Strategic Page Content Optimisation is where a website’s content is optimized to become more alluring, valuable and actionable to users. This usually consists of technical fixes to improve performance, and tweaks to content copy to allow it to perform and rank higher on Google.
There are lots of different approaches to how to optimise your website pages once completing keyword research. FireTap‘s approach is the most optimal, in our opinion, and gives a strategic approach to on-page optimisation efforts.
Below is the step-by-step approach to page content strategic optimisation we perform and by no means this is dogma and the only true way of doing it. It is simply the one that proved to be the best and give the best results for us and our clients.
Step 1. Separating “important” and “not so important” pages of the website.
Every website has pages that serve different purposes. Some of them are informative, some of them have legal purposes and some are “selling” pages. These “selling” pages are the ones that have company services or products listed in them and the aim of them is to “sell” them to the visitors of the website.
The homepage of the website, contact pages and above mentioned “selling” pages are the ones that we at FireTap consider “important” pages. Examples of “not so important” pages from a business perspective can be Cookies Policy, Privacy Policy and other similar pages, which, although very important, don’t serve the main purpose of the website which is – to sell. So, once you have got all your website data using Xenu’s Link Sleuth and organised your HTML pages using Screaming Frog’s list mode, you must now have a list of your “important” URLs ready to use.
Step 2. Grouping keywords and allocating them to “important” pages.
Now, that you have your keywords list and list of important pages. The next step is allocating keywords to each of the important pages you have in your list. Depending on the page length you can allocate up to 10 keywords per page. Keep in mind that having too many keywords might have negative consequences, such as risks of keyword stuffing or not giving search engines a clear signal of what the page is about. Below is an example of how your list should look.
Step 3. Writing Meta Tags and H tags with a list of allocated keywords.
Once you have allocated keywords to all your “important” pages, it is time to get your hands dirty by implementing on-page search engine optimisation.
First, and most importantly, are the meta titles. By now, you already know how important they are for SEO and how important it is to keep them within the recommended length and have search engine results pages (SERP) click-through rates in mind while writing the meta titles.
In the context of page strategic optimisation, you need to remember the following:
- arrange allocated keywords into 2 categories – primary and secondary
- the first word of your meta title must be your most important keyword
- use 2 primary and at least 1 secondary keyword in meta titles
Once you are done with meta titles, using the same logic, you can optimise your meta descriptions using at least 2 primary and 2 secondary keywords. Although meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, they are very important in terms of attracting click-throughs from SERPs. Here is the article from Google you might want to read to learn more about Google’s views on the website’s appearance in SERPs.
While optimising the H tags we tend to use at least 1 primary keyword in the H1 tag and secondary keywords accordingly in H2 and the rest of the H tags if applicable.
Step 4. Keyword Density
Although this one isn’t as precise as meta title’s length or as much a covered topic as to why meta descriptions are not considered as a ranking factor, keywords density is very important. This is a very intuitive factor where you are playing between not mentioning your important keywords in page body text and stuffing the keywords so much that Google considers it spammy.
FireTap tries to mention our primary keywords twice each per page and mention secondary keywords at least once per page for an average-sized page. This, of course, depends on the size of the page and the bigger it is – the more our keyword allowances are.
Step 5. Image Alt Tags and Anchor Texts
Image alt tags are another important ranking factor that gets forgotten from other on-page ranking factors. Alt tags are also important for semantic and universal searches. Each alt tag is a chance to be more descriptive, but more content to your page, use your secondary keywords and show in Google results via the search by image option. In this case, we recommend using the main primary keyword in the alt tag for the first image of the page and using secondary keywords for the other images of the page (if applicable).
Internal interlinking of the pages in the website is almost as important as backlinks are. With this in mind, the anchor texts for these internal links must be almost as important as the anchor texts of backlinks, with one exception – you won’t get penalised for having too many keywords in your anchor text profile for internal links. This is a perfect opportunity to have “internal backlinks” with anchor texts you’ve always dreamt of but couldn’t execute with your backlinks.
These 5 steps are the cornerstones of page strategic optimisation we conduct for our clients. There are, of course, more steps, intermediary actions and other on-page elements that we concentrate on. But these are the ones that we feel that we absolutely must implement.
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