Search Marketing 101 – On-Page SEO Factors

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is about optimizing your websites pages so they look like they are highly optimized. Search engines look at the h1 tag, the h2 tag and the anchor text of links going to your site in order to know what it’s about and rank it accordingly. You can adjust these using your template, but there’s little point.

The Meta Title is the text that shows up in the blue bar on the page. In older search engines this was the biggest factor in ranking. Getting tips on how to maximize this tag’s appearance are endless.

In the early days of pre-Google web, meta keywords were important. Keywords could be one of many factors based on what the search was about. This lead to abuse, as webmasters would pack these words into webpages in numbers so they would achieve the highest rank possible. This led Google to the decision to not include these tags in their ranking algorithms.

Also Read: How to Find Profitable Keywords With Low Competition

Reasons to Use Keywords in the Meta Title

Nowadays, it’s enough to just put the keyword you’re going after in the title, and not worry about including other keywords. Google just recommends you enter your keyword, and that’s it. You don’t need any additional factors, just the keyword you want to rank for.

Also, in older search engines like Yahoo! this was an important factor. Going back a few years, meta keywords are one of the deciding factors for who gets ranked on the search engine.

The Number of Words in the Keyword

Google suggests that your keyword should have a minimum of 1000 characters. They suggest that it’ll be fine to go up to around 20% more. In older search engines this was where all the power comes from.

Keyword Density

This is the standard the industry has deemed for keyword density. Anywhere from 2% – 4% is acceptable. A density of 4% means that for every 100 words of text on your page, you could use your keyword 4 times.

Also Read: 8 Content Writing Tools to Make Killer Content -2020

Keyword Prominence

Search engines aren’t the only thing that searches for in these days. Google suggests that a given keyword should be used in prominent positions such as the title of the webpage and in the first sentence.

This is standard in modern SEO. Prominence is what is deemed the most important by the search engines, and this is where a good keyword analysis tool will come in handy. It will point out where the keywords are used, and give you the actual density of the keyword. As search engines have evolved, these analysis tools provide valuable insights into the keywords a page is being optimised for.

Keyword Research

Competition Volume

There are some cases where the competition for a given keyword will be fierce. For example, if your keyword is SEO & Search Engine Optimisation, then it will be secondly on the list of many search terms showing results for that phrase. This shows the areas in which you can improve to appear more relevant in the search engines.

Unfortunately, if there is too much competition this can either mean that it’s impossible to rank in the top 10 results, or that there will be too many results showing the search terms. To rank for an overly generic term like “SEO” would mean that it would be virtually impossible to appear in the first page of results – regardless of how many people were searching for it.

Instead of relying on search engine algorithms to rank pages for you, a specialist keyword analysis tool would be much more useful. These tools can work out where your competition is strongest, and where you can produce content which will give them a formidable challenge.

Also Read: What are SEO Backlinks? How to Get SEO Backlinks?

Off-page Optimization

Off-page SEO

Many SEO specialists forget to factor in how useful off-page optimization is, and this means they do not do much to boost their site in the rankings. This doesn’t mean they aren’t important, and a good consultant will remind you of the following.

Of course the quality of your content is the most important factor in ranking well, but even the most amateur optimizers will tell you that off-page optimisation is as important if not more important than on-page optimisation.

Also Read: What Is WordPress – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Finding out how many pages are linking to your competitors is an important part of off-page optimisation – and the amount of links on the pages of a competitor that are linking to them is as good an indication as any on how important their website is to the world.

You’ve got between LINKS and UNIQUE content to deliver on the promise of providing UNIQUE content. To the search engines, links are like votes. The more LINKS you have, the better you are.

The quality of a page is based on the page rank. This shows how important a page is to other web sites.

If you follow these basic tips for optimizing for search engines, you should be seeing an increase in your search engine ranking – With foregrounded links to your web presence.

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Dave Daniel: Dave Daniel has been a Freelancer and Blogger for the past 3 years and is now the proud owner of The Tech Vamps. He has Expertise in the Areas of Technology, Science, Gaming, Gadgets, Hacking, Web Development, etc.

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