1. Adding descriptive titles (including your keywords) to each page of your website.
Each page on your website should have a title that accurately describes what the page is about. The search engine normally shows the first 60 characters (including spaces) of your title in their search results which users will see when they type specific search terms. What‟s also very important is that the search engines will BOLD the keyword in your title when users search for those specific terms.
Thus it is vital that you have your keywords in your title and it is also very important to have a very captivating title so that searchers will click through to see your website. The main objective of your title is to have searchers clicking through to see the content on your website. That‟s it! The image below is a sweet example.
2. Adding a unique description (including your keywords) to each page on your website.
The description is a short summary of what your webpage is about. You have a 160 character limit and you should also include your keywords in the description. Just as with your title, the search engines will show your description in the search results and they will also bold the keywords in your description.
The aim of the description is to support your title to have searchers clicking through to see your website.
3. Adding Meta keywords to each page on your website.
Meta tags do not carry a lot of weight towards your search engine rankings. However, high search engine rankings come from a cumulative effort so it‟s important to include Meta tags with your keywords on each page. It will help to tell the search engines exactly what each page on your website is about.
4. Formatting your URLs correctly to include your keywords.
Having your keywords in your URL is a very important factor when it comes to ranking highly in the serps (search engine results page). When you have your keywords in your domain, it will be much easier to get the top search engine positions for your targeted. Even if your main domain doesn‟t have your keywords, the specific page should have the keywords in the URL that is representative of the content on that page.
5. Adding proper sitemaps on your website (one for search engines and one for humans).
A sitemap for search engines allows the search engines bots to spider your website and discover all the content on your website and know what each page is about. A sitemap for humans on the other hand, allows readers to easily navigate your website and find what they are looking for. You‟ll use an XML sitemap for search engines and .html or .htm sitemap for humans.
6. Offer quality content on your website. (Content MUST be unique to your website).
When it comes to SEO, quality content is one of the most important factors to ranking in top positions. You need to add great articles that your readers will love and appreciate. It‟s important to note that even though you are focusing on specific keywords, you should make sure that your content is optimized for your readers.
I also found that the longer your articles, the better results you‟ll get. You should aim to have your articles at minimum 700 words and longer. Another point to note is that you should vary the length of your articles on the different pages of your website. Some can be 700 words, some 800 words, 1,000 words etc.
7. The content on each page must target a specific keyword. (Keep the keyword density to about 1-3%. Don NOT keyword stuff)
Let‟s say you have a website that is focused on dog training. The best thing to do would be to have several pages that target the specific breed of dogs. (Just an example) Therefore, each page should target a specific keyword. For example, one page could target German shepherd and another could target a Great Dane etc.
The keyword density that I find to work the best is anywhere between 1-3%.
You don‟t want to go over that because you may do more harm to your rankings as a result of keyword stuffing. Having too much of a high keyword density can raise red flags in the search engines and may result on your website being penalized to lower rankings. The best thing to do is to ensure that you have the keyword in your first sentence and last sentence and then randomly distributed throughout the body of the article. This should flow naturally and if you can‟t get it in the first and last sentences, at least try to get them in the first and last paragraph.
8. Include videos and images in the content on your pages when possible and use Alt tags on your images to include your keywords.
Bounce rate is a very important factor when it comes to search rankings especially after the „Panda Update‟. Bounce rate simple means how long your visitors are staying on your website before they leave. So if you have a bounce rate of 100% that is very bad for you because it means that people are not finding what they are looking for and click the back button the moment they land on your website.
Adding videos and images helps to keep people focused on your website for longer periods of time which eventually decrease your bounce rate. You see, the aim of the search engines is to offer relevant content to their users. So if someone searched for a specific keyword and then clicked to your website from the search results and then back the moment they get on your site that is telling the search engines that your website isn‟t relevant to the search query. As a result, they will lower your rankings for that specific keyword.
9. Interlink your pages on your website via keyword anchor text.
Interlinking is very important to boost your rankings. You should always interlink pages with the appropriate keyword anchored text. Interlinking also help your readers to easily navigate your website, keeps them longer on your website and as a result boost your overall seo strategy.
10. Each page should have H1, H2 and H3 tags that include your keywords. You can also add more H tags all the way down to H6.
The H1 tag is the main heading for your webpage. When the search engines crawl your webpages, they read the H1 tags first and it tells them exactly what your page is a bout. Each page should have its own H1 tag. If you are using Wordpress, the title is normally in H1 tag by default and all you would need to do is to add the H2 and H3 tags in the body of the content on the page. You can use the H2 and H3 tags as subheadings in the body of your content.
11. Use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords in the content on your pages.
Another important factor that the search engines take into consideration is the use of other related keywords to your main keywords. That means you should also use other related keyword to your main keywords in the content but it MUST appear naturally. A great way to get ideas is to use Google. Simply search for your main keywords and then scroll to the bottom of the results and Google will suggest some other keywords. Use can use some of these as your LSI keywords. Using the term „how to train a dog‟ Google returned the following results:
All off the above keywords could be LSI keywords if I had a page targeting the term „how to train a dog‟.
12. Adding Social Buttons to your websites
There‟s no direct evidence as to how this works but I have found that by adding social buttons like twitter, facebook and Google+ and other buttons helps in my rankings. My hypothesis is that the search engines like to see when people are interacting on your websites. To them, it means that you have good content that people love to share and thus they will rank your website highly as a result.
13. Using the Bold, Italic and Underline functions on your keywords.
When you add content on your websites, you should also ensure that you use a mixture of the bold, italics and underline functions to place emphasis on your keywords at least once throughout the body of the content.
14. Limit the amount of outgoing links on each page.
When you have too much outgoing links on a page on your website, it reduces the amount of authority that page has since most of its link juice would have been passed on to the other sites that it links to. I‟d say keep your OBL (out bound links) to a maximum of 30 and no more for each page.
15. Be careful of the websites you link to.
Don‟t link to spammy websites, or other sites that offers no value to users. Also, do NOT link to adult websites or any gambling related websites as doing so can devalue your website and result in loss of rankings.
16. Avoid Having Duplicate Content On Your Website
The search engines are very strict these days when it comes to duplicate content. No two pages on your website should have the same content. This is especially very important since Google‟s latest Panda updates. If you have two pages on your website with similar content then you should add a „no index‟ tag on one of those pages so that the search engines doesn‟t crawl it. Your website also should have content that can be found elsewhere on the net word for word.Even if your website is the original source, it can still have a negative effect on your rankings. Unfortunately there‟s not much we can do at times about this because there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that will just rip content from your sites. However, when you can do something about it, do it to protect yourself!
17. Add The „Nofollow‟ attribute to your affiliate links or when linking out to other websites.
The „nofollow‟ attribute tells the search engines not that you don‟t want to pass on any link juice to the website you are linking to.
The 17 points above covers EVERYTHING you NEED to know about on page SEO. By applying everything above, you are one step above your competitors because only a minority percentage of them will ever apply all the steps above. Now we are going to move onto off page SEO which accounts for more than 80% of your rankings.
Each page on your website should have a title that accurately describes what the page is about. The search engine normally shows the first 60 characters (including spaces) of your title in their search results which users will see when they type specific search terms. What‟s also very important is that the search engines will BOLD the keyword in your title when users search for those specific terms.
2. Adding a unique description (including your keywords) to each page on your website.
The description is a short summary of what your webpage is about. You have a 160 character limit and you should also include your keywords in the description. Just as with your title, the search engines will show your description in the search results and they will also bold the keywords in your description.
3. Adding Meta keywords to each page on your website.
Meta tags do not carry a lot of weight towards your search engine rankings. However, high search engine rankings come from a cumulative effort so it‟s important to include Meta tags with your keywords on each page. It will help to tell the search engines exactly what each page on your website is about.
4. Formatting your URLs correctly to include your keywords.
Having your keywords in your URL is a very important factor when it comes to ranking highly in the serps (search engine results page). When you have your keywords in your domain, it will be much easier to get the top search engine positions for your targeted. Even if your main domain doesn‟t have your keywords, the specific page should have the keywords in the URL that is representative of the content on that page.
5. Adding proper sitemaps on your website (one for search engines and one for humans).
A sitemap for search engines allows the search engines bots to spider your website and discover all the content on your website and know what each page is about. A sitemap for humans on the other hand, allows readers to easily navigate your website and find what they are looking for. You‟ll use an XML sitemap for search engines and .html or .htm sitemap for humans.
6. Offer quality content on your website. (Content MUST be unique to your website).
When it comes to SEO, quality content is one of the most important factors to ranking in top positions. You need to add great articles that your readers will love and appreciate. It‟s important to note that even though you are focusing on specific keywords, you should make sure that your content is optimized for your readers.
I also found that the longer your articles, the better results you‟ll get. You should aim to have your articles at minimum 700 words and longer. Another point to note is that you should vary the length of your articles on the different pages of your website. Some can be 700 words, some 800 words, 1,000 words etc.
7. The content on each page must target a specific keyword. (Keep the keyword density to about 1-3%. Don NOT keyword stuff)
Let‟s say you have a website that is focused on dog training. The best thing to do would be to have several pages that target the specific breed of dogs. (Just an example) Therefore, each page should target a specific keyword. For example, one page could target German shepherd and another could target a Great Dane etc.
The keyword density that I find to work the best is anywhere between 1-3%.
You don‟t want to go over that because you may do more harm to your rankings as a result of keyword stuffing. Having too much of a high keyword density can raise red flags in the search engines and may result on your website being penalized to lower rankings. The best thing to do is to ensure that you have the keyword in your first sentence and last sentence and then randomly distributed throughout the body of the article. This should flow naturally and if you can‟t get it in the first and last sentences, at least try to get them in the first and last paragraph.
8. Include videos and images in the content on your pages when possible and use Alt tags on your images to include your keywords.
Bounce rate is a very important factor when it comes to search rankings especially after the „Panda Update‟. Bounce rate simple means how long your visitors are staying on your website before they leave. So if you have a bounce rate of 100% that is very bad for you because it means that people are not finding what they are looking for and click the back button the moment they land on your website.
Adding videos and images helps to keep people focused on your website for longer periods of time which eventually decrease your bounce rate. You see, the aim of the search engines is to offer relevant content to their users. So if someone searched for a specific keyword and then clicked to your website from the search results and then back the moment they get on your site that is telling the search engines that your website isn‟t relevant to the search query. As a result, they will lower your rankings for that specific keyword.
9. Interlink your pages on your website via keyword anchor text.
Interlinking is very important to boost your rankings. You should always interlink pages with the appropriate keyword anchored text. Interlinking also help your readers to easily navigate your website, keeps them longer on your website and as a result boost your overall seo strategy.
10. Each page should have H1, H2 and H3 tags that include your keywords. You can also add more H tags all the way down to H6.
The H1 tag is the main heading for your webpage. When the search engines crawl your webpages, they read the H1 tags first and it tells them exactly what your page is a bout. Each page should have its own H1 tag. If you are using Wordpress, the title is normally in H1 tag by default and all you would need to do is to add the H2 and H3 tags in the body of the content on the page. You can use the H2 and H3 tags as subheadings in the body of your content.
11. Use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords in the content on your pages.
Another important factor that the search engines take into consideration is the use of other related keywords to your main keywords. That means you should also use other related keyword to your main keywords in the content but it MUST appear naturally. A great way to get ideas is to use Google. Simply search for your main keywords and then scroll to the bottom of the results and Google will suggest some other keywords. Use can use some of these as your LSI keywords. Using the term „how to train a dog‟ Google returned the following results:
All off the above keywords could be LSI keywords if I had a page targeting the term „how to train a dog‟.
12. Adding Social Buttons to your websites
There‟s no direct evidence as to how this works but I have found that by adding social buttons like twitter, facebook and Google+ and other buttons helps in my rankings. My hypothesis is that the search engines like to see when people are interacting on your websites. To them, it means that you have good content that people love to share and thus they will rank your website highly as a result.
13. Using the Bold, Italic and Underline functions on your keywords.
When you add content on your websites, you should also ensure that you use a mixture of the bold, italics and underline functions to place emphasis on your keywords at least once throughout the body of the content.
14. Limit the amount of outgoing links on each page.
When you have too much outgoing links on a page on your website, it reduces the amount of authority that page has since most of its link juice would have been passed on to the other sites that it links to. I‟d say keep your OBL (out bound links) to a maximum of 30 and no more for each page.
15. Be careful of the websites you link to.
Don‟t link to spammy websites, or other sites that offers no value to users. Also, do NOT link to adult websites or any gambling related websites as doing so can devalue your website and result in loss of rankings.
16. Avoid Having Duplicate Content On Your Website
The search engines are very strict these days when it comes to duplicate content. No two pages on your website should have the same content. This is especially very important since Google‟s latest Panda updates. If you have two pages on your website with similar content then you should add a „no index‟ tag on one of those pages so that the search engines doesn‟t crawl it. Your website also should have content that can be found elsewhere on the net word for word.Even if your website is the original source, it can still have a negative effect on your rankings. Unfortunately there‟s not much we can do at times about this because there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that will just rip content from your sites. However, when you can do something about it, do it to protect yourself!
17. Add The „Nofollow‟ attribute to your affiliate links or when linking out to other websites.
The „nofollow‟ attribute tells the search engines not that you don‟t want to pass on any link juice to the website you are linking to.
The 17 points above covers EVERYTHING you NEED to know about on page SEO. By applying everything above, you are one step above your competitors because only a minority percentage of them will ever apply all the steps above. Now we are going to move onto off page SEO which accounts for more than 80% of your rankings.
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