On Page SEO
- Technical SEO (code quality & site speed)
- On-Page SEO (page content)
- Off-Page SEO (link profile)
The quality of your on-page SEO (page structure, optimization of headers, images, metadata, etc.) is what is easiest to improve as those improvements can be made quickly within a CMS (content management system) like Farcry, Mura, WordPress, Wix or Weebly, and an SEO professional can make appropriate updates without relying on developers (Technical & Site Issues sometimes require this). Off-Page SEO (link-building) is often where you can earn the biggest impact, but it is a time-consuming process relative to making on-page updates.
On Page Elements to Optimize for Search Engines
Meta Title
The Meta title should be no more than 70 characters in length, and if you don’t want your Meta Title to be truncated in the SERPs you should usually try to have your Meta Title be 55-58 characters. The actual length of the title which is displayed varies because it’s based on pixel-width rather than character count (for example a “C” occupies more space than a “t” or “l”).
Here's an Example of a Well-Optimized Meta Title
Here's an Example of a Meta Title which is Too Long
Header 1 Tag
Your <h1> tag should not exactly match your page’s Meta Title, but ideally it will be optimized to directly target your primary keyword phrase. As an SEO your job here is to target the page’s primary keyword exactly as long as you can do so without compromising user experience by having the header worded in an awkward way. For geo-specific car rental landing pages it’s best to optimize your Header 1 as simply as possible:
<h1>Car Rental Paris</h1>
<h1>Car Rental Paris Airport</h1>
If your page is going to be optimized to capture different sorts of traffic or if it will target multiple keyword groups, you can usually find a way to include a keyword or phrase from the secondary group within the H1 to improve SEO for the secondary group of keywords. For example, if I want a page to target both “Car Rental Paris Airport” and “Car Rental Charles de Gaulle Airport” I might try one of the following as the page’s H1:
<h1>Car Rental Paris Airport: Charles de Gaulle</h1>
<h1>Car Rental Pairs Airport – CDG</h1>
This will reinforce the secondary phrase as relevant to the page’s content without sacrificing my primary “paris airport” keyword (at the beginning of the H1).
The last thing to be aware of is that you should avoid having more than one <h1> tag on your page. Subsequent headers after your <h1> tag should be labeled <h2>, <h3>, etc. to help search engines understand the structure and organization of your page’s content.
Sub-Headers
Additionally, Sub-headers are a great place to reinforce the topical relevance of your webpage. Ideally you should include a slight variation of your primary keyword, and a few semantic variations, or secondary keyword phrases in your sub-headers to help Google understand that the page’s content is relevant to any queries on the subject, not just to your primary keyword phrase.
For example if your page is directly targeting the primary keyword “car rental france” then your page’s headings might be structured as follows:
<h1>Car Rental France</h1>
<h2>Popular Types of Car Rentals in France</h2>
<h3>Automatic Car Rentals</h3>
<h3>Economy Car Rentals</h3>
<h3>Luxury Rentals & Convertibles</h3>
<h3>Van Rentals</h3>
<h2>Advantages of Renting a Car in France</h2>
<h3>Cost of Renting vs. Public Transportation</h3>
<h3>Scheduling Flexibility</h3>
<h3>Driving Experience</h3>
<h2>How to Book Your Rental Car in France Online</h2>
By structuring your page’s content in this way you’re reinforcing the relevance of your page with your <h2> tags and you’re also providing a good amount of structure with your <h3> tags to help search engines understand that you’re providing a great user experience.
While the advantage of <h3> tags (and lower sub-headers) has a limited impact on SEO in my opinion, at a minimum you should strive to have several <h2> tags on each landing page, as the keywords within the <h2> tags do certainly have an impact on your page’s rankings.
Generally, the language included in your page’s <h2> sub-headers is weighted more heavily than other on-page content like images and paragraph text.
Paragraph Content
- At least 500 words of unique copy
- Include your primary keyword phrase in the first 100 and last 100 words of paragraph copy on the page (I generally try to include it in the first and last sentence).
- Include semantic variations/secondary keyword phrases 1-2 times throughout the page’s copy, being careful not to over-optimize or “stuff” keyword variations into the paragraph text too many times.
- Use simple sentence structure and syntax which is accessible to users of all education levels. Avoid the use of complex or compound sentences.
As with other landing page components, the paragraph copy is your opportunity to reinforce the topic of your page to search engines. Including relevant keywords and phrases without repeating the primary keyword phrase too many times will help improve the context of your other, more direct optimization (Meta Title, Headers, etc.), while also giving you the opportunity to rank for longtail search queries.
Don’t be afraid to write about the advantages to renting different vehicle types (convertible, van, sedans, etc.), makes or models (bmw, mercedes, audi, ford, etc.), or car classes (economy, compact, luxury, etc.), mention points of interest and landmarks which are accessible by car or common pick-up locations (downtown, airport, rail station, ferry terminals, etc.). You could also include content relevant to driving in the destination. Taking this approach allows you to write unique and engaging content which is related to your primary keyword phrase without stuffing the page’s paragraph content with the primary or secondary terms too often. It will make your paragraph copy appear natural, useful to readers, and will improve your ability to rank for long-tail queries related to your landing page’s content.
I’ve also found that it can be helpful to include simple HTML tables within a landing page’s body content. Structuring the paragraph text within the body of a page can help search engines to understand that your content is well organized, so consider enhancing the page’s body content with some simple tables when applicable.
URL Structure
- It should be short and focused
- It should contain all lowercase letters
- Each word should be separated by a hyphen
- The final section of the url should include your primary keyword phrase
By keeping your primary keyword phrase in-tact as the final segment of your URL you reinforce to search engines the primary topic of your page and the search query your page is relevant to. It’s best practice to use all lowercase letters and to separate words by hyphens rather than underscores.
Here is an example of a properly optimized URL:
http://www.autoeurope.com/go/car-rental-london-heathrow-airport/
Here is an example of a URL which is too long and which offers a diluted SEO impact for the page:
http://www.avis.co.uk/drive-avis/car-hire-locations/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/heathrow-airport-t3and4
Image Optimization
- File Name
- Alt Text
- Title
Like any other component of the page, optimizing your images is another way you can reinforce the topical relevance of your landing page. I recommend that the page’s primary image (the image at the top of the page) is optimized to exactly match your primary search query. The optimization of additional images plays less of a role, but I generally try to reinforce the phrases included in the page’s sub-headers with the images which are placed alongside those sub-headers on the page.
If my primary phrase was “car rental france” then I would optimize the page’s primary image as follows:
File Name: car-rental-france.jpg
Alt Text: alt=“Car Rental France”
Title: title=“Car Rental France”
In the page’s source code this line of code would then look something like:
<img src=“/image-database/car-rental-france.jpg” alt=“Car Rental France” title=“Car Rental France”>
By optimizing your images in this way you’re clearly communicating to spiders that crawl the page what the subject of each image is, and you’re able to reinforce the page’s topical relevance.
You should make sure that your image file names are all lowercase and that each word in the file name is separated by a hyphen, not an underscore and not by a blank space.
Final notes on images: you should be sure that you’re leveraging image compression if you include large image files, as including too many large image files on your page can increase your page’s load time (which can impact your page’s ranking negatively … most search engines favor pages which load quickly). You should also set the amount of time that your images are cached on your server and for browsers out as far as possible, so that the images load from the cache to reduce page load times.
Meta Description
Like the Meta Title, your Meta Description is what will often (but not always) be displayed in the SERPs, so your page’s description should provide a short summary of what your page is about. This helps to reinforce the topical relevance of your page to search engines, and can help to improve CTR (Click Through Rate) for users.
It’s important to realize that while including your keywords in the Meta Description may not have a direct impact on your page’s organic ranking, keywords in your page’s Meta Description which are relevant to a user’s query are often highlighted in bold, which can draw the eye and highlight that your organic listing is relevant to the user’s query. You can also get creative and include elements like HTML checkmarks which can draw the eye of users:
Contextual Linking
As spiders crawl through the links on your page and crawl the pages you’re linking to, that will help inform the way your landing page is viewed in terms of how relevant it is to the original query, and how useful your page is to users.
If your page is targeting the query “car rental paris” but links off to gardening websites, this will likely confuse search engines, but if you link off to a blog post about things to do in paris, day trips from paris, or you link to pages with information about car rental insurance in France, road signs in france, etc. it’s likely that your links will help to reinforce the relevance of your page and will serve to demonstrate to search engines that you’re providing a quality user experience and plenty of additional, related resources.
In general you should try to limit the number of outbound links from your landing pages so that you can preserve the authority the page enjoys from in-bound links, but if you link off to some relevant resources that will be helpful to users this will typically help your page’s SEO.
If you link to external resources, I typically recommend having these links open in a new window, and it’s usually best to use the rel=“nofollow” tag in the link to preserve your webpage’s authority.
Schema Markup
Schema is a specific way of marking up the content of your landing page to make that content more accessible to search engines and to allow spiders that crawl your page’s content to understand the content clearly. While the addition of Schema Markup to your landing pages might not always translate into improved organic rankings, generally the more accessible you can make your landing page content to search engines, the better.
There are several different ways to implement schema markup on a landing page. You can either add Microdata markup in-line within the page content’s HTML or you can use JSON-LD to apply schema markup to a display object or rule. This second option requires help from developers, but it can be the most efficient way to deploy markup to common elements shared across landing pages on a single site or on a set of websites which utilize the same display objects or rules.
The direct SEO advantage of implementing schema markup is that you can sometimes see your marked-up elements pulled into and displayed in the SERPs which can help to increase CTR (Click Through Rate) to your landing pages. A good example is the schema review markup which helps our landing pages stand out with a star rating getting displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results Page: