On-Page SEO Factors – WebPro SEO

Title Tags

Title tag is the text that appears at the top of your browser window whenever you view a website. It is also seen as your site title in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) when users find it via a search query. Title tags, also referred to as Page Titles, help search engines to decide on the topical relevance of the page.

For best on-page SEO it’s essential to match the title tag and the page content by including the main keyword of the page into the title tag. Create short, clear and appealing title tags to attract attention of users and thus increase your site CTR (click-through-rates). Some people also include site’s name or site’s URL to help promote their brand.

Best title tags are those written for both users and search engines, and here are the guidelines to follow when creating your page titles:

• Include page’s main keyword into the title tag

• Use unique titles for every page

• Make the titles short and clear

• don’t stuff titles with keywords

• Use different title structure for different types of pages (i.e. homepage, category pages and article pages)

• Add site name or domain name for branding purposes

There are a number of title tag templates that you can use depending on the page type. We suggest the following scheme:

• Homepage Title: Site name | Main Keyword(s)

• Category Page Titles: Category Name | Main Keyword(s) | Site Name (or site URL)

• Article Page Titles: Article Title | Site Name (or site URL)

Bear in mind that title tags are the most effective time investment you can make in your on-page SEO.

Meta Tags

Meta tags – meta description and meta keywords – are used to tell the search engines what your site pages are about. Despite the fact that they lost their seo value due to past abuse, they are still very important to help search engines determine site’s topic and hence enhance its chances of ranking for the targeted keywords.

And last but not least – the meta description tag is seen in SERPs as the snippet (site’s description) and hence strongly influences the readiness of users to visit your site.

Meta Description Tag

• Keep it short – between 50 to 150 characters, up to 2 sentences.
• Use the main keyword of the page and its variations
• Make it unique for each page
• Make it clear and attractive, enticing search engine users to click on your URL
• Include site’s name (or brand name) to help with branding.

Meta Keywords Tag

Most SEO expert will tell you that meta keyword tag has no significance whatsoever, yet it certainly doesn’t hurt to have it in place and these tips will tell you how:

• Include only keywords relevant to the page topic

• Include only keywords used in the page content

• Use only a few keywords (up to 10 max), don’t stuff it

Keyword Usage

Effective keyword usage means matching the keywords with page content. Keyword usage is about how your keywords are utilized throughout the page text and ultimately determine the topical relevance of that page. On the one hand, writing your page content with only 1-2 keywords per page helps you stay laser-focused, and on the other hand, it allows you to write naturally, using keyword variations and related words (LSI).

All these helps search engines unambiguously determine topical relevance of your site and reward it with better rankings for the relevant keywords.

SEO Copywriting tips

Here is a summary of tips how to write your content to ensure proper keyword usage:

• Have a single topic per page

• 1-2 keywords per page

• Write naturally to inform your users, not for search engines

• Have the page’s main keyword in the Title tags

• Use the page’s main keyword in Meta description

• Use the page’s main keyword in meta keywords

• Use the page’s main keyword and its variation in H1-H3 tags

• Use the main keyword evenly throughout the page

• Use the main keyword’s variations

• Use related terms or LSI

• Use fair keyword density (between 1-4%, whatever fits in naturally!)

Unique Content

• It has the same content as another web page (whether from your site or other site)
• Absence of content on website (empty pages with only menu, navigation, sidebars etc.)
• Site has orphaned pages - i.e. pages not linked to from anywhere (not even from within the site)
• Non-user-friendly URL structure (e.g., URLs containing search parameters like mysite.com/products.php?id=21&cat=4&page=13 – also called dynamic URL)

• modify their content
• add unique content to them or
• remove those pages completely

Other On-Site Factors

There is a number of other on-page factors that are strictly speaking beyond the on-page SEO, namely - sitemap, url structure and internal linking. These belong to site architecture and will be discussed elsewhere.

In reality, search engines may have dozens of factors they use to determine sites’ rankings. Despite that, however, following the on-page SEO techniques presented here should be sufficient to optimize your site content to the extent that warrants the best position in SERPs achievable without backlinks. To improve your site rankings further you need to start building backlinks, but that is a subject of another article.

SEO Optimized Content - WebPro SEO

SEO Optimized Content

Search Engine’s View

Matching Keywords to Pages

 To match keywords to pages you can follow this simple strategy:

• Home page uses 1 to 3 of the most generic (‘theme’) keywords pertinent to your niche; they are usually highest traffic keywords as well
   
• Match your primary keywords reflecting the major subtopics on your site to the Category pages, one per page;
   
• Match your secondary keywords to internal pages with articles discussing specific issues/topics within a category; max 2-3 keywords per page.

The easiest way to do that is to split the full keyword list you composed while doing keyword research into 3 groups – homepage keywords, category keywords and article keywords. Here, using single and plural versions of the same keyword doesn’t smear page focus, so it’s safe to count single and plural forms as one keyword.

SEO Copywriting

Contrary to the common belief, SEO copywriting is not a trick to please search engines by using a specific keyword density and including a certain number of its variations. In fact, SEO copywriting is first and foremost targeted at the readers and looks to maximize their experience by providing narrowly-focused, informative content useful to the audience. If your articles provide this, they will automatically be loved by search engines!

What are the benefits of using the SEO copywriting approach?

·         First of all, tightly-focused content allows you to include keyword variations and LSI (related terms) naturally and easily

·         Narrowly-focused informative content often serves as a link bait, allowing you to get free backlinks form other webmasters reducing your backlinking efforts

And the good news is that you don’t need any special skill to become proficient at SEO copywriting. All that’s required is that you write naturally and clearly about one topic at a time.

However, if you struggle with copywriting in general, you can surely outsource the process of content creation provided you ask the copywriter to stick to the following guidelines:

• Write on 1 topic per article with only 1 keyword
   
• Write naturally without keyword stuffing and provide the reader with helpful information related to their query (keyword)
   
• Make sure they use quality, rich language and engaging style.

Finally, if you have a new site then once your content is ready, you can upload it and schedule for publishing straight away.

What if You Have an Existing Website?

However, if you have an existing website, you need to go through your site pages and find all chunks and pieces unrelated or poorly related to the primary keywords of those pages. Once found – remove, rearrange, or rewrite those paragraphs following the guidelines given above for a new site (1-2 keywords per article, narrow-focused, natural and informative).

If you did your keyword research properly, rewriting or even tweaking selected paragraphs should do the job. If that, however, seems difficult, you may need to replace the existing articles with the new ones written with SEO copywriting in mind.

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Competitive Analysis - WebPro SEO

Competitive Analysis Overview

The idea behind competitive analysis is threefold:

• To find out who your main competitors are (in your niche and on your selected keywords);

• Find out what they are doing to rank high?

• Indentify ways to beat them.

Generally, to outperform your competitors in search engine rankings you have to prove to search engines that your site’s information is more relevant and precise with regard to a specific search term than that provided by the competing websites. To accomplish that, you first need to thoroughly study your competitors in order to discover what helps them to rank, and then come up with a strategy to beat them.

In this article we will discuss various approaches and tools you could use to achieve the desired goals.

Targeting Micro Niches

To determine the list of your competitors to later on analyze their strengths and take on the best strategies from them, you first need to do keyword research and come up with the ultimate list of your keywords. At the next step you should split your keyword list into 3-5 sub-groups depending on how big your list is.

Each subgroup should be based around one of your primary keywords, each of which would be targeting a specific sub-niche or category on your site. Once done, find your top 5 competitors for all the keywords you are planning to rank for in each of the subgroups.

Indentifying Your Competitors

Building On Your Competitor Strengths

When analyzing your competitor websites you should be looking for couple of things – how difficult it would be to outperform them and what steps you need to take to accomplish that. Adopting the strongest search engine ranking factors from your competitors in terms of both on-page SEO and backlinking is what really should help you to come up with a winning strategy.

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Keyword Research Basics

Keyword research is a process of determining a list of terms your website audience is like to use to arrive at your site and search on it.

Despite all the transformations and new trends in search engine marketing (such as increasing importance of link building and social media promotion), keyword research is still an extremely important part of SEO. Here you can split keyword research into two major approaches – ‘manual’ keyword research and research using keyword research tools.

No matter what technique you decide to use, there are a number of essential step steps involved:

• Create a seed list of keywords – i.e. list of terms your readers are likely to use
  

• Estimate number of searches for each keyword

• Evaluate competition – how strong SEO-wise are the websites competing for them?

• Create a short list – pick out the keywords with the high traffic volume and low competition 

Build Keyword List - Manual Approach

Brainstorm – create as comprehensive a list as possible:

• Who are you? - You company and/or your personal name

• What products /services you offer? – generic and specific terms and products for your industry

• Your location? – local optimization is a must for break-and mortar companies

• Issues you solve? – what specific problems your sites solves?

• Put yourself in your readers’ shoes – what terms would you be looking for?

• Keyword variation – use synonyms, as well singular and plural forms for your keywords;

Expand Keyword List

Expand the original keyword list using both laymen and industry-specific terms by using:

• Team Work – get together with your team members and brainstorm collectively

• Audience Poll – create a poll for your audience to inquire what terms they use at your site?

• Attendance Stats – use you website stats to track what keywords your visitors use to arrive at or perform a search on your site
• Spy on Competitors -  analyze your strongest competitors who occupy the top 5 spots on Google page #1 for your primary keywords

Build Keyword List - Keyword Tool Approach

To enhance your keyword research you should use keyword research tools, and you can find both free and paid keyword suggestion tools on the web.

Enter your main keyword and get a list of relevant keyword ideas to expand your list. Then use the manual approach above to tailor the keywords list to target your specific audience. To get keyword ideas for your product or category pages – enter the seed keywords for these categories and drill down to find a list of related terms. Use keyword popularity (the number of monthly searches) to sort them in the order of importance.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a free keyword research tool provided by Google. Despite being free, it’s also extremely useful tool that offers you a lot of valuable info:

•      Monthly search volumes – offering broad, exact and phrase match

•      Advertiser competition – CPC rate advertiser are paying for the searched keywords;

•      The largest keyword database on the web

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool

This is another free keyword research tool that uses both Overture and free WordTracker databases and gives you quick estimate of keyword popularity. The databases are smaller than that of Google keyword tool, but the advantage is that you can compare results from 2 independent databases side by side.

Paid  Keyword Tools

There is also a number of paid keyword research tools out there like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, but their review is outside the scope of this article.

 Evaluate Keywords

Evaluating Relevance

Estimating Competition

Estimating Demand

Shortlist Keywords

Brand Keywords

 High-Relevance and High-Demand Keywords

 High Relevance and Low Competition Keywords

Now that you have created a tentative short-list of keywords, it’s time for competition analysis.

SEO Basics - Clearing the View

In order to succeed in any online business you need to form a clear picture of what is your business goals and website purpose – what does your website offer? What is your target audience? What do you want them to do when they arrive at your site? And the last, but not the least - your ultimate success objectives.

When you answer those questions, you will also need to conduct keyword research to find out keywords your website audience is most likely to look for on your site and also perform the competitive analysis to estimate how much time it may take you to start dominate your niche and rip off the benefits of free organic traffic. But more on that in further articles.

Decide on Your Website’s Purpose

Define Your Target Audience

What Does Your Site Offer?

• What information will it provide to your visitors?
• How will it solve their problems?
• What actions do you want your audience to take on each page?

Success Objectives

• Achieve a certain number of hits on your website per day;
• Get you site generate you a specific monthly income;
• Reach page 1 ranking for so many of your primary and secondary keywords;
• Create a community of a few hundred followers etc.

Tracking Results

Introduction to SEO

What is SEO?

SEO – is set of procedures to rank your site as high as possible (ideally, position #1 on page 1) of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Why this is important? Because it gives you stable, ongoing traffic and you don’t have to pay for it on a per-visitor basis. Surely, you pay for SEO services to an SEO company or SEO consultant to help you bring your site on page 1, but apart from those fees the traffic costs you no extra.

SEO involves 3 major parts:

1. Identifying your target audience;

2. Doing on-page and off-page SEO to rank your site on page #1;

3. Track your site’s rankings and adjust your SEO tactics.

 At the first stage – you are setting your website goals, decide on your target audience, evaluate your competition and create a plan on how to dominate your niche.

At the second stage – you optimize your website content, title tags and meta-tags to make it maximum search engine-friendly, as well as build links to the site and do all sorts of online promotions to get other websites to link to yours naturally!

Finally, the last step involves monitoring your site’s rankings in major Search Engines and adjusting your tactics to help it achieve high rankings and keep them for a long time.

What is not SEO?

SEO doesn’t include any activities that bring traffic to your site except organic traffic search engines. For example, SEO doesn’t encompass:

-       Online advertising or paid traffic;

-       Public relations including mentions in the mass media, press releases, paid blog reviews etc.

-       Exploiting loopholes in Search engines’ algorithms to produce short-term rankings (this is known as black-hat SEO)

-       Any publicity gimmick to attract a XXX number of visitors to your site within YYY hours;

-       SEO is not always free, most effective techniques cost money;

-       Giving away freebies (freeware, free eBooks) to attract visitors.

In general, SEO is a part of your website promotion strategy among the many traffic generation techniques listed above. However, in contrast to those activities, SEO gives you consistent long-term rankings as opposed to quick but short-lived traffic bursts that may be achieved with the non-SEO techniques.

The Right SEO Mindset

The right SEO mindset is a way of thinking which allows you to achieve top rankings and retain them consistently for a long period of time. It’s a set of rules that tells you what to do and what to avoid doing when you goal is stable, high SERPs*). Some of guidelines are fixed, but most are constantly changing.

It takes experience and dedication to always stay on top of the latest SEO trends and adjust your own strategies accordingly. It takes an expert to perform proper SEO on a website to ensure consistently high rankings.

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Keyword Research

To succeed in any Web-business keyword reserach and proper keyword choice for your SEO campaign is vitally important. If you go straight for the most searched keywords, you are soon likely to face the problem of extremely high competition. This, in turn, can make you think that ranking well on such keywords is not worthy of your time and investments. In the worst case, you may even conclude that achieving top positions on Google for those terms is virtually impossible.

If you want your SEO campaign to be efficient, you have to act smart and start it from competitive analysis and keyword research. The purpose of these is to discover keywords and phrases, which are both quite popular and, at the same time, underused by your competitors.

This article will give you a detailed guide on how to discover keywords that should turn your SEO campaign and, consequently, your e-business into a success.

The program of actions is summarised below:

• 1. Find out keywords employed by your top-5 competitors by doing search on Google. Compile a list of about 50 most often used keywords on which the competitors of yours achieved top ranking.

• 2. Expand your list to a few hundred by using synonyms from a thesaurus and combining the nouns with suitable adjectives.

• 3. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, type your keywords into the search box and get keyword ideas. Remember to tick the box "Use synonyms".

• 4. On the result page display the following columns: "Approx Search Volume", "Approx Avg Search Volume" and "Estimated Avg CPC".

• 5. Export data to a csv-file and open it in Microsoft Excel. Sort the data in the "Avg Search Volume" column in descending order.

• 6. Cut anything that shows fewer than 300 searches per month. In addition, disregard all keywords and phrases with search volume trends progressively decreasing through the year.

• 7. Analyse the remaining phrases and keep only those that are reasonable and applicable to your website content. For a site containing less than 20-30 pages, cut the list down to about 300 keywords and phrases that have the highest searches volumes. If your site is bigger, leave a longer list.

• 8. Add 7 extra columns. Name them as follows: "Monthly Searches", "Overall", "In anchor", "In title", "Opportunity", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility". Save the document as an Excel file. These are the names that you assign to each column for convenience. In addition, every column also has a title, i.e. a letter automatically assigned to it by Excel.

• 9. Now, using Google, search for the following combinations: a) "key phrase N"; b) allinanchor:"key phrase N" and c) allintitle:"key phrase N", where "key phrase N? is one of the key phrases from your list. Repeat this for every keyword.

• 10. For each key phrase you will get 3 numbers displayed in the top right corner. Copy those and paste into the "Overall", "In anchor", and "In title" columns, correspondingly.

• 11. In the top second cell (just below the column name) of the "Opportunity", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility" columns type in theses formulas: "=MS^2/T1", "=MS^2/T2", and "=MS^2/T3", where T1, T2 and T3 are the titles of the "Overall", "In anchor", and "In title" columns, respectively; MS - monthly searches.

• 12. With the above formula fill in the last 3 columns (highlight the cell with the formula and drag it down to the bottom).

• 13. Highlight the keywords with the largest numbers for "Approx Avg Search Volume", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility", and the smallest value for the "Overall".

• 14. If you are now left with less than ~150 phrases, come back to step 7 and retain more keywords. As an alternative, by using a thesaurus, you can also expand your list of key phrases by finding more synonyms and combining them with suitable adjectives.

• 15. In the end, you should get about 150-200 keywords and phrases to deploy in your SEO campaign. 

If you carefully followed the steps described above, you should now end up with a list of highly efficient key phrases that both display sufficiently high search volumes and are relatively underused by your competitors. Such a list will give you much better chances to outdo your competitors and develop a successful e-business!

Now it is time to start your SEO campaign and perform the on-page and off-page optimisation.
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