Let’s start by checking a few on-page fundamentals.
Figure out the most important pages on your site. You would have seen these on the SERP when you checked how Google indexed your site, or with the report from the initial web crawl earlier.
These most important pages are those that bring in the most organic search traffic for you– in effect, your most popular pages.
In a browser, right-click and view the page source. You’ll want to make sure that any particular page you’re checking:
- Has a well-crafted, clickable title tag.
- Has a custom meta description– one optimized specifically for getting the most click-throughs.
- Has only one instance of the H1 tag.
- Has subheaders (H2, H3, H4, etc.) that are being used correctly.
Multiple headers or improperly used headers can be quite distracting and confusing for your visitors. So you’ll want to fix these issues up as soon as you’ve found them.
Go through your list of important pages and do this manual check.
Note that while the meta description by itself does not directly influence your ranking, a well-written and well-optimized meta description can get more folks to click on your page– and having higher CTR’s (click-through rates) helps bump up your Google rankings.
H1 tags are an important on-page ranking factor as well. You should have a single, unique, descriptive H1 tag on each page. Your H1 tag should not only communicate the page’s primary purpose, but it should also include one or two highly relevant keywords as well.
Subheaders are used to help break down the page into more easily skimmable parts, and these should be used to showcase your secondary keywords/phrases.