How Does a Perfectly Optimized Landing Page Look Like?
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To make your content visible to the masses or ranking your landing pages in the search engine queries is dependent on numerous factors. When it comes to on-page SEO, the most heard about terms in the industry are meta tags and keyword density or penetration that you must also be aware of. If you were looking at what you should keep in mind while optimizing your landing pages, then here is a checklist for you:
Insights From The Infographic:
1. You must leverage SEO-friendly permalink URLs
You must always have short URLs and they must be keyword rich. For example, URLs like yourwebsiteURL.com/p=342452 or long URLs like: yourwebsiteURL.com/on-page-seo-is-amazing-omg-its-the-best/ are given less weightage by Google and other popular search engines. Google has clearly stated in its statement that first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight or is counted in the ranking factors.
A better version of a landing page URL just as for this blog must look like: yourwebsiteURL.com/on-page-seo or
yourwebsiteURL.com/optimizing-landing-pages
2. Goal=Start Title Tag with Keyword
As you must be aware, title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor. Where you place your keywords strategically carries equal importance and you must take care to put it as closer to the title tag as possible.
For example, on the SERPs this blog page must have a title like:
On-Page SEO: The Anatomy of Your Perfectly Optimized Landing Page or 12 On-Page SEO Elements You Need For A Perfectly Optimized Landing Page
3. Do Include Multimedia
Text always has its limitations and entice website visitors to a certain limit. Engaging images, videos and diagrams can reduce the bounce rate of your website and increase the time spent by your visitors : two very critical user interaction ranking factors for search engines. Google has been working for a long time on improving the user-experience and hence its ranking factors are also determined by user-interaction signals that are boosted by including multimedia on the websites.
4. Use Outbound Links
This is one of the white hat SEO strategy that helps in getting more traffic. Outbound links to related pages is a relevancy signal that helps Google figure your page’s topic. If the user-interaction to your website page is high then Google knows that your page is a hub of quality info.
5. Use Keywords in the first 100-150 words
A lot of people make mistakes of meandering around the topic intro in their articles without using the keywords. They use keywords for the first time in the middle of the post and it goes on towards the end. It’s always better to use keywords somewhere in the first 100 words or so. That helps Google understand easily what your page is all about.
6. Wrap Your Title in an H1 Tag
The H1 tag is the headline tags and most of the popular CMSs like WordPress automatically add the H1 tag to your blog posts of the website. If that is the case then you’re all set. But some themes override these settings and you must be careful about these things. Check your sites code to make sure your title gets the H1 love it deserves. We suggest that your site’s H1 tag must contain your target keywords.
7. Website Loading speed should be high
Google has stated that website loading speed is an important ranking signal. You can boost your site speed by using CDN technology, compressed images and switching to faster hosting servers.
Ideally, a website’s loading speed must not take more than 4 seconds to load. A survey conducted by MunchWeb found that 75% of the users won’t visit the site that took more than 4 seconds of time to load. To check your site’s loading speed use: GtMetrix.com or you can check out this article for top 5 free tools to check website loading speed.
8. Add Modifiers to your title
Adding modifiers such as “2014”, “best”, “guide”, and “review” can help you rank for long tail keywords that you were aiming for.
For example, This article could have been named as: “On-Page SEO: How a perfectly optimized landing page looks like”
Here the use of the terms like “On-Page SEO” helps you rank for long tail keywords. These modifiers aren’t targeting any particular long-tail keyword but that title would definitely bring in a few more visitors rather if this modifier was not included.
9. Use Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing may not be playing an important role in ranking your site but they are a sort of generating more eyeballs on your content. The more eyeballs you get, the more likely it is someone is going to link to your site. So it is a way to provide CTAs to popularize your site. Infact, a study conducted by BrightEdge found that prominent social sharing buttons can increase social sharing by 700%.
10. Post Long Content
A study conducted by SERPIQ.com that supports the fact that “length is strength”, found that longer content tends to rank significantly higher on Google’s first page.
11. Slash Bounce Rate
A bounce rate- when a visitor leaves your site from the first page of visit itself- might be used by Google to gauge a page’s quality.
12. Use LSI keywords
LSI keywords, are synonyms used by Google to determine the relevancy of your site’s pages. You must include them in your landing pages.
Some other factors:
- Quality Content: It is a very important factor and is used by Google to serve its users with the most fresh and relevant content that they seek over the internet. Even though search engines do not have a direct way to determine quality, they user-experience metrics like: Repeat visitors, Chrome bookmarks, Time spent on site, Dwell time.
- Internal Links: Internal linking is a very useful tool. If you want to see great example of how to internal link on your site, check out any page on WikiPedia, you’ll know what I am talking about. The site massively links internally to its other pages so that the user does not has to go to any other site for information.
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