On-Page Optimization
Creating Your Content
For those who love creating content, this is your bread and butter. For those that struggle with what to say next, this may be your nemesis. However, on page optimization is an essential element to SEO and developing a web page or site to rank. Once, you have honed in on your target audience, you can really start gearing up to rake in sales with keyword rich pages and SEO optimized pages. So, what are all the things that go into on page optimization? We have The SEO Answer.
Applying Your Keyword Research
Once you have narrowed your keywords down, here are a few simple steps to follow to improve your page performance:
Put your keywords into groups and categories, so that you can pinpoint what topics they best fit within.
Run a keyword analysis to determine the strength and difficulty of ranking for the keyword and how it differs by each SERP. Characteristics of the SERPS can include:
Are they image or video heavy?
Is the content long-form or short and concise?
Is the content formatted in lists, bullets, or paragraphs?
Make sure you provide value in your content. Offer something new, beyond a fresh perspective. Don’t be afraid to offer up your tips, tricks, and secrets.
On page SEO morphs your boring research into vibrant copy and motivates your audience to purchase. Just make sure to avoid falling into the trap of low value tactics that could hurt more than help! People who read your page should be able to take something from your content that they can use in their lives or their businesses.
Stay Away From Low Value Tactics
When you make content and you stuff it full of keywords and forget that these are your key offerings, you are missing the point. You aren’t really selling yourself, or your brand. Even if you get your audience to click on your page, you will lose them. Make content that not only supports your keyword strategy but brings in your audience without confusing them.
Thin Content
Some web pages with repetitive and poor content may rank high, but that doesn’t turn into sales. If you are stuffing your page with keywords and not putting together content that provides solutions to your customers problems, all you will have is viewers. Your bounce rate will be high and your sales will remain stagnant.
For example, if you are selling lawn services, you might have created individual pages for planting, winterizing ponds, or lawn care vs landscaping, but each page is essentially offering the exact same thing with no special factors. Another failing tactic for local businesses is to create multiple pages of content for each city or region from which they wanted clients. These “geo pages” often have the same or very similar content, with the location name being the only unique factor.
Tactics like these are clearly not helpful for users, so why did publishers do it? Google wasn’t always as good as it is today at understanding the relationships between words and phrases (or semantics). So, if you wanted to rank on page 1 for “landscaping” but you only had a page on “lawn care,” your site might not have made the cut.
This practice created tons of thin, low quality content across the web, which Google addressed specifically with its 2011 update known as Panda. This algorithm update penalized low quality pages, which resulted in more quality pages taking the top spots of the SERPs. Google continues to iterate on this process of demoting low quality content and promoting high quality content today.
Google is clear that you should have a comprehensive page on a topic instead of multiple, weaker pages for each variation of a keyword.
Duplicate Content
Often you will see competitors or businesses piggyback off of each other's content. Some would call it plagiarism, but in internet speak, it’s often referred to as “Scraped.” So say you came to this page and you stole a few sentences here and there and linked to my webpage, to credit your source. That’s all fine and dandy except SERPs will recognize this practice, and it’s not nearly as effective as you would like it to be. Taking content and republishing it with your name on it or only modifying it slightly, will not add any value to your brand or your on page content.
Auto-Generated Content
Arguably, one of the most offensive forms of low quality content is the kind that is auto generated or created programmatically with the intent of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. You may recognize some auto generated content by how little it makes sense when read — they are technically words, but strung together by a program rather than a human being.
As technology moves forward, some auto generated content does seem to be improving. However, this is likely why in Google’s quality guidelines on automatically generated content, Google specifically calls out the brand of auto generated content that attempts to manipulate search rankings, rather than any and all auto generated content.
The True SEO Answer
There is no “secret sauce” or “special coding” to get your business ranking in search results. Google ranks pages highly because it has determined you are the best answer to the particular query. Your page has to provide value to searchers and be better than your competitors for your search query. Here’s a simple formula for content creation:
Search the keyword(s) you want your page to rank for.
Identify which pages are ranking highly for those keywords.
Determine what qualities those pages possess.
Create content that’s better than the content offered by other pages.
Google will reward you for it, and better yet, you’ll naturally get people linking to it! Creating more effective and informative content is hard work, but will pay dividends in organic traffic.
Just remember, there’s no magic number when it comes to words on a page. The goal is to provide information and feed the needs of your audience. You want them to come to you because you are the authority.
Here is a quick checklist of things to keep in mind when building on page and blog content:
✔ Have at least 1 outbound link on your page/post
✔ Have a few internal links in your page/post
✔ Keywords in title, towards the beginning of the title
✔ Keywords in introduction paragraph
✔ Keywords in metadata description
✔ Keywords in text headings
✔ Keywords in image name (alt description)
✔ Keywords in the URL slug
✔ Try and make more statements than passive sentences
✔ Try and keep the sentences under 20-25 words
You only need ONE focus Keyword per posting. So if the keyword is loan options, put loan options in the title, the first paragraph, and one text heading. Call us today for your Free SEO Report!