A Quick Guide to on Page SEO

On Page SEO is one of, if not THE most critical element of your websites search engine optimization campaign. For the major search engines to properly crawl and index your site for the keywords you want to be found for requires your website being optimized for those keywords. Here is a process that will help you to optimize your website for SEO and the keywords that are best for your business.

1) KEYWORD RESEARCH

i) Traffic Analysis
The first step in optimizing your website for on page SEO is to conduct keyword research. I would use Google Adword Keyword Tool to determine the approximate amount of traffic for a broad search. I would target keywords that get a lot of broad traffic, because even if you do not rank number one for them nationally, you may show up for them locally, and in turn generate substantial local traffic. I would say have 2 to 3 keywords you want to target for each page on your site. So if you have a 10 page website, have a list of 20 to 30 keywords you may want to target based on traffic.


ii) Competition Analysis
The next step is to determine the competition for these keywords. One of the best tools for this is Moz’s Pro Keyword Research and difficulty score. If you do not have a Moz Pro account, I suggest getting one or just simply using Open Site Explorer for free a few times to get an idea for the domain authority and page authority of the top ten sites for the keywords you want to rank for. Once you have a keyword difficulty score from Moz then you should be able to have an idea of what kind of competition you are up against for the keywords you want to rank for. Keywords with high traffic but lower competition should be the most desirable for your website.


iii) Ranking Analysis
The next thing you should do is check your rankings to see where you stand. Advanced web rankings is by far the best ranking analysis tool that gives great rankings reports for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and specific locations on Google and other search engines. If you see you are ranked high or close to page one for certain keywords you may want to target those keywords, especially if they have low competition and high traffic.

2) SITE ARCHITECTURE

Site architecture is critical for successful on page SEO. The overall architecture of your website tells the search engines how your website is constructed and how it is displayed. You want to make sure that your site architecture contains the most important pages at the top level of the architecture and that the child pages are easily accessible with the least amount of clicks into the site. Additionally, you want your url structures and links on the menu items to be optimized for SEO. For instance if you have a page about dogs, your menu link should be Dogs and the url should be https://yoursite.com/dogs. Your child pages should follow this same format. If you have a subcategory German Shepards below dogs your dropdown link should be German Shepards and the url should be “””https://yoursite.com/dogs/german-shepard.”””

3) TITLE TAGS

The title tag is arguably the most important tag on any page. It is the tag that displays above the url in search results and tells the search engine what the title of your page is. This should start with the most important keywords that you want to rank for, for a specific page. For instance if you want a page to rank for chicken cutlets and chicken breasts and your company name is Prized Chicken, your home page title should look something like this “Chicken Cutlets & Chicken Breasts | Prized Chicken.” Google only displays 70 characters, so make sure your page title is no longer than 70 characters.

4) META DESCRIPTIONS

Meta descriptions tell the search engines what your web page is about. The meta descriptions do not show up on the page, but they do show up underneath your url in the search results so they are very important for click through rate and overall SEO. Your meta description can only be about 140 characters, twice as long as the page title. You should go into more detail than the page but remember you can only fit so much so try and keep it brief, but as descriptive and useful about the contents of the page as possible.

5) HEADER TAGS

You one to have one H1 tag on each page, and should have the proper keywords in that tag relating to the page. The h2’s should be the next most important header tags, but with h2’s it is ok to have multiple ones, whereas you are only supposed to have one H1 tag. Essentially your h2’s should be second most important, h3’s third, h4’s fourth, and so forth. Make sure these header tags make sense, and do not always stuff keywords in them; the keywords should only be there because they make sense in describing the content on the page.

6) IMAGE ALT TAGS AND URLS

Search engines cannot index the pixels in an image. Therefore, they need to have some html text to understand what the image is about. “img alt=”this is a description of an image” src=”https://trellis.co/img/someimage.jpg.” You need to have an alt tag in an image to describe what the image is about to the search engines. Additionally, the image source tells the search engines what the file is and making sure the file is a name such as /images/red-flowers.jpg vs /images1234235kj.jpg is much easier for the search engines to understand regarding the keywords related to the image.

7) KEYWORD DENSITY AND CONTENT

If you want to rank for a certain keyword but it only shows up once on the page you want to rank for that keyword, you may be underusing it. However, search engines also notice if you use a keyword too often. This is called keyword density. Optimal keyword density is approximately 3-5% for a given keyword, and having a keyword show up more than 5% on a page of content can cause harm to your rankings. Search engines may think you are trying to hard to rank for that keyword, and actually penalize you for over optimizing your content for just SEO rankings. Therefore making sure you have used the keyword enough times, maybe 5 to 10 times, in a 250 word page will generate the best overall results. Search engines also want to make sure that each page on your website is valuable, and not just created for SEO itself. Therefore you want to make sure your content is quality, and has approximately over 250 words, unless it is a gallery, portfolio, or some other page that specifically does not need text.

8) INTERNAL LINK OPTIMIZATION

Having good inbound links helps search engines determine what pages are connected and what pages are most useful on your site. Additionally, search engines want your site to be user friendly to the user therefore having a good internal linking scheme, should make it easier for the user to navigate through your website. Making sure your websites have the proper footer links follow your main navigation menu links is a good way to make the navigation simple and easy to use at the top and bottom of your website. It is also a good idea to have internal links on each page to other pages of your website that may be relevant such as the contact page, the resources pages that may have more detailed information, or a blog post that goes into more detail about a specific topic on one of your pages.

9) ROBOTS.TXT

The search engines look for a robots.txt file to see what pages they should crawl. Utilizing the robots.txt page to tell search engines what pages not to crawl may help your SEO if they had previously been crawling pages that should not have been crawled or may be damaging to your SEO rankings.

10) CANONICAL LINKS

Canonical links tell search engines which are duplicate pages of other pages or pages with similar content. For instance, if you have a page that is the second page of products, it will have similar content. Canonical links tell the search engines that the first products page is the main page, and the next pages are just the next product pages that have more products that cannot fit on the first page products.

11) BLOGGING AND RSS FEED

Blogging is one of the most important elements of on page SEO for many sites because it is the easiest way to write content targeting keywords. Your services and products pages cannot be overloaded with unnecessary details or too many keywords, bogging down the user looking to get a quick understanding of your services. Blog posts can be used to go into detail on specific keywords or topics you may want to rank for without ruining your main pages. According to Hubspot, websites with blogs get 55% more traffic and 75% more leads. Additionally, having an RSS feed for your blog is a great way to make it easy to aggregate your blogs information, and many sites link to RSS feeds helping you generate backlinks more efficiently.

12) SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION AND SHARING

Social media integration and sharing is critical to SEO moving into 2014. Search engines are looking for social sharing signals just as much as they are for backlinks. Having social media sharing buttons on products, certain pages, and blog posts can make your website and content much more likely to be shared. The search engines crawl the major social media sites regularly, and if they see your content consistently being shared, they know it has value, boosting your rankings.

13) SITE MAP SUBMISSION

Submitting your sitemap to Google and the other search engines is helpful for getting your site indexed. You want to make sure your website is getting indexed properly, and having a proper site map for the search engines to find, in addition to submitting it, will most likely help the search engines understand your website more clearly, leading to higher rankings

14) GOOGLE AND BING WEB MASTER TOOLS

Utilizing Google and Bing web master tools is one of the most critical factors for keeping up to date with the maintenance and status of your website. Google Web Master tools will inform you of how many web pages of your website they have indexed, any crawl errors or internal errors on your site, and links you have going to your site. Keeping up and monitoring your google web master tools is a necessary component of a succesful website and marketing campaign.