Since Google looks at over 200 factors when ranking a website, how do you know which ones to focus on? Or better yet, what steps should you take to improve your rankings?
To help you with your on-page optimization, let's start with an infographic we created that shows you how to make each of your web pages search engine friendly.
Let's get started.
How to structure a perfect SEO-optimized page?
As you can see, there are a lot of factors involved in creating a perfectly optimized page. On-page optimization can go a deeper level than just making sure your meta tags are complete. And you can get to that deeper level without having to be a veteran SEO.
Here's how:
Tactic #1: Search for synonyms on Google
Using synonyms when creating an SEO plan for your blog or website is quite common. However, finding those synonyms isn't always easy or done correctly.
We believe that the best way to search for these terms is to use Google. The reason is that you can see not only the synonyms themselves, but also how they rank on your competitors' pages.
To search for synonyms on Google, simply place the tilde symbol (~) before the search term. This is actually how we search for the terms we used in the internal linking section to find synonyms for my web page.
This will give you synonyms without returning your original search phrase. You can then take these keywords and integrate them into your text, wherever it flows smoothly and organically. By using synonyms in your content, you will notice that you start to rank your website for more relevant long-tail keywords.
Tactic #2: Link to High Authority Sites
We all know that links from high authority sites are important. They tell search engines that your site can be trusted because a high authority site is linking to it.
What is a high authority site? These are information/content sites like Boing Boing, CNN, Drudge Report, or Huffington Post. There are also other forms of content sites like .edu and .gov sites.
A link from these sites tells search engines that you can be trusted. But did you know that an external link to these high authority sites can improve your SEO?
When search engines crawl your site, see a link, and follow it to CNN or Huffington Post, they consider it positive. The trick is to find organic ways to link to these sites.
Adding them to an anchor text will make them even more natural. For example, if “getting a link from CNN may crash their servers” was a link, with that link going to the specific CNN page, it would be a very natural external link.
By adding these authority links to your website, you will show search engines that your website can be related to these high authority sites.
Tactic #3: Pay attention to feeling-seeking cues
You can't ignore the idea that search engines pay attention to the mood, emotions, and attitudes of web content.
What exactly is sentiment?
If I land on a page about a motorcycle part and think, “Gosh, this is not only well-written, but it's kind of funny. It's funny. It includes some anecdotes. It has some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don't care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet this is a really good page.
What a great page. If I was interested, I'd be tweeting about this and sharing it. I'd send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I'd love this page.” For that you have to optimize. It's a totally different thing than optimizing. Did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords?
So, if you want to get healthy results, here are some things you can do:
- Reviews: Search engines look for product reviews to gauge the feel of the content plus the overall content on the page. However, this means that a great response to the content, whether through actual post recommendations or a vote, will carry more weight. This may seem out of your control—and it is—but you can actually use this information to improve your product or content.
- Content: Stay on top of the ever-changing landscape of what search engines see as relevant content. For example, for a long time, searchable content was limited to text. That's starting to change as search engines figure out ways to define video content.
- Context: Search engines are also learning to figure out the meaning of content based on its environment, asking questions like, "Was the response to the video positive or negative?" "Were the tweets in response to the video good or bad?"
- Personality: You need to make the content on the page seem like it was written by a funny, hot-blooded human being. Or someone who is constantly angry. In other words, you need to prove that it was written by a nice person and not a machine.
This technique is quite advanced and requires sentiment analysis software.
Tactic #4: Offer Google fresh content on a web page
We know that search engines like fresh content. And we know that publishing fresh content daily drives traffic and brings leads to our doorstep. That's why we spend so much time creating new blog posts.
But don't forget about fresh content on a single page. That in itself is a signal to search engines that you've updated a page and will quite possibly continue to update it, so they'll visit it more often.
And the more they visit it, the more trust it gains and hopefully better rankings. If you don't update frequently, the spiders will extend the time between visits.
Just take a look at Wikipedia... Its entries dominate the rankings. Most of its pages are updated frequently.
For non-home pages, you can update the content by adding to the history with updates, more statistics, a growing portfolio of projects, case studies, or even comments.
You can do this by identifying a few of your strong link-worthy pages and then mapping out a strategy to update them periodically. You should try to update these pages at least several times a month.
Tactic #5: Use Dublin Core metadata elements
Whether and to what extent search engines give weight to keywords in metadata is still up in the air. Most experts agree that you should add keywords to your metadata, just in case.
And it's important to have your keywords match up across all of your metadata, from title to description, so you don't get penalized. The same goes for using Dublin Core metadata.
Dublin Core is an open source movement started in Dublin, OH. It was created to help prepare content for the discovery of the future of the web, namely the semantic web.
The theory goes that the benefit of using Dublin Core metadata is that perhaps search engines will view this code as an extra step the content creator is taking to make their content as relevant as possible to a particular search.
The other benefits of Dublin Core include the following:
- It can help with some internal search engines.
- It can help with your SEO efforts.
- It's easy to implement.
- It doesn't bloat your code.
- Installing Dublin Core metadata on your website is easy. You place it in the HTML header of your page, i.e. inside the <head>, right after adding the regular HTML data.
If you want help adding it to XML and XHTML code, head over to the SEO with Dublin Core page. By the way, you should test your SEO efforts against a baseline to determine if there is any benefit to using Dublin Core on your site. Don't just take our word for it.
Tactic #6: Define content absolutely
If you do a search for "Dublin Core," the first four search results are for dublincore.org. The fifth is for Wikipedia.
If you do a search for "metadata," the Wikipedia entry is at the top. Search for the word "strategy" and the first five results will have one Wikipedia and two dictionary entries:
This simple little demo shows you what's called "relevance authority." Search engines see these sites and their pages for the keywords as exact matches for the keywords.
Why is that?
It's because the entire page is geared toward defining the keywords. The lesson for you is to get into the habit of creating pages that "define" keywords like authority sites like Dictionary.com and Wikipedia do.
It will be difficult to compete against these authority sites with competitive terms, but with less competitive terms, it will be easy to rank highly.
Using these on-page optimization tactics will give your current tactics a boost and help you get better search engine rankings. So, give them a try. They are actually quite easy to implement.
The biggest mistake we see businesses making is messing up their URL structure. If you are short on time, focus on fixing that first. It is one of the hardest things to fix, but it will pay off in the long run.
The rest can be fixed over time and is not that complicated. For example, loading time can be improved with the help of Google PageSpeed.
