Last week, we talked about how to optimize the meta data of your pages in Optimizing Pages for Building Designers, Part 1: Meta Data. This week, we’re talking about how to optimize the page content.
Optimizing Page Content
The page content is anything that’s visible to the viewer. This will be your text, images, and even videos or audio if you have them.
Should you have more than just text on your pages? Absolutely.
People like pages with visual interest. They like pages broken up by images or videos or even just text formatted differently.
Optimizing the Page Title
This is the on-page title that everyone sees when they visit your page. It needs to be placed at the top of the page in an H1 HTML tag.
If you’re using WordPress or any other major CMS, that will be the default in the standard “Title“ input box.
This will be similar, if not the same as, your meta title, but without the secondary keyword nor the brand name.
If your meta title was:
Residential Designer in Miami, FL | Cool Home Design Brand
Your page title be:
Residential Designer in Miami, FL
If your meta title was:
Residential Designer – Building Designer | Cool Home Design Brand
Your page title will be:
Residential Designer
There isn’t really a hard rule on how long your page title should be, but it shouldn’t be ridiculously long. You don’t want to stuff it with keywords or have it be any longer than absolutely necessary.
If the page is a blog post, you want it to be the title of the blog post. Writing a good blog post title is a whole skill in itself, so we’ll talk about that in a future blog post.
Optimizing the Page URL
The page URL needs to be your primary keyword with hyphens (-) separating the words. You won’t need to include the location in the URL unless you have multiple pages with the same keyword but in a different location.
If your meta title was:
Residential Designer in Miami, FL | Cool Home Design Brand
Your page URL should be:
yourwebsite.com/residential-designer
For a blog post, you want it to be the same as your title (again with hyphens separating words), but without the articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (but, or, for), and prepositions (on, at, to).
For example, your blog post title is:
How to Design a Modern Detached Garage
Your URL would be:
yoursite.com/how-design-modern-detached-garage
This is usually the default if you set your CMS like WordPress to automatically make your URLs out of the site post title, but if you need to do it manually, that’s how it should be done.
If you keep in the articles, conjunctions, and prepositions, it’s okay. They won’t hurt you any, but it’s considered standard practice to leave them out, just as you leave them lowercase when writing a title.
As far las length goes, it’s not really important to keep it under a certain length, but generally you want something short and concise. No reason to get ridiculous with it and have it go on forever.
You also don’t want to have more than one keyword in it, so something like
yourwebsite.com/residential-designer-home-designer-building-designer-miami-florida-fl would not help you any (and probably hurt you).
Optimizing the Text Content
There’s a lot to talk about regarding text content but in this post we’re going to stick mostly to the SEO techniques you should be using on your text content.
Word count isn’t terribly important.
For the most part, the longer a page is, the more page content there is for Google and the other search engines to read and index.
That said, you don’t want to fluff your page content either. Your page content needs to benefit the reader first and foremost. Always write for your reader first.
The Yoast SEO plugin suggests every page be at least 300 words long, but I’ve seen pages with less rank if they’re good pages that help the reader and deliver quality page content that matches the meta data.
Make sure your keyword is used through your text content.
But not too much. The primary keyword should be between 0.5% and 2.5% of your text. The Yoast SEO plugin will calculate this for you, as will many other free tools on the internet if you don’t use WordPress.
It’s a good idea to include your secondary keyword here and there as well, but not as much. If you don’t have a secondary keyword, don’t create one just for the page content; your primary will be fine.
You’ll also want to include your location if you are a location based business. It doesn’t need to be with your primary keyword every time, but should be there where it makes sense.
A good rule of thumb is that the sentences need to read well, so don’t have the location stuffed in places where it doesn’t make sense.
A good example would be:
If you’re looking for a residential designer in Miami, FL, you’ve come to the right place!
A bad example would be:
A residential designer in Miami, FL, will know how to help with a remodeling job.
The reason why is because the second one doesn’t need the location in it at all. A residential designer in Miami probably would know how to help with a remodeling job, but that isn’t something special to Miami.
The first one would be special to Miami because it’s indicating that’s specifically what the user was searching for.
Add visual interest to your text content.
Use bolding, italics, and bulleted or numbered lists, but don’t over-do it. People used to bold and italicize their keywords as a standard. Don’t do this. This is an outdated practice that doesn’t help any.
Instead, bold what’s most important for the reader. If someone skimmed your page and only read the bold, it should be enough for them to walk away with the main idea.
Use subheaders to break up sections.
We talked about the title above, which is always placed in H1 HTML tags. The H2 HTML tag is important as well. There are also other H tags you can use, from 1 to 6.
Use them as subheaders to break up your page content and make it more readable.
You can also use them for SEO purposes. At least one H2 should have your primary keyword in it, and if it makes sense, include the location as well (if you’re a location based business).
Don’t let your paragraphs get too long.
For readability, paragraphs should be broken up to never be more than a couple lines long on a standard browser. This doesn’t do anything for SEO really, but it’s good for the user.
Optimizing Image Content
Images need to have relevant keywords in the file name, and the page should have at least one image with the page’s primary keyword in the file name.
Just like with the page URL, use hyphens to separate words.
To continue with the same example we’ve been using, you could have a picture of you on the page and have the file name be:
john-smith-residential-designer.jpg
If you’re showcasing houses, you could just use the primary keyword and a numbering system for the order you plan on displaying them:
residential-designer-1.jpg, residential-designer-2.jpg, residential-designer-3.jpg
This will also help you easily identify which images go on which pages if you bulk upload multiple pages’ worth of images at once.
You’ll also want to set the alt tags for your image. If you ‘re using a CMS like WordPress, this will be an option via an input boxes. If you’re using HTML to build the site by hand, you’ll need to code it in.
The alt tag is important for when the image fails to load or for screen readers, commonly used by people with vision disabilities such as blindness.
You want the alt tag to have an accurate description of the image and work in your primary keyword if you can. It’s important that the description be accurate more than have the keyword in it.
A good description for a picture of you on a page for the keyword Residential Designer would be:
Bust photograph of person, John Smith, Residential Designer.
or
Woman, Jane Smith, Residential Designer, smiling in front of a house.
If it’s a picture of a house design, it could be:
Photograph of a house design by John Smith, residential designer.
Again, the primary reason for the alt tag is to describe the image to someone who cannot see it. That’s more important than including the primary keyword. However, if you can work it in and it makes sense, it will definitely help.
Optimizing Video Content
Optimizing videos for sites like YouTube is a topic reserved for a future post, and it’s recommended that you upload to YouTube rather than self-hosting your videos, for various marketing reasons.
Again, we’ll talk more about that in the future, but let’s briefly touch on if you’re natively uploading a video to your website instead of YouTube or another site like Wistia.
The main thing you need to do is to make sure that the file name is titled like a we talked about in the image optimization section.
A good example if your video is a portfolio reel:
John-smith-residential-designer-portfolio-reel.mp4
It’s also a good idea to have a transcript of the video available beneath the video, if there aren’t closed captioning options.
That’s it for optimizing the videos when self-hosting on your own website.
Optimizing Audio Content
This is exactly the same as optimizing a video.
There are audio hosting sources you can go with that will need some level of optimization, but if you’re self-hosting the audio file on your website, then the only real optimization you’ll need is the filename of the audio file.
And just like with video content, having a transcript beneath the audio would be very helpful to those who cannot hear it.
If this all seems like a lot of work, it’s really not. You might have to go through and edit all of the pages that are already existing. Luckily, once it’s done, it’s done.
You can always go through and rewrite the page content to be better, but for the most part your page content will be fine as is if you follow this guide.
Main Takeaways
- The title needs to have primary keyword and location if applicable
- Text length isn’t important as long as it’s good content
- Keyword density of the text needs to be between 0.5% and 2.5%
- Media files need to have the primary keyword in the file name
[Tweet “I just learned how to optimize page content for search engines!”]
Garrett Mickley is the Communications Director for AIBD and has over eight years experience working in digital marketing.
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