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On-page SEO is far more important than it used to be. Once upon a time, scammers manipulated Google's search results by what came to be known as "Google-bombing," or directing an inordinate amount of links to a particular site using favored keywords in the anchor text. While backlinking remains a legitimate part of off-page SEO, it becoming increasingly defunct as on-page SEO rises in importance. What is on-page SEO?On-page SEO is comprised of anything you can do in optimizing a page for the search engines on that page, not off the page in the form of backlinking, deep internal linking, or getting into human-edited directories. Common on-page SEO techniquesURL optimizationThe URL has always been important for SEO, but it now plays a much larger role than it used to in SEO. I have anecdotal evidence that the domain alone is sometimes enough to obtain a page one ranking. This was shocking to me, but it's true. Using a two-word domain with over 800,000 competing pages, a site I built got to #1 within two weeks of being online. And this was before the site was even officially launched! The main criteria for the high Google ranking appeared to be the keyword based URL, the title tag, and potentially the meta description tag (although there is disagreement as to whether Google uses the meta description tag for ranking at all). To make sure this wasn't a fluke, I tried the same process with several other keyword domains. Same result—page 1 of Google. My results so far: - Page one on Google against 345,000 competing sites
- Page one on Google against 460,000 competing sites
On sites that have been around a bit longer, I obtained the following amazing results: - #1 on Google against a formidable 3.4 million competing sites!
- #1 on Google against an even more astounding 11.8 million competing sites!
The conclusion from my experimentation was clear: The URL, including the domain, path, and filename, play hugely important roles in determining keyword relevance in Google's algorithms. My advice to clients is to pick domains that are keyword relevant, invest in some good old fashioned SEO copywriting, link to it form a few trusted sites, and repeat as necessary. Once these sites rank well, they can be used to link back to a branded site to help it rank better without the advantage of the keywords in the domain. They can also be used for lead generation, opt-in email marketing, etc. Title optimizationTitle tag optimization is absolutely critical for search engine optimization. This is so important, it is hard to overstate the importance of selecting relevant, keyword-rich titles that actually describe the content of the page. Think of Google as a big index card file. If you were organizing recipes and labeled everything "Dessert," or worse, "Recipe," you would never be able to find the specific recipes you were looking for. This is like having a home page titled "Home" or every page of your site titled the name of your company. Each title should be as unique as possible, and should be descriptive of the content on the page. The more specific it is, the more likely it is to get picked up by the search engines. It should be noted that there is really only one "meta tag" with several content types, including title, description, keywords, etc. For clarity, I will describe each of these types of meta tags separately. Many SEO professionals argue that the meta title tag is not relevant to search results, and they are probably right. This tag is not worth spending a great deal of time or money on optimizing. It is probably best for misspelled versions of your title to potentially pick up alternate spellings on the search engine. Most SEO professional agree that an optimized meta description tag does not improve ranking, but can significantly improve your click through rate from Google's search results. The meta description tag is a short description of what your page is about, and it is typically used as an "excerpt" on the Google search results page under the page title. I disagree with some SEO's who suggest that you should not put your keywords in the description tag due to the fact that it doesn't help you with ranking. I recommend putting your keywords in the meta description for one very important reason: Google likes to bold your search terms in its results, and this includes in the excerpted description under the title. When your keyword is bolded in the title, URL, and description, there is higher likelihood of a user clicking on your link to go to your site. Most SEO's don't bother using the keywords meta tag, and for good reason. There is little evidence that it has even the slightest effect on rankings. The best reason for putting keywords in this tag seems to be (a) superstition…it just seems wrong not to…and (b) the outside chance that some other search engine will rank you better because they are there. In short, don't waste much time on optimizing this tag. If you're already there editing it anyway, sure, throw a few keywords in there. But don't go crazy and stuff this full of keywords. It doesn't fool anyone, including the search engines, and it is a sure sign of an amateur. Optimized heading tags are extremely important for SEO, and rank right up there next to the title tag. A well-structured, semantically correct document will always outperform a similar document that is not so well structured. If people can understand better what your site is about, and more specifically, what your page is about, then so can the search engines. Google looks for keywords in your heading tags, weighted in importance from h1 to h2, and on down the list. Make every effort to think through your topic and outline it before writing it so you can use your heading tags to your advantage. Typically, you'll want to make your major outline points h1 tags, with subsequent major points in h2 tags. Subtopics within those h2 tags can be headlined in h3 tags and written about in the paragraphs that follow. Ordered and unordered listsThis is an often overlooked technique to highlight certain keywords in a list format when it makes sense in your copy to do so. I typically use a list of bullet points in an unordered list to tell the reader (and the search engines) what the rest of the article is about. Then I copy each of those list items and turn them into h2 tags, elaborating upon each topic. In this way, the organization of your article becomes easily navigable. You can even get some additional on-page SEO benefit by linking an anchor in each list item to the heading tags below where that bullet point is elaborated upon. This puts some valuable keywords into anchor text format within the page, which can help direct Google's attention to what the page is about. It also makes it much easier for humans to navigate. Well-written and optimized copyGood SEO copywriting will do the heavy lifting in your competition to get to the top of the search engines. If humans like your content, they will bookmark it, giving you some off-page SEO benefit in the form of backlinks. But it all starts with on-page SEO in the form of well-written copy that is organized logically, navigates easily, and includes strategic use of your intended keywords or phrases where appropriate.
If you are not a writer, this is something that can be learned, but as with any discipline, time is money. If you want to shorten the time between concept and a high-ranking page on Google, it is well worth the investment to hire an experienced SEO copywriter to handle your on-page SEO.
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