Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization basically provides structure and clues to the content we read on the internet. In this article, we explore the relevance of advanced techniques for on-page optimizations.

Keywords: SEO webmasters gain higher rankings by placing relevant keywords in the title tag, headlines, and in different places of the textual content. This is the fundamental concept of on-page optimization. However, the influence of keywords is waning steadily with changes in Google’s algorithm.

Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)

This important tool used by Google indexes web pages. It is a measure of significance for keywords. Consider Google’s Ngram viewer for this purpose. “Basketball player” is more significant on a page compared to “basket” as the frequency of the former is less than the latter. Compared with keyword usage, TF-IDF has a slightly better association with higher rankings.

Synonyms

These words are associated with nearly 70% of searches on Google. The search engine has vast numbers of synonyms and close variants of billions of phrases. Consider the query dog pics; its synonym would be dog photos. However, dog motion picture would be totally different, but does the search engine understand this?

SEO webmasters must consider this viewpoint to provide natural language and variations. This would certainly eliminate ambiguity associated with search queries.SEO webmaster may need to exploit Google’s Hummingbird tool for this purpose; it takes into consideration the different contexts of a word and its meaning.

Page Segmentation

Placement of keywords plays an important role in on-page SEO. Content location in the main body of the text gains more wattage than that placed in sidebars of a webpage. But, the repetition of the same text lessens its weighted for higher rankings. Page segmentation has gained sudden importance as we transition toward mobile devices.

Semantic distance

This is the relationships of terms and phrases of sentences, paragraphs with various HTML elements. Search engines would determine the distance between different words with their related HTML elements. Thus, phrases present in the same paragraph are semantically closer compared to phrases located in distant paragraphs.To avoid this guesswork of search engines, SEO webmasters must employ special markup for defining correct relationships.

Phrase-based indexing

Google indexes complete phrases. Google’s algorithm considers co-occurrence of phrases for prediction. Suppose your search query is “Roger Federer”; this phrase would normally occur with “tennis champion” “tennis player.” When a page contains all these related phrases, its content is more likely to focus on “Roger Federer.” Webmaster must link the page with incoming links of pages having related, co-occurring phrases; this ensures better rankings.

Entity salience

Distinct and well-defined terms in a document, termed as entities, are used for building known relationships for pages. Consider an article with the terms Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Pete Sampras, Serena Williams, Approved epas's School, etc.. The phrase “Tennis Champions” bears a strong entity relationship with all these terms. So, even if “tennis champions” appears once in the entire document, it is a very significant entity in the document. On the other hand, the word “ATP Tour” may appear multiple times, but it holds a weaker entity relationship, so it is less significant.

www.pixotritechnologies.com

Do You Need To Hire An SEO?

Google continues to get better at evaluating external clues to determine the value of a website and thus its relevancy to searchers. Small business owners can control a lot of these things themselves by having an active social media presence, providing exceptional service and encouraging customers to leave reviews online, hosting or participating in community events, and writing for publications in their industry. Does that mean that the role of an SEO is diminishing or, dare I say it, no longer necessary to achieve first page rankings on the SERPs?

No, it doesn’t.

First of all, the practices mentioned previously are becoming more important but there’s an increasing number of ways to maximize their value. Here are a few examples:

Community Events – Hosting a community event can be a great way to get your business some exposure, but without appropriate marketing, it won’t get the attendance that attracts press. An SEO can help promote your event in such a way that you earn links, gain traffic to your site, and create social conversation around your brand.

Publishing Articles – Getting an article published online can drive traffic and create awareness on its own, but a dedicated SEO could amplify it through social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, give it visibility on your website and through email marketing to your leads, use it to connect with prominent industry influencers through Twitter or email, and potentially even find ways to repurpose it (as an infographic or by compiling it with other articles to make an e-book, for instance) to give it a new audience.

Review Management – Getting reviews is just one piece of the puzzle. SEOs can leverage reviews to make sure they show up with your website in the SERPs, building confidence in searchers and boosting click-through. There are also strategies for managing reviews, particularly when it comes to responding to negative reviews, that can help your brand gain even more value from them.

It’s also important to remember that some of the most important aspects of SEO are related to technical aspects of a website that most small business owners don’t understand or don’t have the time to learn. Here’s a bit of what I mean:

On-page Optimization – The core of technical SEO, this refers to the authoring of title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags, appropriate organization of heading tags, and URL optimization, all with a keyword strategy that has been researched to target high volume keywords with relatively low competition. Without this, the search engines may struggle to understand what your website is about, which can doom your chances of getting on the first page of results.

HTML Markup – Related to on-page optimization, HTML markup is a method of coding certain parts of your site to communicate directly to the search engines. Most commonly for local businesses, this means marking up your address, phone number, and business name. This helps the search engines know that you’re local and gives you increased odds of ranking when a searcher is near your business.

Website Optimization – Google is giving more and more weight to certain aspects of website design. For example, websites built with responsive design that function just as well on mobile devices as desktops get a boost in the rankings. There is also site speed to consider – websites that load slowly are less likely to get top rankings, but good SEOs know the tools and tricks to increase load speeds.

In addition to these, a quality SEO will monitor ranking performance, stays on top of Google’s many algorithm changes, and research competitors for link-building opportunities. Things can change quickly in the world of SEO and small business owners are often too wrapped up in running their business (understandably) to put much time into keeping themselves informed.

The truth is, small business owners should be doing everything mentioned in the first paragraph while their SEO manages everything else. You’re pretty much guaranteed to see an increase in your rankings and a resulting bump in organic traffic to your site, which can make a huge difference in the number of leads and clients. The investment is almost always worthwhile.

www.pixotritechnologies.com

On-Page Optimization

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, chocolaty 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 my meta 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 utilize 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 the Google Page Rank 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.

9. Geo Targeting

Use geo-tagging to let your users and search engines see your actual business location.

10. Authorship Markups

Use authorship to take the ownership of the content you publish on your website.

11. Socialbility

Add social media buttons to encourage your readers to share your website’s content on their profiles. Websites with social signals can get better rankings in search engines.

12. XML Sitemap

Create xml sitemap and add each of your website in it. You can submit to sitemap in Google and Bing webmaster tools to make your website index soon.

13. Robotics.Txt

Updated: The robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.

14. Analytics

Make sure you have added and setup the analytics code so you can properly analyze your website.

15. Webmaster Tools

Add and verify the ownership of your websites via Google Webmaster Tools. These webmaster tools will also help to analyze the on-page validations.

www.pixotritechnologies.com