Basic SEO For Creating Webpages Part 2 – 007

Basic SEO Practices For Creating Webpages – Part 2

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics!  This weeks episode is part 2 of our Basic SEO Practices for Creating Webpages topic.

In the conclusion of this two part episode, we’ll wrap up the basic SEO strategies you need on your web pages. Learn how to utilize headline tags for SEO, and what it takes to write great page content – both for the search engines, and for the users that will visit your website!

(Didn’t catch part 1?  No problem!  For those that missed part 1, you can listen to it here.)

YOU’LL LEARN

• How to use headlines on your page to rank higher
• Best practices in using headlines to convert customers
• What are headline tags (H tags)
• What is the difference between H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags
• Best practices for using H tags on your page
• How many pages your website should have
• How to optimize your page text to increase ranking
• Tools for writing better pages

Thanks for Listening!

Here is a preview of the transcription from Episode 7 – Basic SEO Practices For Creating Webpages – Part 2;

Jesse: Hey, it’s Jesse with Local SEO Tactics. Welcome back for part two of our two part
episode on basic SEO for creating webpages. We’re going to be talking about headlines,
page texts. We’ve got some great best practices, and some pretty cool tools that we use
that I think are going to help you out for how to write your webpages and create that
content. Like we mentioned last week, I want to encourage you to take some notes and
make sure you’re writing down some actionable items. This isn’t the sexiest topic, but it
is the nuts and bolts that’s going to make a difference for your business. Stay tuned,
should be some great content for you, and we’ll catch you on the backend.

The next area we want to cover is on page content is your headlines for your site, right. I
had an art teacher in high school and what he had said always is if you’re doing a
painting, or a drawing, or whatever it is, if you maybe just squint a little bit so things are
out of focus, and fuzzy, whatever pops out to you should be the primary thing you want
people to focus on. Same concept is true for your websites. Steve Krug, he has a book,
Don’t Make Me Think.

Bob: It’s a great book.

Jesse: What’s the other one? It’s Not Rocket Surgery, I think is the name of the other book.
Excellent reads, nice easy quick reads too, definitely recommend them to everybody out
there. But we did some training with him for the Don’t Make Me Think class, and his
main point was, somebody if they only read the headlines and the bullet point of your
website, they should get the gist of the message, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Just like with my art teacher’s example of, if you squint and only make out whatever is
coming through as the primary thing of your painting, same thing with your website.
Most people aren’t going to read your entire webpage, right? Your webpage should
have about 2000 words on it, that’s a lot of words to write. It’s a lot of words to read.
You don’t read all those words. You look for the headlines and the bullet points that are
germane to what it is we’re on this page for. Might read that paragraph or two.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: And if you’re super intrigued by it, then you might finish the rest of those two thousand
words. But those headlines are extremely important.

Bob: Yeah it just comes down to, can these people help me? Great, they can. I’m going to call.
Alright.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: What have you.

Jesse: Absolutely. So from a usability standpoint, those headlines are very important because
those are going to be the things that jump out, the things you may use to kind of scan
the page, to decide where you’re going to stop and read more information. So then
you’d be very germane. Again if we’re talking about oil changes in services to your
automobile, make sure if you’re on a page that’s talking about oil changes, that’s your
lede. Don’t bury the lede. Again, talking above the fold, right when you’re on that page,
they should be talking about oil changes. Talking about conversion, to get them to be a
customer. Throw your price in there. Throw your speed in there, right, if you took timer
money that we make decisions on.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: For conversions. But speak to people directly. Don’t make them think about what this is
for, don’t make them interpret what you’re trying to say. Just punch them right in the
face. Give the same advice we gave on the quality of your images. If you’re not sure if
you typed this up right, put it out there for people to check. Ask your friends and family,
“Hey read this page real quick. What is it that I do? What is it I’m trying to promote
here?” You know what I mean? And again, this is true of your homepage, and all the
other pages on your website.

Second reason those headlines are extremely important is because Google and search
engines also know that they’re very important to us humans so they give them more
weight, right? If you have just a regular sentence on your page, just part of your regular
body, that’s going to carry a certain weight. If you have a headline, that’s going to carry
a lot more weight in Google. So choose your words wisely, choose your phrases wisely,
whatever keywords and phrases you want to be falling for, make sure they’re in the
headline.

Now within the headline there’s a subset here, there’s H1, H2, H3, which stands for
“headline one,” “headline two,” “headline three.” And the normal convention for your
website is … your H1 is going to be your biggest, and also the one up on top. Now if you
compare this to a traditional newspaper, it’s the huge headline on top. That’s the H1.
Those should be the most important words on the entire page. That’s where the biggest
… they’re at the top.

Now you’re only going to want one headline. This is something that people sometimes
try to take advantage of and it can hurt you. Even if you go back five years or so, like oh
when it was easier to kind of gain the system, you can do this kind of stuff. But today,
Google and the search engines are a lot smarter. You can’t just have H1 headlines all the
way down to your page. If you’re using WordPress or HTML editing software, you can
usually highlight the text, and just go up there to format, and say, “What is this going to
be? Is it a H1, is it H2, or headline one, headline two?” They’re going to use that kind of
terminology. Your rule of thumb is that you have one H1, one headline one, per page.
You don’t have two. And if you have other areas that need highlighting and you want to
call them out as important, that’s what your H2, and your H3, four, five, and six, so on
down the line, are for.

The usually convention is: when you go from a one to a two, the H2, it’s a smaller
headline. H3 is even smaller from there, so the size and the prominence of those comes
into play with how that naming convention is. You can have one H1, you can multiple
H2s, and multiple H3s, but use that same sort of pyramid deal. You’re not going to want
to have one H1 and seven H2s. There’s just no way those seven “subsections” on that
page are all equally important.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Try to put some thought into it.

Bob: Hey Google’s algorithm is picking up on all of this, I mean they want you to play by their
rules and when you start messing with their rules, they get upset about that.

Jesse: Absolutely. They can tell if people are trying to cheat the system and spam me.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: There’s no hard-and-fast rule here, but if we had to throw out kind of a real quick
recommendation: I’d have one H1, maybe two or three H2s, I wouldn’t go over that, and
then the rest are going to be H3s and H4s. Again, that’s not any kind of hard-and-fast
rule, but … just think about it as us users, I mean, look at a newspaper or a magazine,
and you’ll notice the different sizes and fonts. Or different webpages even too. We don’t
have to reference paper material. But just kind of look, and you’ll see. There’s always
one thing that jumps out, maybe two or three other things that jump out next, and then
a bunch of smaller sections from there, and that’s what these tags are for.

All these tags are important. You’re definitely going to want to have H1, H2, and H3 tags
or headlines, I should say, on every page of your website. At least one of each, because
you’re sending a signal to the search engines that this is a very important sentence or
phrase on my page, and use it. If Google’s going to give you credit for taking these as H1,
H2, H3, pick content on your page to utilize that. Now what you don’t want to do, is
repeat. You don’t want to have duplicate content. So you can’t say “Best Oil Changes in
Town,” as an H1 headline tag.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Have that lower on the page, “Best Oil Changes in Town,” as an H2. You got to do
something different. If you want to mix in the word “oil changes” and things like that in
there, that’s fine. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the exact same phrase, right?
Bob: So this may be a naïve question. What does a typical local small business, service
business, have for a number of pages on its website. I mean, is this something … you’re
doing this on 20 pages or doing it on 200?

Jesse: Yeah, we’re doing it on every page.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: Period. This is kind of … we get an SEO 101 deal. If you’re going to make a page, these
are the basic things you want to apply. But for a business, how many pages does my
website need? You’re going to have your home page.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You’re usually going to have some kind of About Us or Contact Us page. And then from
there, I would say that you’re going to have at least, what, one, two or three products or
services that you’re offering. They should each have their own unique page. Speaking as
a bare minimum here, so you’re up somewhere around half a dozen pages. Now from
there, you may expand on some of those pages. Maybe get some variations before
doing the auto repair service center. We do oil changes. We also do radio repair,
transmission. Break each of your services down, don’t just have a page that says
“Services.”

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You can have a hierarchy from there too. You can, on your top menu of your website,
have a button that says “Services,” and from there they can choose the different
services you have. But really, the number of how many would it grow to, is infinite. You
can have millions of pages on your website.

Bob: Okay.

Jesse: Most businesses, I would say small, local service businesses, like we worked with, might
have 100 pages, some companies are going to have 700 or 800 pages, and that sounds
kind of scary for that amount of content, but that’s developed over years, and that’s
putting out very specific content. Talking about oil changes on a Toyota, talking about oil
changes on a Dodge, and things like that. Some of that can be a little overkill, and again
if you’re duplicating your content, that can really cause you some trouble, because
Google is seeing that all you’re doing is copy-and-pasting the same thing but just
changing Toyota to a different brand each time.

So I don’t want to confuse people there, and say that you’ve gotta push out a lot of
content. But at the end of the day, just think about the different revenue strings you
have, the different services that you offer, and, again to answer the question, you
should have a page, a unique page, for each one of those. I would say that would be
how many pages I want to have, for your business. No less than that, because that’s
your brochure. People aren’t usually going to call you and ask you what you do, or say,
“Can you send me some information?” We want to give it ourselves. That’s why we’re
on the website. That’s why we’re exploring. You should have the ability for them to
bump into everything that you offer.

Bob: That’s a whole other strategy we’ll get into as far as creating pages and landing pages, if
you will, for … again, if you’re an auto shop and you decide you’re going to work on Land
Rovers or Rolls Royce, you’re going to create a page for that specific type of business
that you really want to get, and do everything to optimize it. As business owners, you
can do that. You can pick out the items or the types of services that you do, and create a
page from that.

Jesse: I kind of have an easy hack that we do and recommend everybody. If you’re unsure
maybe what pages should I be putting out there, and then even further if you’re unsure
of what should my page say, what kind of layout, what is important, what should I
emphasize? Search. Check out your competitors. There’s companies large and small out
there that are competing in the same space as you. And check different markets as well
too. But piggyback on what other people are doing. You don’t have to copy them, I’m
not saying to do that, but see what some common threads are.

Bob: Yeah and we’ve gone out to other markets too, right? So we’re here in the No Coast,
Minneapolis, and we’ve gone out to bigger markets and did searches and examined sites
and … very competitive or hyper-competitive markets like Los Angeles and San Diego
and Dallas and Atlanta. You’ll begin to see certain trends, and then certain things that
people are doing well. You probably want to emulate that.

Jesse: Yeah, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, right? Do some searches, see what’s ranking
high, check out those websites, make some notes about what’s sticking out to you. That
gives you a great template to start with. And again, you can always change it later. So
don’t be afraid, don’t put too much hard thought into it and make it slow you down. Get
something out there.

The last topic for today’s episode is your page text. So we’re talking about adding some
images to your website, putting some headlines on your website, now you actually have
to type out some paragraphs and some sentences for people to read if they choose to
read them. This is also a very important area of your page and for your SEO strategy.
Good rule of thumb is, try to get 2000 words on the page. There’s a lot of word-counting
websites and software out there that can make it easy, you don’t have to actually count
the pages- sorry. You don’t have to actually count the words yourself, we’ll put in the
show notes some of the links for some of those free services that you just copy and
paste to your webpage once you’ve published it. They’ll analyze it, they’ll tell you how
many words are on the page. They’ll also give you scores and marks for grammar and
punctuation, things like that too. Super cool, you don’t have to put your best foot
forward, right? I’m horrible at spelling and grammar. I’ve got these links saved. They’ll
be very easy for us to compile this.

But you definitely want to have 2000 words on your page. This is a newer thing that’s
probably more important in the last six months than it was before. Google wants quality
content. They don’t want a website that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. You’ve got to
have some mass there, I mean, there needs to be some content, so that can be pretty
challenging.

Bob: So their algorithms are getting smarter so, like you said in the past, you can more or less
just kind of put out whatever you wanted to put out and it made no sense, right? For
the most part. But now they’re getting much smarter with their algorithms. It’s got to
have grammatically correct, it’s got to make sense, and their tools are allowing them to
see if you’re, again, gamifying the system or spamming the system. So we’re not trying
to scare you in terms of writing your content, but it’s just got to make total sense in
what you’re writing and have a flow to it.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And there’s a whole other topic, Ice Bowls, or …

Jesse: Yeah, we’ve got another episode coming up in a few weeks that’s going to get into
copywriting and how to do some creative writing. Some really cool tools that are out
there to help you kind of jumpstart that. But that’s a big topic in itself.

Just some quick rules to live by is, try to get 2000 words on there, and like Bob’s saying
that the algorithm … things are pretty smart. You can’t just mash a bunch of
incomprehensible stuff together, and it’s got your keywords. That’s not going to work.
Google now, when they’re reviewing this, they are making sure that it’s readable, now
that humans can actually read it. You can’t create a page just for the search engines to
see your keywords and try to get rankings. Google is not going to let you play. They
want a page that a user can get to, read, navigate properly, understand, and digest. So
you need quality content, not just deep content and a lot of words on your page.

Again, not a lot of us small business people are great wordsmiths, or creative writers, so
give me a challenge and just sit down and write up an essay, essentially like that, get
out, see what the competition is doing, see what kind of main points they’re focusing on
… If you’re breaking out and end up needing to write paragraphs about little subtopics,
it becomes a much easier exercise to do than to say, “I need to create a page with 2000
words on it.” Break it into chunks, try to find out what things people are talking about,
and just take it in small bite-sized pieces.

So write your content, get your pages out there. Again, keep in mind, while you’re
writing this, what keywords and phrases are you wanting to be found for, and what are
you wanting to communicate to the people that are reading this and that are there.
Incorporate that, right? It’s a good idea to type all this up, look at it, then go back in
after you’ve written your page and you got your 2000 words on your page. Then think
about, “what is the exact things I’m trying to communicate and get across here,” then
wordsmith it. I always find that’s easiest for me, just dump it all out there then go back,
read it, maybe change some words. Again if we’re talking oil changes, make sure you got
that in there, maybe three to four times. You have it in the headline, maybe in a H1,
maybe in another H2 or H3, and then mix that word “oil change” in there three to four
times on the page, in various talking points.

In addition to that, again, the Google algorithm is extremely smart, there is words that
are related to the oil change or the process of it, right? You’re going to want to mix
those in there as well. There’s a really cool web page out there called
TextOptimizer.com. It’s awesome, what it does is that you put the link to your page in
there, you put the keyword phrase you’re trying to optimize for … It reads your website.
And then it gives you back suggestions on words you should put in there. So essentially
what it does is … it looks at who’s being found for this key word out there, and what
words and phrases, what are they talking about on their website … so then it turns it
inside out for you and says, “Look, all the other guys that are getting found for oil
changes, they’re also talking about how many bays they have” or maybe what their
turnaround time is. And if that’s not on your website, it’ll tell you. It’ll say, “Include these
words,” or, “Pick 15 of these 85 words we’ve displayed and try to mix them into your
website.”

And so that’s kind of what I’m talking about when you dump your thoughts onto the
page, reread it, go through it, mix in your word oil changes, run in through a tool like
this … and there’s are other tools out there. This is just a handy one that I like myself
personally. And that’ll inspire you for other words that you need to mix in. You’ll just
kind of rewrite sentences or maybe little paragraphs of your webpage. The end result’s
going to be a much better page. Again, like we keep saying, you can always come back
to change it later, so you don’t have to toil over it for hours and hours. But I would
definitely write it. Go back as a step and make sure your keywords are in there, and then
run it through a tool like this, kind of as a final check. This is also assuming that you’ve
got spell check enabled and things like that as well too. You don’t want to have those
kinds of errors. But then you’re going to be in pretty good shape.

So with that, you should be able to create or revamp, if you already have a website. The
pages that you need, again, create pages for every main product and service that you
have. And just like we said with your images, have friends and family take a look at it,
have strangers take a look at it. If you want us to review any of it, just send us some
feedback through the “Show Notes” page, drop in the link. Tell us kind of what you’re
trying to do, give us a little bit of context on it, we’d be happy to take a look.

The last thing of course that you can do is run in through our free SEO audit tool. Any
page, as many times as you want to use it. It’s completely free, it takes about 15
seconds. Plug in the page that you want to be checked, plug in the keyword that you
want that page to be optimized for, and you’re going to get a report that’ll tell you. It’ll
tell you: are you using H1 tags? Did you use too many tags? Are your keywords in these
headline tags? Your keyword wasn’t used in your page content. It’ll tell you if your image
file names have the keyword in it like were saying, right? Red balloons: the image should
be called “red balloons.” It’ll tell you all these things that we’re talking about today in a
real easy checklist, so check that out. Go to Intrix.com, click on the button that says SEO
audit. Again it takes 15 seconds, it’ll show you the audit on page. It’ll also instantly email
you an email of that audit so you can take it and use it later as well.

Bob: So I would throw something else out there on that SEO audit, and I think you brought
this up last week, but this is really important: if you’re going to go into other markets,
and you’re going to do your research and essentially do your search for “diesel oil
change” or whatever the case is, and you see a site that comes up at the top, you can
put that site in, and run it through this audit tool. And that’ll give you some metrics of,
okay, how are they doing this? Not specifically, but how are they performing in this
audit. And then, in my opinion, that gives you a baseline that you need to shoot for, or a
goal you need to shoot for with your own page, against that audit. Does that make
sense?

Jesse: Absolutely. It’s like, why reinvent the wheel?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: See what’s working out there in the market. You can’t copy anything, that’s going to be
horrible for you, but you can get inspired, get some ideas. You peek under the hood, see
what the competition’s doing, and it helps guide you where you want to go with that. So
check that out. We say it, I think, pretty much every episode but it’s completely free.
Unlimited number of pages, as long as you copy and paste and put your keyword in and
hit the button, you can just keep running those reports and it’s going to be extremely
available for you.

Bob: I know it takes a lot to digest this but you can do this. Take the action. This might be a
podcast you’re going to have to listen to a couple times to kind of absorb it. And again, I
can’t encourage you enough: if you have questions, go ahead and send us some
questions. We’ll be more than happy to take care of that. And, going forward with these
podcasts, we’ll be taking questions and answering questions, and going forward.
Jesse: Absolutely, would love to do that. And not to sell ourselves … this show is not about
promoting ourselves, but at the end of the day, this is a service we provide. If anyone
out there is just feeling discouraged and saying, “I’m sorry this is just too much for me to
do, I thought this would be easy but it’s a little more than I thought,” we’re here to help.
We’re up in Minneapolis, this is what we do. If you need help, we service anywhere in
the entire country. So drop us a note on the Show Notes page, give us that feedback,
phone number, email, whatever it is, reach out to us.

Bob: We’re looking for Hawaiian customers, so if anybody’s in Hawaii, we’d really like to
come out and visit you.

Jesse: Or deep, deep South Florida on the coast somewhere.

Bob: Exactly.

Jesse: Especially at this time of the year for us, itsBob: Pretty cold.

Jesse: Yeah, it’s snowing again. I think we had an episode a few weeks ago where it was
snowing, and it’s snowing again, so help us out.

Bob: Alright, until next week. See ya!

Jesse: Take care!

Alright everyone Jesse here again. Wanted to thank you again for sticking with this two

part episode. Hopefully there’s a lot of great content on there. A lot of things you can
take action on and start making a difference on your website. If you want to grab some
of the cheat sheets and some of the guides and links we were talking about, visit
Intrix.com/episode-7. You’re going to find all the links and references there, and also
find the link to watch this via video if you want to choose that route. And if you haven’t
subscribed to the podcast yet, you can go out to Intrix.com/iTunes. And there you can
subscribe and be alerted when the new episodes come out. We’d also love it if you’re
finding value in this podcast, so leave us a review. Let us know how we’re doing, give us
a rating. Last week we shared our first one with you, which is pretty exciting. We got
another one here to share this week.

This is from Wendy Lister. Wendy gives us a great five-star review, and Wendy says,
“There’s so much great information in this podcast. At first, I didn’t know what to do
with it. I don’t own a business currently, but I could see what a positive impact this
information would have for any local business owner. And truly strong local businesses
help all of us. It took me about a week to figure out what to do. I am sharing this
podcast with the local business owners in my life. First up my brother, who owns a
heating and air company. Thanks guys, keep up the good work.”

Wendy, that’s awesome. We love the fact that not only did you enjoy the podcast and
see some value in it, but that it caused you to think of who else you might want to share
this with. And that you shared it with your brother is just awesome, and then that you
felt compelled to give us a review, even though it doesn’t directly impact you, is
awesome, and lets us know we’re on the right track.

You can give us some feedback, Intrix.com/show, on the feedback form there, or again
we’d love for you to go out to iTunes and let us know what you’re thinking, share with
everybody else too.

Lastly, I wanted to mention one more time as we’ve done throughout this two-part
episode: definitely take your webpage, go out to our free SEO audit tool, Intrix.com,
click on the free SEO audit button, and run your webpage through our audit. It takes
about 15 seconds, going to give you a great grade, checklist on the page. It’s just an
awesome resource, use it as many times as you want, on as many pages as you want, for
different keywords, and of course you can always look up what your competitors are
doing as well.

That’s about it. We’ll wrap that up, and we’ll see you next week!

Check out the show notes below for resource links, guides, and a link to watch the episode in video format!

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RESOURCES

Note: some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning we get paid a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

• Online tool for writing better pages textoptimizer.com
• Online tool for counting how many words are on a webpage; wordcounter.net
• Book – Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug (on Amazon)
• Our General Resources Page
• Our Free Instant Online SEO Audit