On Page SEO

On page SEO is all about the SEO activity that happens on your site. We believe that on page SEO is often a hugely underestimated part of your SEO strategy. In a world where everyone is focusing on links, the importance of on page is often forgotten. We believe that content is, and always will be King, and on page SEO is all about content.

Often website owners are quick to identify their top terms, their “hero keywords”, that generate the most traffic. Yet, most traffic, and often the most valuable traffic, comes from “long tail traffic”.

We therefore believe that investing all your efforts in ranking for your top terms is a bit like investing in a whole football team of strikers. Which doesn’t necessarily get you more goals!

Verve Search therefore insist on building an on page SEO strategy that doesn’t only cover your key  terms and phrases, but also assists the growth of your site’s long tail reach.

Here are some of the most common on page SEO areas we always cover:

• Keyword & Competitor research (these should always go hand in hand). One without the other is a bit like Mick without Keith (yep that’s a Stone’s reference).
• Keyword mapping
• Keyword gap analysis and longtail keyword targeting
• Content optimisation (title, meta descriptions, H1 and main body content)
• Internal link optimisation
• Additional content and on-going optimisation (often achieved in the form of blogging)

To learn more about On Page SEO view our collated Knowledge Bank below:

8 Great On-Page SEO Techniques

There are many people who are just starting to blog and many more that have run their own site for a while, that don’t know what SEO is and how to implement it!

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

Now, SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.

Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at On-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways toincrease your page rankings on search engines.

On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolatey cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of mymeta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

As you can see for this page, the URL is http://onlineincometeacher.com/traffic/on-page-seo-techniques/ I have included the keywords that are relevant for this post.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2,H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

6. Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.

7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

8. Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly,internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase theGoogle PageRank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example, this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘ useful. Perhaps other people are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.

Summary

These 8 techniques are just some of the ways that you can improve your on-page SEO. Any one used independently of the others won’t make much difference to your site ranking, however when used together, they can help to improve your site traffic.

They will help to get your pages working better, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.

So, it pays to spend some time implementing these to improve your site! Please leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.

10 TIPS FOR BETTER SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

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Alright, bloggers and website owners. let’s sit down for a cup’a tea and talk about S to the E to the O. What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization and you’ve probably heard the term if you’ve been around the internet for a while. Why is it important? I will tell you…

SEO is important because, in simple terms, it is how people find your site in search engines. Search engine traffic can contribute to a huge amount of your visitors, and if done right, can boost your presence online. Without getting too technical, here are some tips for making your website or blog search engine friendly:

1. Title Your Posts Properly
Whenever you title a post, think about what you would search for in Google if you were looking for an article about the topic. Think about how other people might phrase the same search term and try to create your title from that. You don’t have to do this for every single post, just the most important ones that you actually want people to be able to find through a search.
Example of a bad title: She’s Got Wind in Her Hair…
Example of a good title: 7 Heat Friendly Summer Hair Styles

2. Speaking of Titles…
Your post title plays a very important role in SEO. Not only does it appear on the actual post page, but also in the browser’s title bar. To maximize the impact of your title, it’s best that your post title be the first element of the title that appears in the browser address bar. If you notice, Blogger does this a little backwards, placing the title of your blog before the title of your post.  For example, “Name of your blog: Title of your post”. For better SEO, it should be formatted like this instead: “Title of your post: Name of your blog”. To change this in Blogger, you will have to get your hands a little dirty with some HTML editing. Open your HTML editor page and find:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

and replace it with:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;’>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/><title><data:blog.pageName/><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

Now your post title will appear before the blog title, only if that page is a post page.

3. Your Content Matters
What a novel concept, right? Your actual article/post has to have some substance. If you caninclude popular search terms/phrases within the post, even better. For example, my 30 Day Shred post is my highest ranking search engine post, and still appears on the front page of Google if you search “30 Day Shred Results”. The term “30 Day Shred” appears multiple times throughout the post. Did you know that I do that purposely? As long as it flows with your content and doesn’t read like a bunch of random keywords or search terms, you should think about this when creating a post.

4. Stop Stuffing in the Keywords
Many people have this idea that search engines strictly read meta data and that you should fill your meta tags up with a bunch of keywords and descriptions to get the best results. This isn’t true at all. In fact, Google doesn’t even use the keyword meta tag anymore to crawl your sites. Stuffing your site full of random keywords can actually have a negative effect on your ranking. Those “labels” or “tags” you place on your posts are not there for SEO keyword purposes, they are there to categorize your content so others can easily find past posts under the same topic. If you overuse keywords on your page or in your coding, Google sees this as keyword spamming… and spammers never get anywhere in life 

5.  Use Text Instead of Images
When it’s possible to do so, use actual text instead of images. Obviously you can’t have a picture made of text, but if you have headings, for example, instead of making them graphic titles, keep them as text. Search engines can’t really read images for content (more on this below)… what they want is your text content! Even better? Wrap them in a heading tag <h1>Your Heading</h1>. Google looks for heading tags when crawling your site, so wrapping your heading in that little bit of HTML code helps for sure!

6. Image searches are cool too
Contrary to what I said above, Google can find your images, but in a different way. Instead of appearing in the text results, they appear in the image search results. To make the most of this,title your images properly. Instead of uploading a photo as IMG_920.jpg, title that image to match the topic of your post, for example, “seo-basics-for-bloggers.jpg” is something I would name an image in this post.

7. Get Yourself Out There
Probably the toughest part of any website marketing is getting your website out there, and linked on other websites. Websites with high rankings that link back to your website add value to your site. Google sees your site as a site that somebody important is talking about, and therefore wants to crawl you. Think of these as bonus points for your blog ;).  The greater visibility you can gain for your site, the better. Share your links on social networking sites and get people to check you out.

8. Link Past Posts
Another trick is to link back to some of your past posts in your new posts that have to do with the same sort of topic. Whenever you have a link on a page, a search engine will crawl through it. Links are like doorways to more content. You want search engines seamlessly crawling your site… and often. The easier you make it for them to navigate around your website, the better. Example: see some more of my blogging tips!

9. Image Maps Help Nobody
I am begging you, please refrain from using image maps on your website or blog. Image maps help nobody. They don’t work properly in some browsers, and hinder navigation because your actual link is not truly attached to a single image. It’s like an invisible box floating above an image with a link in it. It makes no sense. Instead, you should check out my YouTube tutorial on how to create a header with image links properly.

10. Clean Up Your Website
Like I said above, links and text content make search engines crawl through your site seamlessly. If your site is full of clutter, random images and banners, and doesn’t have a good flow, it will be difficult to navigate through. Remove any old outgoing links, unused images, and clutter, and make your site more about the content than anything else.

Hopefully you will be able to take some of these tips and tricks and apply them to your site. I couldn’t cover everything in this post, but gave you some good starting points! SEO really starts with thinking about how you create a post. If you think of it in terms of what users would be searching for, then that is half the battle. Remember, there is no quick and easy way to get more traffic to your website. Nobody will market your site for you but you. It’s constant work, but once you start seeing your work pay off it’s worth it!

Let me know if you enjoyed these tips and if you think you can implement them into your blog!