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CHAPTERS

1

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

How Do Search Engines Work?

SEO Basic Steps and What You Need to Do

A Good Domain Name

Installing Tools and Getting Ready

Register with Search Engines (Indexing)

What Do You Do If Your Site Isn't Indexed?

Benefits of SEO

Should I Hire A Digital Marketing Agency to Do SEO?

Head to Chapter 1

1

How Search Engines Build Their Library and Rank Pages

URLs

Crawling

Processing and RenderingProcessing and Rendering

Processing and Rendering

How Search Engines Rank Pages

Google Key Ranking Factors

Should I Outsource Web Design and Development For Better SEO?

Head to Chapter 1

1

Understanding Keyword Research for SEO

What are Keywords?

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research Vs. Topical Research

How to Perform Keyword Research

Step 1: Run Your Competitor's Site on Ahrefs

Step 2: Study Search Intent

Step 3: Filter Out Unwanted Keywords

Step 4: Keep Long tail Keywords 24

Head to Chapter 1

1

On-Page Optimization Factors

What is On-Page SEO?

Content Element

Structured Markup

Slug

Internal Linking

Mobile Responsiveness

Site Speed

Head to Chapter 1

1

On-page SEO Optimization

Optimizing Content on Your Site

Optimize Title, Description, and Image Tags

Optimizing Your Slug

Head to Chapter 1

1

Monitoring On-page SEO Results

Bounce Rate Decrease

Ranking without Linkbuilding

Rapid Indexing

Summing up The Symphony

Head to Chapter 1

Chapter 00

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Impactful SEO is rarely executed by a lone wolf. Instead, it is a team effort achieved through consistency and persistence, yielding long-term profits for growing and established businesses.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines work by scanning billions of web pages using crawlers. These crawlers are called "spiders" because they create a web of sites interlinked based on the keyword they are targeting. In a metaphoric sense, search engines are similar to libraries that index books under unique categories on the shelf. The user is a person looking to browse through a book and would definitely ask the librarian for directions.

The libraries, in this sense, would be the "search box," where users type phrases related to what they are looking for.

So if you want your website or book (in this metaphoric sense) to be placed in the world's biggest digital library (Google), you'd like the librarian (crawlers) to go through it.

That's why crawling and indexing is the most important step for SEO.

SEO Basic Steps and What You Need to Do

Search engine optimization is vast and might seem too hard to digest for most beginners. However, even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference.

That's why we'll encourage you to read as much as possible in one go, take a break and return again.

But for now, let's dive into the basic of SEO.

A Good Domain Name

SEO starts with a website, and every website needs a domain name. A good domain name covers a broad spectrum of keywords within its name. For example, www.contentmarketinginstitute.com

This domain name houses all keywords that connect with the term content marketing. But with so many websites on the internet, it can be hard to find a domain that houses your keywords.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a phrase that searchers type in search engines to find relevant results.

Matching your domain name with your services or keywords isn't a sure-shot strategy for ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The best example of this is www.hubspot.com.

They have a strong presence in the content community. Yet, their domain name doesn't directly match any "content" related keywords.

So how do you pick a good domain name?

But in recent years, SEO has changed dramatically and can no longer be manipulated by stuffing keywords. Hence, picking out a good domain name falls on these three principles,

  • Short and Catchy
  • Easy to remember
  • Shouldn't include symbols or numbers
    • Once your website is live under your domain name, the next step is getting your site ready for SEO.

Installing Tools and Getting Ready

In recent years, SEO has become more about searchers than the search engine itself. This is primarily because Google wants websites to answer search queries instead of flooding content that doesn't meet keyword intent.

Therefore, gathering and analyzing customer data has become the pinnacle of SEO practices. And to do that, you'll need to install tracking tools on your site.

Google Analytics is an excellent place to start. This tool provides information about who visits your site and which pages they click.

This information is worth gold in the SEO industry because you can track which pages are performing well and which aren't.

But tracking and analyzing customer data comes after you receive traffic.

Register with Search Engines (Indexing)

You couldn't be more wrong if you thought Google was the only search engine. There are more than 10 search engines worldwide, but Google has the lion's share. That's why many brands aim to rank on Google.

Registering on search engines also gives you access to multiple tools that provide detailed insights into your website's performance. In addition, registering with search engines lets them know your site exists.

What Do You Do If Your Site Isn't Indexed?

In most cases, Google fails to index sites because of several issues. But don't worry; there are ways around it. Here are a few questions to ask yourself if your site isn't indexed.

• Is my site brand new?

Google gets millions of indexing requests from new and old websites. Therefore, this process is slow. If your website is new, you can expect it to rank after a week or sooner – depending on how busy Google is.

• Does my site offer unique content?

Google de-ranks or removes websites that plagiarize content. If your site doesn't offer unique content, you should stop holding your breath.

• Is my website mobile-friendly?

Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites because a huge chunk of search engine traffic comes through mobile devices. Therefore, if your site isn't mobile-optimized, Google might not index it.

With so many moving parts in SEO, is it really that important?

Benefits of SEO

SEO might be confusing and complicated in the beginning, but once you start getting organic leads, you'll realize its actual value. In SEO Vs PPC, SEO takes the win but it’s time consuming. Here are several SEO benefits that make it worth the effort.

  • SEO is free.
  • Organic rankings serve as a strong trust signal.
  • SEO traffic is usually consistent.
  • SEO improves your site's experience.
  • SEO generates qualified and targeted leads.
  • SEO improves brand visibility.
Google search engine share

Data Source: https://www.seo.com/blog/23-search-engine-facts-and-stats-you-oughta-know

Should I Hire A Digital Marketing Agency to Do SEO?

Depending on your budget, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your site, hiring a digital marketing agency isn't all that bad.

When you hire a digital agency, it's best to determine their skills and abilities. Although many agencies claim to provide SEO and other digital marketing services, their quality of work can vary.

Choosing the right digital marketing agency can save time and money. In addition, it can keep you from getting your website banned because many SEO agencies build unethical backlinks. These backlinks shoot your SERP ranking, only to meet a hard fall after a few months.

Chapter 1

How Search Engines Build Their Library and Rank Pages

Search engines are a complex mechanism of algorithms, constantly evolving and getting more complicated as technology advances.

Each search engine has a unique process for crawling and indexing websites, but it all starts with the URL. Here is a simplified infographic of how Google crawls and indexes websites.

How google indexes my website

URLs

URL stands for Unique Resource Locator. It's like the address of your website on the web. Everything starts with a URL because that's what search engines read.

To keep things simple, we'll take Google as an example for all search engines because this behemoth has the lion's share of web traffic.

Google has several methods of discovering your URL, but the most common and effective ones are stated below.

  • Through Backlinks: Backlinks are like testimonials in the digital world where one site recommends the other by linking its web page, blog, or any URL. This informs Google that a new site has appeared on the web, allowing the search engine giant to index it.
  • From Sitemaps: Sitemap serves as a guide for Google crawlers to find relevant pages of your website. Sitemaps are uploaded on the website but hidden from site users.
  • URL Submission: Google allows site owners to manually submit their site to Google Search Console, where crawlers would go through the site and index it. But according to StanVentures SEO trends for 2023 (replace with our blog link), Google has reduced indexing to reduce its environmental impact.

Crawling

Crawling is the beginning of indexing. It's the part where Google spiders automatically access and store all the content on a website. The purpose of crawling sites is to collect and showcase information when it's requested by the searcher.

Processing and Rendering

Now that Google spiders have crawled and checked your site for plagiarism, it's time to process that collected data. During this stage, Google scans your site's health – core web vitals, to be precise.

This information helps Google learn how fast your site loads and what images or videos show above the fold.

This is important for Google because if your site is slow, it won't rank higher on search engines. This is because Google prioritizes search experience and doesn't want to show slow websites on its first page.

To be fair, no one outside Google knows much about the processing stage. But SEO experts with years of experience have made some accurate speculations, one of which is checking site health.

To improve your website's health, you can use the tools mentioned below.

Indexing

Indexing is where all the collected and processed data is stored and recalled when the user generates a query. Each indexed website has data saved in a dedicated directory identified via the URL.

Since all web data is stored in different directories, optimizing images and videos becomes essential for SEO. But that's a topic we'll cover later in this guide.

For now, it's important to know that Google tests for plagiarism during the indexing stage. Therefore, if you think Google won’t notice when you copy content form other sites – think again.

In addition to content plagiarism, Google checks for image and video credits. So if you've taken a video or a picture from another site, make sure you link to the original domain.

Otherwise, Google might penalize your site for stealing information.

That's why getting indexed on all search engines besides Google is great for SEO because you can never be sure where your customers are coming from.

Google Facts: From January 2015 till December 2022, Google had around 84.08% share of all the search traffic.
Source: hftps://www.statista.com/statistics/216575/worldwide-morket-share-of-search-engines

How Search Engines Rank Pages

Google Fact: There are around 30 to 50 billion websites indexed on Google. This number has been growing rapidly year over year.

Crawling, processing, and indexing are the first few parts of the puzzle. Next comes ranking, which is a crucial aspect for SEO experts. Search engines have developed algorithms that rank results when a user performs a search.

There isn't much information about what factors search engines consider when ranking websites. But expert speculations and tweets from Google's John Mueller have paved a path for SEO experts.

Here are some key ranking factors Google considers.

Google Key Ranking Factors

Google has never disclosed all the ranking factors. But with time, SEO experts have figured out some key ones. Here's a look at the 4 most important ranking factors on Google.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from a website that leads to your page. They can be inbound links, outbound links, and two-way links.

Search engines, including Google, consider backlinks as "votes" in favor of a website. For instance, when a well-known website links to your site, search engines consider your site to be credible and worthy.

Links that come from other websites to you are called "inbound" links. These links are great for SEO and boost your site's authority.

"Outbound links" go from your site to another. In this case, your website becomes the one that transfers (not shares) authority. This means that your existing value doesn't drop when you share a link to another website – so don't worry.

"Outbound links" go from your site to another. In this case, your website becomes the one that transfers (not shares) authority. This means that your existing value doesn't drop when you share a link to another website – so don't worry.

The higher the authority of your site, the more credible it becomes in the eyes of search engines for a specific niche.

Note that we said "specific niche." This is because Google doesn't value links from sites that aren't related to your business.

For example, if your site sells shoes and you get backlinks from Samsung, it won't have the value you'd gain from a site that writes about shoes.

Building backlinks is a time taking process. But don't worry, later down this SEO guide for 2023, we'll share expert link-building tips that boost your site's authority.

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Relevance

Google has robust mechanisms in place to understand what searchers are searching for. Relevance is one key system that determines if a site is helpful against a particular search query.

Though Google and other search engines have several methods of determining a site's relevance against a search query, the most common method is keyword targeting.

When a searcher searches for something on Google, crawlers immediately scan Google's database of indexed sites to find relevant results.

These crawlers look for keywords within the site content. For instance, if you sell automobile parts online, your website must have terms like "car parts, automobile parts, etc."

Google looks for these keywords on the sites stored in its database. When Google finds enough keywords entailing that a webpage is related to the searcher's query, it is ranked based on its authority.

However, this doesn't mean you should stuff your site with "keywords" because it's against Google policies.

Crawlers are smart enough to recognize whether a site is stuffing keywords. So the best way to add keywords to your site is by adding your main keyword in the first 100 words.

From there, sprinkle keywords where they fit, making grammatical and reading sense.

Content Freshness

The content freshness ranking factor doesn't fit all businesses. Instead, it's a query-dependent ranking factor that demands new content occasionally.

For instance, if you search for "latest Netflix Shows," the results would be new. But if you search for "How to reset my computer," the results would be relatively old.

This example also applies to digital marketing agencies and businesses that evolve with technological changes. Therefore, uploading new content becomes a pack and parcel of such businesses.

Design a page that defines your user’s journey and add CTA’s at the right spot because most visitors won’t know how to reach out to your business.

If your business falls into a category that's always evolving, start a blog page and add weekly content. This will help you tackle the content freshness ranking factor.

For instance, if your target audience is from the mid-tier financial status, your site shouldn’t be designed with complicated transitions and high-end animation.

Page Speed

Google is always striving to improve user experience, and what better way to make an already great search engine better? Improve the web speed of sites on the search engine result page.

Google page speed was introduced in 2019 for desktops and in 2018 for mobile devices. A quick-to-load page reduces your bounce rate and keeps the visitor engaged on your site.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that opened your site and left without moving to other pages on your site or spending enough time. It's a key metric for Google to determine if you site should be ranked higher on SERPs.

Since page load speed depends on several factors, such as image optimization and minify JavaScript, Google decided to shift from page speed to Core Web Vitals.

Core web vitals John Mueller tweet

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals serve as unified guidence for web quality signals. Core Web Vitals are based on user-experience which are affected by several metrics. We will share these metric in the guide below when you have enough understanding of the subject.

Other Metrics

Besides the ones mentioned above, there are several other ranking factors Google accounts for. It's impossible to mention all the ranking metrics because no one outside Google knows of them.

However, over the years, SEO experts have made speculations and followed Google guidelines to uncover a few effective ranking metrics that get results.

  • Keyword in domain
  • Topical authority
  • Historical page updates
  • Outbound link quality
  • Multi-media
  • URL length
  • Content value
  • Sitemap
  • Server location
  • SSL certificate
  • Alt tags
  • Competitor link
  • Guest posts

Should I Outsource Web Design and Development For Better SEO?

Outsourcing web design and development can be tricky in terms of project delivery and getting what you want.

Hiring a freelancer or an agency means you have extended resources that don’t work under your roof. This may be cost-effective, but you’ll need to vet the market before making the investment.

One of the key evaluation metrics for hiring a web design agency is its portfolio. When on call or in a meeting with your potential partner agency, you need to ask for live samples.

The reason for asking live website portfolio is that it’ll help you judge web functionality (a crucial part of SEO). Also, you can use the inspect tool to see if heading tags are installed, and live websites allow you to check page speed.

Since you need an SEO-optimized website, you need a fast website that follows Google’s instructions. So make sure you don’t install any intrusive elements on your site.

What Are Intrusive Web Elements?

Anything on a site that limits your visitor's visibility is an intrusive site element. Best examples of intrusive elements include pop-ups because they interrupt viewing experience. Google measures your site's friendliness and intrusive elements are a negative metric.

Chapter 02

Understanding Keyword Research for SEO

Unless there’s a symmetry to your keyword research, you’re not sure which keywords would take less time and generate more revenue.

If you’re new to SEO or picked up our SEO guide 2023 from this chapter, you probably aren’t aware of keyword research.

In this chapter, we’ll explain everything about keywords and the difference between topical and keyword research. So you don’t want to miss this one.

What are Keywords?

Simply put, keywords are phrases searchers type in search engines against a particular query. These phrases can be long-tailed or short-tailed.

When searches search for a particular query (keyword), search engines populate the page with relevant results.

In our previous chapter, we explained how search engines rank websites based on keywords. If you want to refresh your memory, you can check out Chapter 1 - How Search Engines Build Their Library and Rank Pages.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the strategic process of finding high-quality keywords that require less effort to rank and generate massive traffic.

Every keyword research starts with a seed keyword which becomes the base for all the keyword ideas you get from keyword tools.

What is a Seed Keyword?

A seed keyword is a short-tail phrase related to your niche that searchers might type to find your website. For example, "Chinese Food" is a seed keyword for a chinese resaurant. Seed keywords serve as the foundation of your keyword research.

Seed keywords entered in a keyword research tool return a list of long-tail and short-tail keywords. These keywords are ranked on their difficulty level, volume, and backlinks.

Though there are several keyword research tools on the internet, we prefer using Ahrefs because it offers a variety of other features as well.

Here’s what you’ll see if you enter a seed keyword in the Ahrefs keyword finder.

Ahrefs keyword research dashboard

Keyword research plays a strong part in content marketing by finding keywords you can easily rank for. The above image shows the difficulty level of every keyword, illustrating that short-tail keywords (content marketing) are the toughest to rank for.

So for a sound ranking strategy, you need to target short keywords in your blogs until your site has enough authority to rank for the tough ones.

From the above keyword research, you can probably make a blog topic on “Paying Content Marketing Manager Salary Vs. Outsourcing.”

It sounds like a good topic because it incorporates a low-competition keyword with 900 average daily search traffic. And you can plug your services as well.

But we’d like to make one thing clear – keyword research and topical research are entirely different.

Keyword Research Vs. Topical Research

Keyword research is a part of SEO that spans over to content marketing. Conversely, topical research is part of content marketing that takes help from keyword research.

However, the intent behind both searches is entirely different.

Where keyword research focuses on high-volume low, difficulty keywords, content marketing focuses on delivering content to potential buyers.

Content marketers mainly use Google Trends to find which keywords are being searched for. But their seed keyword comes from keyword research that’s performed on Ahrefs and other keyword tools.

In addition, keywords highlighted through keyword research aren’t necessarily made into topics in content marketing. Why?

Because your potential customers might not be looking for an exact match keyword.

For instance, the topic we made through keyword research was “Paying Content Marketing Manager Salary Vs. Outsourcing”

If this were to be a part of content marketing, the topic might be something like “Hiring a Content Marketer Vs. Outsourcing”

The reason for this change is “intent.”

Content marketers strive to generate Marketing Qualified Leads through blog pages, videos, and social media posts. While SEOs perform keyword research for ranking home, service, and other pages.

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How to Perform Keyword Research

If you’re writing on topics no one is searching for, getting traffic is close to impossible. That’s where keyword research comes into play. Through consumer insights, keyword tools, and Google Analytics, you can easily find keywords that have low difficulty and high search volume. But understanding the steps to keyword research is crucial.

Step 1: Run Your Competitor's Site on Ahrefs

The easy way to start keyword research is by running your competitor's website on Ahrefs. This will show you what keywords they’re ranking for. You can make this process easier by running the link to the exact page you’re looking to design for your website.

Once you have a list of keywords, you need to choose the ones that best fit your requirements and search them on Google Trends. This will show you keyword popularity for a specific duration you choose.

At Advertyzed, we run 6 months of data on Google trends for a particular keyword of interest. This helps us understand whether that keyword is being searched or if our choice of keyword is seasonal. Once you have a list of keywords checked on Google Trends, it’s time to filter out results.

Step 2: Study Search Intent

Stuffing high-volume keywords used to boost organic ranking back in the day. But now, it’s not so easy. Today, Google's algorithm is smart enough to understand the search intent behind keywords. And that plays a crucial part in ranking your content.

Search intent is defined as the reason behind a keyword search. You can determine search intent by observing the site’s ranking against these terms. And for some keywords, you might not need to observe ranking because there are obvious.

For instance, keywords that include words like tips, tricks, and guide are information-intent, and keywords that start or end with “services” are buyer intended.

Understanding search intent will refine your keyword research and allow you to write content accordingly. Moreover, you’ll refrain from including buyer and information intent keywords together in a single blog post.

Step 3: Filter Out Unwanted Keywords

You don’t filter out keywords based on their difficulty or volume; that’s something you did in the first step. Now you step into your customer's shoes and filter results based on what your customers might be searching for.

Sure, your competitor is ranking and getting traffic for keywords that aren’t being searched any longer. But your chances of securing search engine real estate for these keywords are slim. Why?

Because your competitors have brand recognition on these keywords. And if you want to build brand recognition for a specific keyword, you need to start from level 1.

So assume your buyer’s person and start removing keywords that you know your buyers would write to find a business they’ve worked with before. For instance,

If you have a site that hosts anime, targeting keywords like “watch anime online” may rank your site through link building, but you might not get the expected traffic. This is because most customers searching for this keyword are looking for sites like Crunchyroll, Hulu, or Netflix.

Step 4: Keep Long tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are easy to rank for; hence you must keep them in your SEO arsenal. But that doesn’t mean you should decorate your content with long-tail keywords only. Consider long tail keywords as a stepping stone that helps rank your short tail keywords.

Since long-tail keywords have low difficulty and medium to low traffic, they serve well as a means of generating link juice.

What is Link Juice?

Link juice is a term used in SEO to refer to the authority or value passed by one domain to another through hyperlinking. This term is best used to describe do-follow links and content that’s ranking on search engines.

Once you have a buyer-centric list of long-tail keywords, align them with your short-tail keywords. This will give you a batch of keywords ready to be installed in existing web pages or new blog posts. It doesn’t matter where you ad your keywords; just remember to sprinkle them throughout the content and use this formula,

  • Primary keyword = Once per 100 words
  • Secondary keywords = Once per 200 words

Chapter 03

On-Page Optimization Factors

Higher rankings and more traffic are wonderful, but the more important is the targeted and relevant traffic that can be easily converted into sales.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the front-end part of your website, making it pleasing for visitors. Improving your website’s front end increases your chances of getting ranked higher on Google because your site is both pleasing for the visitors and Google search bots.

Google’s algorithm ranks your content on three factors, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and off-page optimization. But for the sake of this guide and chapter, we’ll focus more on on-page optimization factors, which are also divided into three elements.

  • Content
  • HTML
  • Site architecture

Content Element

Content elements include everything and anything related to the content on your site. Whether this content is in the form of videos, infographics, pictures, web copy, or blog posts, it’s all connected to the content elements on your site.

1. High-Quality Blog Posts

Gone are the days when stuffing keywords in 1000 words would rank your content on search engines. Today, Google’s algorithm is so advanced that it captures NLP keywords and value-added content. Hence, putting words on your blog or web page with keywords won’t get you anywhere.

In this competitive landscape, you need to add value to your content, and this value is broken into two elements based on what form of content you are uploading.

  1. Web content
  2. Blog content

Value-added for Web Content

Value-added content for web copy would be your USP. Say you are trying to rank your site for content marketing services. You’ll need to prove to Google and your visitors that your services are unique and you have a selling point that no other business is offering. This can be a dedicated project manager, in-house marketing tools, or quick turnaround time. Whatever it is, you need to mention and highlight it on your website.

In addition, you’ll need to integrate NLP keywords.

What are NLP Keywords?

NLP stands for Natural Language Processing. It’s a machine-learning algorithm that tests the sentiments and natural keywords used in your web or blog page content. NLP was introduced by Google as a ranking metric that plays a crucial part in ranking your content. Whether your content is in the form of video or blog posts, you need to add NLP keywords.

NLP keywords come naturally when you are an expert in a field. For instance, if you write content for a car rental website, your NLP keywords may be transmission, clutch, and any other car-related term you might use on your website.

Value-added Content for Blog Posts

When you cover USPs in your web copy, you can’t state them everywhere in your hundreds of blog posts. So what do you do then?

Value-added content for blog posts is sharing information about your industry that’s not easily available on the internet. In today’s content-crowded world, most blog posts are inspired by the ones that are ranking, and writers either perform ethical plagiarism or simply paraphrase existing content.

Value-added content for blog posts is sharing information about your industry that’s not easily available on the internet. In today’s content-crowded world, most blog posts are inspired by the ones that are ranking, and writers either perform ethical plagiarism or simply paraphrase existing content.

Adding this sort of information to your blog posts may boost your chances of beating competitors with higher DA/DR against your target keywords. Why?

Because Google is a user-centric platform that wants to share the most up-to-date and accurate information with its user base. When your content shares authentic information that’s backed by data and is somewhat unique, Google will put your content on top.

2. HTML Elements

HTML elements refer to the source code of your website when it’s developed. Doesn’t matter if your site is indexed or not; even if it’s on a demo link, you can make HTML updates.

You can check HTML elements on Google Chrome by right-clicking anywhere on your website and selecting the “inspect” option. This will open a new window on your browser cluttered with code. On the top side of the code, you’ll see “elements,” that’s where you can check for HTML elements.

You can either select the mouse button on the top right of the inspect window, or you can press “ctrl/cmd + F” and search for

  • Meta title
  • Meta description
  • Image title
  • Alt description

Besides the ones mentioned above, HTML elements cover other ends, such as,

  • Structured markup
  • Slug
  • Internal linking
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • Site speed

Meta Title

The meta title is a crucial part of on-page SEO. This little snippet of code tells Google and your users what your content is about. The meta title is the title of your content or web page that’s going to show on search results. Here’s what meta titles look like,

advertyzed

Optimizing the Meta title means adding your keywords in there. You can do that by simply pasting your keywords in your title, but the best SEO practice is to frontload your primary keyword. Also, your meta title can be slightly different from the on-page title (Blog title that’ll show when someone clicks on your link)

Meta Description

A Meta description is a short snippet of your web or blog page that shares brief information about what y your visitors might find on your page. Meta descriptions are added to the code through custom web development. However, WordPress has a built-in section for Meta description, making it easy to add this information.

If you don’t add a Meta description to your blog or web page, Google will automatically pick a random short paragraph of around 150 characters and show it as your Meta description.

Best on-page SEO practices involve adding your primary keyword in the Meta description, allowing you to maximize your keyword usage without stuffing. Here’s what the Meta description looks like.

Meta title Google

Image Alt and Description

Image alt and description rank your content in Google Images. As an On-Page SEO specialist, you’ll need to maximize your content exposure, and adding images and alt descriptions is going to help you with that.

In addition, Google crawlers can’t read images (or they don’t want to). In that case, adding an image and alt description allows Google crawlers to understand your image. Although, you should add a description and title of the image according to what’s in that image. But most SEO would simply integrate their keyword in this section for maximum keyword coverage without stuffing.

Structured Markup

Structured markup, otherwise known as schema markup, is a search engine’s vocabulary. It tells search crawlers what your page is about. When search engines recognize structured data on your page, they serve rich results or search snippets. Here’s what search snippets look like,

You can easily create schema markup on technicalseo.com and choose the type of schema markup you’re looking for.

You’ll find a variety of schema markups, and each serves a different purpose. For instance, a product schema shows your product ratings and reviews right on the search page. That’s an excellent conversion point.

Slug

Slug is the “URL of your web page that search engines see when your webpage is indexed. The best SEO practice is to add your primary keyword in the slug because it shows up in the search results under the Meta title.

Internal Linking

An internal link is any link that goes from one page of your website to another. These links are used by search engines and your web users to navigate to different pages. Internal linking is excellent for guiding users to other pages on your site in an attempt to boost traffic and make sales.

For instance, if you write a blog post on one of your services, you’d definitely want to make use of the traffic that comes to your site. By strategically linking your services within your blog post, you can send traffic to your services page and convert them.

Internal linking is best done through anchor texts.

What are anchor texts?

Anchor text is a word that’s hyperlinked to another web page. Anchor texts are used for both off and on page SEO. It’s best to use your keywords as anchor texts because it signals Google that you’re aiming to rank for these keywords.

Internal linking is not limited to anchor texts in a blog or web page. The header section of your website that helps users navigate to different pages on your site is also considered internal links. When used strategically, internal links also transfer page authority to other pages on your website – ultimately boosting your site rankings and DA/DR.

Internal linking also transfers link value. And if your internal pages are interlinked with your home page, these pages will get the maximum link value. For instance, if you link your blog section on the home

page, you’ll get a good chunk of link value. In addition, a blog page linked to the home page will allow Google to index your new blogs faster.

page, you’ll get a good chunk of link value. In addition, a blog page linked to the home page will allow Google to index your new blogs faster.

While websites are often created for desktops, optimizing the design layout for mobile devices is crucial. This process is called mobile optimization or mobile responsiveness. You can measure the mobile responsiveness of your site on Page Speed Insight.

You can manually check the mobile responsiveness of your website by right-clicking and opening the “inspect” tool (for Chrome and other browsers).

Mobile responsiveness check

Next, you’ll find a small desktop icon on the top left of your Inspect tool tab. Click on that small desktop, and your site’s display will change from desktop to mobile view

Since the adaptation of mobile devices has increased over time, buyers tend to search for products/services on mobile devices. A mobile responsive website is in Google’s good books because the site’s content is adaptive to mobile layouts of all screen sizes allowing your visitors to conveniently navigate through your site.

Site Speed

Site speed is a commonly known factor for Google’s search ranking among SEO specialists. Improving your site’s speed improves your Google rankings. This is a must-do step for on-page SEO, as web developers tend to miss search optimization.

You can check your site’s speed on Page Speed Insight or GT Metrics. Both are great for evaluating your site on different global servers to get a feel of your site’s speed and performance. Both tools will give you improvement metrics. One of the most common ways to improve your site’s speed is through SVG images. This image format is web-friendly and quick to load.

You can also use lazy loading to optimize your site for visitors. But make sure your lazy load code isn’t installed on the banner. This is because lazy load prevents below-the-fold elements from loading and directs all the speed to the banner section

Looking to Improve Your Site’s On-page Performance?

Partner with Advertyzed for on-page SEO optimization, and we’ll take care of everything! From site, speed to Meta’s and everything in between, your site will be in safe hands!

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Chapter 04

On-page SEO Optimization

It’s important to look beyond rankings and rather ensure a website is usable for everyone.

Now that you know on-page SEO factors, it’s time to understand how to optimize these factors for better on-page SEO.

The fundamental concept of on-page optimization is to improve your site for search engines and visitors. Without on-page optimization, your site’s ranking and performance will go down.

Since there is a chuck full of on-page factors, we’ll target the most relevant ones in this guide. So before anything, let’s work on your on-page content.

Optimizing Content on Your Site

The major chunk of optimizing your content for SEO is keyword installation. You’ll be adding your keywords to most parts of the on-page factors such as Meta title, description, heading tags, and body paragraph.

The key to proper keyword installation is to add your keywords once per 100 words. Although most guides would tell you to add your primary keyword in the first hundred words and sprinkle it around, that only works for sites with high DA/DR.

When you’re a small business, your DA/DR is definitely low because you don’t have backlinks. The reason adding primary keywords in the first 100 works for high-ticket websites is that they have already established backlinks on thousands of keywords using them as anchors.

When you’re a small business, your DA/DR is definitely low because you don’t have backlinks. The reason adding primary keywords in the first 100 works for high-ticket websites is that they have already established backlinks on thousands of keywords using them as anchors.

But for small businesses, you’ll need to strategically place your keywords. So start with frontloading your primary keyword in the title and give it an H1 tag.

Next, add your primary keyword in the first 100 words and use one secondary keyword close by. Continue this momentum by adding your primary keyword once per 100 words and sprinkling your secondary keywords throughout the content.

Make sure your secondary keywords are closely related to your primary keywords. Don’t pick synonym as your secondary keyword because that’s only going to confuse Google crawlers. Again, using synonyms as secondary keywords works well for high DA/DR websites because they already have millions of backlinks on their primary keywords.

Optimize Title, Description, and Image Tags

Once you’re done with optimizing your content body, it’s time to start working on the technical side of optimization. Whether it’s web or blog content, you’ll find an option to add Metas. When used strategically, these Meta play a critical role in SEO and reverse SEO.

What is Reverse SEO?

Reverse SEO is the process of removing unwanted or defaming results from search engines. SEO specialists target local news and business listings to push defaming results from Google. Adding Metas greatly improves reverse SEO in web, image, and video results.

Adding Metas to your web or blog content is a developer’s job. But as an SEO, you’ll need to share Metas with your development team.

For best SEO, try adding keywords to your Metas, including images and alt descriptions. This will boost your content’s ranking in Google image searches.

Frontloading your primary keyword in the Meta title is the key to ranking higher on search engines. This is because Meta titles give search engines a good overview of what your content is about.

But that’s not where your on-page optimization ends. To take things a bit further, you can add “modifiers” to your title tag. This’ll allow you to capture more traffic and target broader keywords.

For instance, if this guide was titled “On-Page SEO Guide,” ranking on search engines would be difficult. However, we named our long-form content “Best On-Page SEO Strategies,” allowing us to target phrases that exactly match our keyword.

Optimizing Meta Description

The Meta description is a small snippet of your content that shows up on search engines when visitors search your target keyword. Optimizing the Meta description is crucial for search rankings because Google crawlers analyze your Meta description against the keyword. That’s why it’s also important to add your primary and secondary keywords in the Meta description.

Optimizing Your Slug

Slug is a unique URL of your page that makes each page different from the other. Consider search engines as libraries and slugs as books. No two books of the same can be stored in a library – the same goes for slugs.

Here’s an example:

https://www.advertyzed.com/search-engine-optimization-services

In this link, “Search engine optimization services”” is the slug.

Optimizing slug means you need to add your primary keyword to it. This allows search engines to understand what your page is about. Due to this, your page starts ranking higher on search results.

 

Chapter 05

Monitoring On-page SEO Results

High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online.

Now that you’re done with on-page optimization, it’s time to measure your efforts. Setting SEO KPIs is key to measuring your team’s performance and setting future goals.

Although most SEO guides will focus on measuring holistic marketing or SEO results, we believe in breaking down measurement metrics and evaluating each metric’s individual performance.

Although most SEO guides will focus on measuring holistic marketing or SEO results, we believe in breaking down measurement metrics and evaluating each metric’s individual performance.

Bounce Rate Decrease

On-page optimization means your site’s broken links are fixed, and your content is keyword rich with value-added. As a result, you might face a decrease in bounce rate.

This is primarily because your readers are interested in your content and don’t want to switch tabs. You can check the bounce rate through Google Analytics.

A lower bounce rate improves your site’s overall ranking because Google trusts your site’s content. In addition to building trust, a lower bounce rate signifies your site’s engagement levels. Because it shows that your site visitors are clicking on internal links which aren’t broken.

Ranking without Linkbuilding

Ranking without backlinks seems close to impossible in the SEO industry. But if your site or blog page content is optimized, your blog page may start showing up on the 2 or 3rd page.

Rapid Indexing

If your content is getting indexed sooner than usual, it’s probably because your on-page optimization is on point. This happens when Google crawlers scan your website and find structured data, internal/external links, proper headings tags, and value-added content.

Summing up The Symphony

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving field that keeps changing with new algorithm updates. To keep your site in check and in line with Google’s latest updates, it’s crucial to keep on-page optimization as a top priority.

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving field that keeps changing with new algorithm updates. To keep your site in check and in line with Google’s latest updates, it’s crucial to keep on-page optimization as a top priority.

Finally, keeping all SEO elements in check would improve your site ranking, traffic, and engagements. If you’re looking to outsource your SEO activities, you can trust Advertyzed. We’ll work through the basics by conducting an SEO audit and move forward with on-page optimization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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