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If you work on a website of any kind, you're probably wondering how you can make it easier to find your web pages and make them rank better on Google.

Thankfully a lot of web building tools, like creating your church website on Rock, give you some tools to effectively implement your SEO strategy. Knowing some SEO basics and coupling them with these tools will help your website resonate more with online visitors and prove its effectiveness to Google.

Let's take a look at what necessities every page needs to make sure it's ranking as highly as it can!

SEO Necessities for Webpages

1. User Intent
A key factor on the success of your SEO strategy is user intent. Search engines like Google work on the basis of providing users with information that might actually be helpful to answering the question they provided when searching.

So, make sure your content aligns with what someone is looking for and don't be misleading! Accuracy is rewarded when search engines determine that people engaged with your content and didn't leave the page immediately. 

2. Title and Header Tags
Optimizing titles and headers of each page is very important to SEO success. You want them to be accurate to the page contents, catchy enough to draw interest and unique to each page of your website. Oh, and you'll want to weave your target keywords into them. 

You'll want to include as many header tags as you need to present your content without duplicating them (only use a tag like h1 or h2 once) on any single page.

These tags help prioritize your thoughts and makes your content easier to scan for both Google and users alike. 

3. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are short (up to 160 character) summaries of the content that a user would find on your page. This info appears just under the page title in the search results. 

You'll want to make sure this content is well written using keywords, accurate descriptions of the page contents and is unique to each page.

4. Links!
You know them and love them—it's links! Pages that can be found via internal links (by prioritizing them in your site navigation or menus) and inbound links (social media profiles, email, blog posts, Yelp, etc.) help supply web traffic and credibility to your webpage. 

If Google can't find the page on your site (bad internal linking) or users will never find it off of your site (shows potential lack of authority/credibility) than you will be penalized in the search results. Think of each page as a branch on a tree that needs connected to the trunk to survive.

5. Quality Content
Quality is something that seems somewhat objective, yes? In my younger days, I considered Taco Bell food somewhat quality. As a mature adult? Not so much.

• Includes keywords or phrases
• Matches user intent
• Keeps users on the page
• Uses video/media 
• Earns more inbound links

So, yes ... there's a lot that goes into it, but hard work creates quality and quality is rewarded.

6. Page Speed/Mobile Friendliness
Unfortunately, Google does not have much reverence for the old story of "The Tortoise and the Hare", in which a slow but steady tortoise emerges victorious in a race against an arrogant hare. Nope, Google likes fast.

Page loading speeds, particularly on mobile devices, are essential to SEO success. Slow loading pages are almost always considered less user friendly than their quicker loading counterparts and will often be ranked as such. Make sure you're keeping pages mobile friendly and not overloading them with things that can slow them down (media that hasn't been optimized, excessive/unused code, pop ups, etc). 

7. URLs
While the impact of the direct contents of a URL has waned as SEO has evolved, it still has some role to play. 

Creating URLs that are user friendly, by including keywords and keeping them readable, does impact how users view them. And if you have one page with multiple URLs on your domain (short codes are great work arounds), those can be flagged for duplicate content which hurts your overall site health. 

Start Now and Watch the Results

While SEO does take some time to take affect (4-6 months is the typical suggestion to watch for full impact), making these 7 items a priority on each page of your website will have you rising up the ranks in no time. 

There's no way to vault yourself to to the top of the search results overnight (except with ads of course, but that's a different topic) but making progress on SEO over time will have you moving up in a sustainable way that will help you reach more people in your community and across the globe.

Have questions or are you looking to improve your site's SEO?

We'd be happy to have a conversation about your next step. SEO can seem overwhelming at times, so making a plan of attack can be the best way to move forward.