On Page SEO Techniques To Rank On First Page – 2015
Edition
Want to
make your post Keyword targeted? ..
Want to
make it easier for search engine to understand what Keyword your blog should
rank for?
If yes,
you are about to learn the secret of making your blog post Keyword targeted.
When it
comes to optimizing a website or blog posts, there are two factors that plays a
big role. These two factors are Onpage
optimization and Offpage
optimization. Today’s article, remain focused around On
page optimization and I will be sharing some good on page
SEO techniques you should implement while working on onpage aspects of your
blog posts.
Now, lets not confuse onpage SEO optimization with Onsite SEO
optimization. Talking about, onpage SEO, we optimise our content for our target
keyword. This includes use of proper heading, keyword placement, content
quality and many other factors. We will look into them one by one in this
detailed post.
Why do you need OnPage Optimization:
So what’s
the target of this post: This post will help you to write more search engine
optimized article. Now, when I say SEO optimized article, many blogger think
it’s a bad practice.
Search engine is nothing
but a set of algorithms, it look into various factor to rank your page for
certain Keyword. Now, here we will help search engine to pick the target
Keyword from the post and make it more target able.
Here is a
food of thought: When you publish a post, have you ever thought why you have
not got 1st page ranking. ?
So when we
do SEO optimization of post, it means we follow certain set of proven method to
rank higher in search engine. Now ranking in Google, doesn’t only consider On
page SEO score, but it also take care of many factors like Social media votes,
back links,domain
authority and many
other offpage factor. Our goal here is to optimise our article in natural but
smart way, so that search engine can easily pick the target keyword (Focus
keyword) and thus, instead of raking for irrelevant long tail keyword, we
will get more targeted visitors. Here is an interesting article which shows how
on page optimization is not dead.
Before,
you read more, I assume you know about Keyword research and you have found a
Keyword for next post, which is going to be a perfect example of onpage SEO
optimized post. Here are latest 2015 On-page search engine factors :
As you can
see from the above list, a lot has changed in 2015 and most important factors
are relevant keywords, internal links. Above chart is prepared by search
metrics team after analysing top pages from Google search. One thing which I
highly recommend you to do from now on is to take advantage of adding videos in
your blog post. Adding videos will not only increase the rich media on your
post, it will also make users stay more on your blog post.
10 Onpage Optimization Techniques for
Better ranking
So here is
the ultimate list of 10 Onpage
Optimization factors you should keep in mind while optimizing your
blog posts:
Most
important Onpage factor which really plays a big role in deciding whether our
blog posts will be doing well on search engines front is its title. We should
make sure we are using targeted keywords or phrase towards the beginning of
Title tag. We should not repeat the same keyword in title tag with the
intension to get better rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. And we should keep
limit Title Characters length to 65 Characters only
with spaces.
Then it’s
about going ahead with a search engine optimized URL structure. Again, you
should aim at using targeted keywords towards the beginning of blog post URL.
You should avoid using special characters, symbols, brackets, comma’s etc as
part of your post URL. Most of the times you should be using alphabets and
numeric from 0-9 in your URL structure and use dashes to differentiate two
strings in URL structure. Make sure to follow a pretty permalink instead of
random strings in your permalink.
You should
use heading tags like h2, h3 and h4 etc to highlight various headings,
sub-headings and important points. Our Title tag is used as h1 tag at single
post level in WordPress. So we don’t need to use any h1 tag in our blog post
body section. Also, don’t repeat H2 or H3 tags too many
times, as it is considered as negative SEO practice. Here is
what Matt Cutts has to say about repetition of H1 or any other heading tags.
You should
keep the keyword density to up to 1.5% percent with mix of LSI
keywords. You should be using your main keyword once in first
paragraph and then in the last paragraph apart from regular use in blog post
content. You should use bold, italic and underline to highlight important
keywords and phrases in your blog post. Here is official Matt Cutts comment on
what’s the idle Keyword density:
You should
add unique and relevant meta keyword and meta description with each of your
blog post. Again, you should use your use targeted keyword in the meta
description and meta keyword section. You should create a meta description tag
which work as a summary for your blog post. You should limit meta description
length to 160 characters including spaces. You should write
user friendly meta description tags forbetter
Click Through Rate (CTR) in
search engines. Though, many search engine like Bing still prefer meta keywords
but Google already made it clear that they don’t give any weight-age to Meta
keywords. Here is official statement from Google regarding use of Meta
Keywords:
We
have already talked about Image optimization for SEO and
it helps a lot in driving traffic from image search. Though, according to many
case studies, Keyword in alt text in image and image title helps a lot to make
your blog post more focus and targeted. Now add one or multiple images to your
blog post. You should include targeted keyword as part of image name, image alt
text etc. Availability of images makes our blog contents more interesting and
attractive. While adding images, you should look out for small size images
only. Addition of big size images will slow down your blog speed and will
ultimately lower down your blog rankings as these days Google Started consideringwebsite
speedas one of rankings factor on Google organic search.
I
don’t see blog posts doing well especially on search engine front page having
very few words. So as standard, you should try to draft blog posts carrying
minimum 700 words. If possible write long and well researched blog posts
while targeting highly competitive keywords in your niche. More over, if you
writing naturally and covering everything related to the topic, your topic
would be of great length. Suggestion: Analyze other posts on the target keyword
and see what you are missing and if your post is better than post ranking on
first page in Google or not. Though, there is no limit or exact number for
minimum word count for SEO optimized posts, but ideally I keep it more than 700
words. This post is over 1900 words plus.
You
should link out to related blog posts from your blog to send additional page
rank and traffic to them. Interlinking of blog posts naturally will help your
blog readers spend more time on your blog. But you should not overdo it. While
linking out to your own blog pages, you should use keyword rich anchor text as
that will help the linking posts perform better on Google and other search
engines for their targeted anchor texts. Also, keep variation while internal
linking but don’t confuse Google with two similar post for same target Keyword.
Linking
out to External Websites
Apart
from linking to your own blog posts, it is a great idea to link out to external
websites if you feel addition of links for them will help your blog readers
find more and relevant information about the topic you are currently blogging
about. While linking out to external websites, you should link to trusted
websites only. And if you have doubts about the authority or popularity of
a website, you can use nofollow tag to avoid passing page rank and search
engine rankings to bad neighbors.
You
should use dofollow link for trusted websites and nofollow link for those about
whom you are doubtful about their trust rank on Google. If not, try to link
with Wiki article, which is considered as one of the most authoritative source
of information. Even if not from onpage optimization point of view, linking to
useful resource helps readers and make your content more credible and
informative.
You
should write engaging content in your post and should work as a complete manual
for the targeted keywords for that post. You should look at various ways so
that people get engaged with your blog contents. You can do this by asking some
kind of questions or asking for their opinion on topics related to your blog
and etc. If you are unable to write engaging contents on your blog, people will
not spend much time on your blog and will immediately leave your blog. This
will result in higher bounce rate for your blog and which will work as a
negative factor when Google calculates your blog rankings for targeted terms.
On
page SEO Checklist:
Here
is the final checklist which you need to follow in 2015 to make sure your
content rank higher in search engine.
Keyword
placement:
- Keyword in Title
- Keyword in Permalink
- Keyword in first paragraph
- Keyword in Image Alt tag
- Tweaked Keyword in H2 or H3
- Bold Important Keywords and related keywords
- Italics 1-2 important Keywords
- Outbound Link to relevant high-quality sites
- Internal links to related articles
- Remove all stop words from Permalink
- Add multi-media (Video, Slides, Inforgraphic)
- Longer the content length, better it is. Minimum: 700 words
- Optimize image before uploading (Compress and resize)
- Page loading time
- Use LSI Keywords (Use Google search to find related Keywords)
Other
things:
- Use Meta title in less than 65 character
- Use Meta description in less than 150 characters.
- If using any Social SEO plugin, make sure to add image for Facebook,
Twitter. (Take advantage of social graph)
- Make sure to have social sharing buttons at the end of post or
floating social sharing buttons.
- Have related posts after blog posts to lower down bounce rate.
Things
not to do:
- Not more than 1 H1 tag (Your Post title is H1 tag)
- Don’t repeat H2 and H3 Tag
- Don’t increase Keyword density by more than 1.25%
Things
to focus on:
- Try to use Keyword in Post Title at beginning
- Use Long tail keywords (You can use up to 65 Character in Post title)
- If writing in evergreen niche, remove dates from the posts. (Use Date
Exclusion SEO plugin)
- Content length: The longer the length of the content, better it is.
Though don’t try to uselessly increase the content size.
- At the end of blog post, ask users to take action.
With
this, you have covered all the factors that you need to have to make your
articles on page SEO full-proof. If you have any queries or want to add your
tip, let me know via comments.
