what’s already ranking after you’ve excluded the websites that are ranking based off of authority alone.
All you need to do is open up the top few websites in Google for your keyword and look at how often the keyword appears on those pages. That will usually give you a good idea of what Google expects for that search.
Now, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you speed this up, like SEO Quake and Page Optimizer Pro, and there are a few other good ones as well, but the manual approach does work just fine, too.
LSI stands for latent semantic indexing and these are the type of keywords that are related terms that help Google to understand your topic better.
For example, if you’re writing about swimming pools, you’d naturally end up mentioning things like water, filters, pumps, chlorine, etc. And if you were writing about running, you would end up mentioning things like shoes, cardio, marathons, and so on.
That’s because these are the semantically related terms. They’re not synonyms. So think of them as the words that you would naturally use when you’re talking about a specific topic.
So if you think about a page that’s talking about swimming pool installation, for example, and that page never ever mentions water pumps, filters, or chlorine, or anything like that, Google is very likely to interpret that as a page that isn’t really very informative about that topic.
One of the easiest ways for you to find your LSIs is to have a read through your competitor’s content or run them through one of the tools that I mentioned earlier.
You should also be using additional heading tags throughout your content, such as the H2 and the H3 tag. These help you break the page up, making it easier for people to read and scan. This in turn improves time on page and reduces bounce rate, both of which are strong user signals that Google associates with quality.
They also give Google more context about the structure and subtopics of your page and can also help you to rank for additional keywords. Your heading tags are often a great place to include your main target keyword, your LSI keywords, and also any keyword variations.
When you use heading tags properly, you’re basically showing the structure of the page both to readers and to Google. Your H1 is the main heading of the page. Under that, you use H2s to split the page into main sections. If one of those sections needs breaking down further, that’s when you use a H3. And if you need to break down a H3 section further, that’s when H4 might come in.
The important rule here is that you do not skip levels. So you wouldn’t go from a H2 straight to a H4 because it suggests that there’s a missing section between it.
Think of it like this simple outline. Your H1 is going to be your overall topic. Then your H2s are your main sections. Your H3s are the subsections inside of those sections. And then your H4 is like the extra details that are inside of those subsections.
This helps people to quickly scan the page and helps Google understand how your content is organised.
And one more thing, heading tags aren’t there just to make the text look bigger. They’re meant to show hierarchy and structure. If you want something to look bigger or smaller on the page, that should be handled with CSS and not a heading tag.
Over the last part of this lesson, we’ve talked a lot about keywords and LSIs and keyword variations. And while all of that is important, this is where people often start to overthink things.
At the end of the day, your content is still being read by real people. And if you focus too much on forcing keywords into every single sentence, the page can quickly start to feel awkward or unnatural.
That’s not just bad for users, it’s also going to be bad for SEO, too. Because Google is getting better and better at understanding language, especially in the current AI-driven landscape. It doesn’t need you to repeat the same phrase over and over again to understand what the page is about.
What it really wants is clear, helpful content that genuinely answers the searchers query. So, it’s important to stop here for a moment and just acknowledge that your content must be written for humans first and then optimised naturally for SEO after.
When you add images to a page, there are two main things you need to think about. The first is the image file name and then the second is what’s known as the alt text.
The file name should describe what’s actually happening in the image. So, for example, on an emergency plumber page, if you have a photo of a plumber that’s fixing a sink, your file name might simply be plumber-fixing-sink.jpeg. Then, when we look at the alt text, that’s just a short description of the image that sits hidden in the code.
It’s mainly there for accessibility reasons because the screen readers will use it to describe images to people with visual impairments, but Google also use it as well to help understand what the image is about.
So, in this case, the alt text might simply be plumber fixing a sink. Your file name and your alt text don’t always need to be identical, but they should both clearly describe what’s going on in the image in a natural way.
You also don’t really want to stuff keywords in here. Just describe what’s actually happening in the image.
The other thing to keep in mind is the file size because large images are going to slow the page down, which hurts the user experience and the SEO. So, it’s important to always try to compress your images down so that they’re as small as possible without looking blurry.
One final and very important point is that while you can often target multiple related keywords on a single page, you still need a dedicated page for each core thing that you want to sell.
So if you’re a service business, that means a separate page for each of the services you offer. For example, a scaffolding company should have individual pages for commercial scaffolding, domestic scaffolding, bespoke scaffolding, and so on, rather than just listing everything briefly on one page.
If you’re running an e-commerce website, the same idea applies in the form of collection or category pages. So, if you sell men’s blue trainers, you’ll want a page that pulls all of those products into one page and is properly optimised around that search.
Search engines and AI tools are trying to match specific services or product searches with specific pages. And if you only mention something in passing on your homepage, for example, but your competitor has a page that’s dedicated to it, they’re far more likely to rank for that or be suggested by the AI tool.
On top of that, dedicated pages almost always convert better. When somebody lands on a page that is fully focused on exactly what they’re looking for with clear explanations, real photos, and relevant proof, they’re much more likely to get in touch with you or make a purchase.
Now, although there is more to on-page SEO, what you already understand puts you ahead of most business owners, marketing managers, web designers, and even some SEOs. If you take what you’ve learned in this course so far and you actually apply it, you will see results.
But we’re not finished yet. In the next lesson, we’re going to take a look at the importance of branded keywords, how social media can impact your SEO performance, and we’re also going to be taking a look at online reputation management, too.