Charles Floate

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You are here: Home / SEO / OnPage SEO: The Lost Art

OnPage SEO: The Lost Art

October 24, 2016 by Charles Floate 62 Comments

OnPage SEO: The Lost Art

25/10/2016 Update: It’s been a while since I updated this guide, and I promised if the update toΒ my link building postΒ got over a 100 shares I’d make a significant update to this post. We managed to hit that mark, and some.. So here we are.

If you’d like to see me make any updates to other posts, then drop a comment with your suggestions.

Note: This guide isn’t in any specific order, and there isn’t a set priority queue for what OnPage needs doing first unless you’ve done an extensive audit, so just read and extract/use what information you want & need from this guide.


Unfortunately, in today’s (SEO) world, there is one thing, and one thing only that folks seem to actually care about: Backlinks. Although backlinks are a key cog in ranking a website, they aren’t the be all and end all of ranking in the SERPs, despite what some people may say.

When I do my consulting sessions, the number one issue I find with websites is terrible OnPage. People are skipping by the essential (and sometimes boring) tasks of basic OnPage, and going straight for the links.. Then they wonder why they don’t rank after spending a thousand bucks on links…

Your website won’t rank (usually) without proper OnPage SEO.

Let’s look at an analogy in the real world:

Say you go to the gym, and you start off by doing basic, compound lifts like the bench press, deadlift, squat, and overhead press. These are compound exercises that will help you when you decide to move onto other, more specific exercises. By creating the initial framework, once you start on other exercises, you’ll be a lot stronger and will reach an intermediate level much quicker.

SEO is the same way – without that initial framework built, you’re basically wasting your time when you’re doing things like building backlinks, doing outreach, working on building your social media, and more. Despite popular belief, OnPage SEO isn’t as easy as it looks either. You don’t just plop down some title tags and expect your site to rank. Google is always changing, and there are a lot of different factors you have to take into consideration.

Luckily for you, I’ve compiled the ultimate guide to OnPage SEO for you right here. If you’ve read something on this topic that was published in 2010, burn it and throw away the ashes. So much has changed since then. This is the most updated resource right now, and I’ll continue to update it, as Google’s algorithm changes.

Enough introduction, let’s get into my guide to OnPage SEO.

Note: I’ll be using the WordPress CMS to convey how to do OnPage, as that’s the CMS the majority of my readers use. If you’re using something other than WP, then just use the advice and convert it to your own CMS.

We’re going to talk about 12(!) different main factors you need to consider, as well as some advice towards the end.Β 

Table of Contents

  • 1 Title Tags
  • 2 Header Tags
  • 3 Bold Tags
  • 4 Image Optimization
  • 5 Keyword Density
  • 6 Latent Semantic Analysis
  • 7 Site Speed
  • 8 Bounce Rate
  • 9 Length of Content
  • 10 URL Optimization
  • 11 Meta Description Optimization
  • 12 Interlinking (aka Internal Linking)
  • 13 Some Extra Advice
    • 13.1 Google Panda, The Core OnPage Algo
    • 13.2 Social OnPage (OpenGraph, Twitter Cards etc)
    • 13.3 Topical SEO & Silo Structure
  • 14 OnPage Optimization Tools
    • 14.1 Auditing Tools
    • 14.2 Keyword Research
  • 15 Conclusion

There’sΒ a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

Title Tags

The first thing on our list, and one of the most important factors when it comes to OnPage SEO.

This tag can be automatically added by many WordPress themes and by WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast.

Essentially, the goal of the title tag is to tell Google what the topic of your post is. For example, the title tag on my recent post, β€œHow to Get High Quality Backlinks from Wikipedia”, tells Google exactly what the post is about. To find information like the title tag, you can use inspect element in Google Chrome, but I prefer using Site Analyzer or the SEO Quake plugin on Chrome.

To insert your own title tag if your site is in HTML, you can simply add <title>This is my title</title> and viola, your title will be Googlebot-friendly.

Make sure when using title tags that you include your main keyword in your title. If that main keyword will highly sacrifice the quality of the title, don’t opt for it, but if you can insert it and make the title sound realistic, go for it.

We don’t want to destroy our bounce rate or click-through-rate on social media by writing a bad title like β€œGet Great SEO Backlinks with Backlinks from Wikipedia”.

Don’t stuff a bunch of keywords in your title, just make the keyword naturally occur if you can.

Screenshot_14

Remember that the main goal is to tell Google what the post is about. When they see the title tag, they want to know what the title of your page is. That’s it – don’t get overly complicated here. That being said, let’s move on to talking about header tags.

Header Tags

You only get one title tag, but you can use unlimited header tags. Hopefully you’ve used these before when writing blog posts on WordPress, or another platform. These help segment your post into different β€œheadings”. Like on this post for example, we see that each different heading is in bold, and has a slightly larger appearance than the rest of our font. This allows us to tell Google what each heading is about, and allows us to break down big posts into easy-to-view chunks.

To use header tags, simply insert tags like so: <h1> this is an h1 tag </h1> <h2> this is an h2 tag</h2> <h3> this is getting boring </h3> and so on.. Most CMSs will allow you to automatically insert the header tags too.

When using headings, we achieve two things. We help ourselves rank for secondary keywords not included in our title tag, and we make the page more aesthetically pleasing for our audience. Sounds perfect, right!?

Looking at a quick example, let’s say you had a piece of content about watches. You might have your title tag say something like β€œThe Best Watches”. Under this, you might have <h2> tags for things like β€œthe best watches under $100”, β€œthe best waterproof watch”, and so forth. Maybe under your β€œbest waterproof watch” heading, you’d have a blurb about β€œhow waterproof watches work”, and so on. Basically, you use these headings to distinguish between different parts of your content. It helps Google find what your post is about, and helps viewers skim the content to find what they really need. Use them, or your site will suffer.Β 

Pro Tip: Format the header tags into a table of contents like the one I have above, or the ones you see on Wikipedia. This helps markup the data for Google to offer “jumps” to specific pieces of content that users want to see, and also has some ranking benefit.

Bold Tags

Some SEO’s swear by the notion that they believe bold tags will increase their rankings. By thinking so, they go ahead and bold their keyword, they italicize it, all to no effort. There has been no significant proofΒ by anyone that bolding keywords actually increases rankings. If anything, when people randomly bold keywords, instead of action words, it turns the audience away from what the real meaning of what the piece is about.

Let’s look at an example –

Romance has always been an issue for me. Every day I’d read romance self help books so I could learn how to be a proper lover and find a girlfriend. Sadly, although I’d read and read, I never found the perfect book, until now. This book changed my life forever, and I think it would change your life too. If you want to stop being a loser like me, paging through thousands of useless pages with no end in sight, check out this book. It will change your life, and it changed mine.

One bit of that bold text would probably increase conversions, and one bit would probably lower it. Use bold tags to emphasize words, and that’s it. Same goes for italicizing and strong tags. Don’t think of it as an SEO factor, think of it as a factor that helps your audience understand your content better.

P.S. That example has nothing to do with me, it was just an unpublished paragraph from one of my affiliate projects. Inb4 the trolls show-up.

Image Optimization

A vast majority of people think that image optimization doesn’t matter at all when it comes to SEO, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Optimizing your images is one of the easiest things you can do, especially in WordPress, and it will not only help optimize your page, but it will help you to bring in image traffic from Google Images. It takes an extra five seconds, why not do it?

Doing this in WordPress is ridiculously simple, and doing it in HTML is no big deal either. Simply slap on an <img alt=”WORD HERE”/> tag, and you’re all set.

Why Would I Optimize Images?

When Google’s going through your post, studying the code and the wordings, they don’t physically see the image. You might be able to see it with your own two eyes, but their bot has no way of telling what the image is. This is what the alt tag is for. By classifying the image as β€œa ladybug in a glass of water”, you’re telling them exactly what it is.

If the image file name was β€œbug3”, or even worse β€œKodakFZ41” (the name of a camera), there’s no telling what that image is.

By adding the alternate text, Google knows what the image is, and there’s more chance it will be found. This is a no-brainer. Just do it!

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a HOT topic amongst SEOs right now, and always has been. It might be the most debated topic in the field of SEO (other than black vs white), and for good reason.

Back in the glory days of SEO, you could keyword stuff articles with over 5% keyword density, and they’d rank. Do that now, and you’ll likely run straight into a sandbox. Now, many people argue about what the β€œright” keyword density is for an article, and if I’m being honest, I’d say this.

Google Doesn’t Care.

As long as you aren’t sticking out like a sore thumb with crazy keyword density (over 3%), and you aren’t avoiding your main keyword like the plague, Google isn’t going to change much at all. If you have your main keyword included with a 0.7% density, and your competitor has 1.1%, I honestly don’t believe much changes at all. Other folks have come forth with this belief too, and I think the question can be laid to rest. One thing you DO have to avoid is keyword stuffing on your page when you don’t even realize it.

Let’s say your main keyword for your site is β€œgold watches”. So you have the keyword β€œgold watches” a few times in your article, once in the title, once in the URL, and you have three category pages β€œcheap gold watches”, β€œexpensive gold watches”, and β€œwaterproof gold watches”. To add on top of this, you have a β€œrecent posts” widget in the sidebar that showcases five of your latest articles, all about gold watches. This means your actual keyword density is going to be killer. You need to watch out for other uses of the main keyword on your page.

What Yoast says in the field at the bottom of your page is true for the content you write, not the rest of the page. Make sure you analyze your content from top to bottom to get a true feel for your keyword density. I’ve made this mistake before (over optimizing), and so has everyone else. Don’t let it happen to you – avoid sidebar widgets that keyword stuff every page. Avoid pages that include your main keyword on every page. When in doubt, check your posts with this tool to check the real density. What you find may be shocking.

Latent Semantic Analysis

Earlier we talked about how keyword density doesn’t matter as much in modern day SEO. Of course, including the keyword once or twice is going to be a benefit, but overstuffing the keyword isn’t going to do you any good. By utilizingΒ latent semantic analysis, we can include different variations of our keyword, and Google will still know what we’re talking about. It’s thinking PAST the keyword you’re going for. For example, people might search for “lemon cleanse”, but they’re also thinking about things like “cleanse with lemons”, “lemon diet”, and more.

Explaining this in words can be difficult. I wasn’t able to find much video content on the subject at hand, but did find this short video that explains it if you can get past the cheesiness of the video:


Latent semantic analysis is something every SEO is using, and if you keep it in mind when hiring writers, you’ll rank for a lot of different variations of your keyword, and will even hit a bunch of different long tails you never would have imagined. Just tell the writers to freely insert “variations” of the keyword and to write without having to include your main keyword a bunch of times.

To be short – write things naturally and don’t focus on the keyword too much, and you’d be surprised that you’ll actually rank for a lot of different keywords fairly easily with on-page SEO. Your competition will have their sights narrowed down onto one keyword – you’ll be focused on every variation that exists. This is what looks natural, not including your main keyword 37 times in a 3000 word post.

Site Speed

This is another thing many website owners and SEO’s look over. Your site speed is crucial, not only to your website’s visitors, but to Google as well. As you’ll see in a minute, Google doesn’t factor in your bounce rate when deciding to rank your website, but it does help your total traffic numbers. It would make no sense if you went through the process of ranking a site, only to lose the customer to your site’s slow speed. Site speed is important, and has been for a while. If you still aren’t convinced, here’s a study from MozΒ (Yes, Moz) they did three years ago that talks about speed. It is still very relevant today.

Getting your website’s speed up is where things get tricky though. How can you fix a slow website? There are a few suggestions I have, but I’m going to link to a huge guide on improving your website’s speed that you should check out if you still can’t get things fixed.

Make sure you’re using a decent hosting provider before you do anything. If your hosting is costing you .50c a month, chances are you’re not going to get your speed up to anything worth smiling about. Shared hosting is fine, but I prefer using something a bit better. For starters, as long as your shared hosting loads every time, and loads fairly quickly, you’ll be fine.

Note: If your website is geolocated (e.g. targeting UK customers) then make sure you’re hosting in the same country as well.

The first thing you should look at is your website as a whole. Are you using a bulky, image-filled, adsense-supported WP magazine theme that takes a year to load? You likely won’t get your load time down under one second unless you minify everything, which can take ages. I would suggest either opting to use WP Super Cache or W3 total cache. Just by installing every plugin and playing around a bit you’ll be able to speed your website up significantly.

At this point check your website speed. You can do so by using Pingdom’s website speed test. Your ultimate goal is to get your load speed under a second. This will keep viewers on your site so they aren’t clicking the back button after they have to wait for 4-5 seconds. Testing my sitesΒ speed shows that I have a fairly decent load time –

speed

For affiliate sites however, the goal is always to be under a second. The only major thing I can talk about is tidying up your theme and using a caching plugin. I’ll hand it over to Kinsta’s guide on speed optimization if you want to go further down the rabbit hole, which I would highly suggest you do.

Bounce Rate

We aren’t going to talk about bounce rate for very long. It’s that thing that haunts PPC advertisers, and it should haunt you if you’re an SEO too. Your bounce rate means your website is getting found, but people aren’t visiting any other pages on your site. You want user engagement to be high, so attempting to get a low bounce rate is crucial. It has not been proven that your bounce rate actually impacts your search engine rankings, but it will affect your total traffic numbers.

Try to use lots of interlinking in your content to get people to visit other pages. Mention other articles in your posts as often as possible as long as they’re relevant. Neil Patel over at Quicksprout is great at doing this, and I’m sure his bounce rate is low as a result of his great interlinking.

Length of Content

This didn’t play a huge factor a few years ago, but the length and quality of your content is now key when trying to rank a site. A few years ago you’d see these β€œhuge” 1,000 word posts that affiliate sites would use. Now those posts are more like 5,000 to 10,000 words. Google has won – people now want to provide actual value. They aren’t skimping on the quality if they know the payday is imminent.

Having longer content allows you to include more heading tags, it allows you to include more long-tail search terms, and it allows you to really sell the potential visitor your idea or product. Check out any major Google result and you’ll find that the pages that provide the most value will end up ranking near the top. This is one of the reasons Wikipedia always ranks so highly for major search terms. Long content ranks, and if you truly want to rank for a keyword, be sure to go with long content at first.

Don’t skimp on it right away – the long content will be easier to rank, and will provide your audience with more value (apparently). It’s a win-win.

URL Optimization

If possible, try to include your main keyword in your URL. It helps to tell Google what your page is about (as you can see we’re giving Google a lot of information with our OnPage SEO), and helps the audience decide whether or not your link is relevant. You’ll notice every single big SEO site does this. I do this, Neil Patel does this, and big affiliate sites are doing this. To set this up, it couldn’t be simpler.

How to Optimize Your URLs in WordPress:

Navigate over to settings -> permalinks. From here, you’ll want to select β€œpost name”. Your permalinks page should look like this now:

Screenshot_9

WordPress will now automatically make your post title your URL as well. We’re not done yet though. Sometimes our URLs can get a little bit strange, let’s take this URL for example: http://charlesfloate.com/silo-structure-seo . As you can see, the title of the post isn’t β€œsilo structure SEO”, but that’s the main keyword I’m going after, so that’s what the URL is optimized for. You can eliminate words like β€œfor” from the URL when you’re making your WordPress post like so:

Original post:

Screenshot_10

Edit the yellow area by clicking β€œedit” or double-clicking the yellow words and remove the filler word. In our case, that word is β€œfor”. After doing this, your URL will be properly optimized for Google and for your website viewers. We’re almost done, but we have a few more things left to talk about.

Meta Description Optimization

Your meta description is what’s going to show up in Google when people see your website in the search results. You want to use your description to attempt to get visitors to click on your link, and also if possible, want to include your main keyword in the meta description. I’m going to show you two examples from my own site. One meta description is done WRONG (a shock right?), and the other is done RIGHT.

Let’s look at a bad meta description I’ve done –

Screenshot_11

To be honest, I wasn’t writing this post to be optimized in search engines, it was just meant for my blog. You can see how I didn’t even write a meta description for this post! Many people avoid doing it thinking that it doesn’t help, but in my personal experience, I’ve noticed it helps with conversions, and not so much with SEO itself.

Here’s an example of a meta description done right –

Screenshot_13

As you can see here, I use the meta description to try to increase my click-through rate. My target audience areΒ newbies that are using SAPE for the first time, and so in the description, I talk about the basics like registering, filtering, and buying. Short and sweet typically works better than trying to fill up the entire 160 characters, but that’s just what I’ve found. If you’re going to go through the trouble of writing long content, building links, and optimizing your site for speed, why not spend the extra one minute to write a proper meta description?

Interlinking (aka Internal Linking)

Interlinking is the last thing I’m going to talk about in this OnPage SEO guide, and it’s undoubtedly one of the most important things to do. If you’re not interlinking, you’re missing out on rankings, usability, and most importantly, more engagement and traffic. You need to be interlinking. It’s not something you can avoid.

Upgrade Your SEO Game: Learn how I use Silo Structure for effective Interlinking.

By interlinking between different pages on your site, you’re going to help pass authority and link juice between articles. Imagine a huge spider web where each article was the result of you spinning more web and reaching out to a different topic.

Here are a few tips you should follow when interlinking on your site –

#1: Is the Link Relevant?

Make sure that the page you’re linking to is relevant to the topic at hand. Going back to the example of watches, let’s say you have an article on the best waterproof watches, and then you have an article on how to keep normal watches safe from water. Perhaps you’d interlink the best waterproof watches article in your other post, saying that if people don’t want to go through the trouble of keeping their watch safe, that they can check out waterproof watches on your site. Make sure that the link is relevant, and people will click it. This helps to lower your bounce rate, and gets you more engagement in the long-term.

#2: Don’t Drive Away from the Main Point

If your article is about gold watches, your general audience is going to be people looking for gold watches. Don’t go out of your way to sell them on silver watches. Don’t sacrifice conversions for interlinking! Look into the buyer’s mind. If they came to your page looking for a gold watch, and suddenly you start talking about how silver watches are cheaper, still look great, and then drop a link to a silver watch, you’re going to lose some of your target audience. Perhaps they’ll buy a silver watch from you, but at this point you have them second-guessing. Don’t drive away from the main point when interlinking.

#3: Too Many Links?

As long as your page is resourceful enough, I wouldn’t say there’s ever a point where you can use too many links. Obviously use common sense, but as I mentioned earlier, you want to use long content. Long content is going to be full of links to other pages on your site, especially if the topic at hand is relevant to the rest of your site. If you run a resourceful website and by the end of your long content, people have sixteen tabs open to read tons of other content, it’s a good thing! They trust you, and want to read more of the content on your site. Don’t be afraid of using too many internal links.

#4: Utilize Anchor Text

This is a no-brainer, but make sure you’re using anchor text when linking out to your pages. Tell the audience what that page is about, and how it can benefit them by going to it. This helps not only your audience, but Google as well.

Some Extra Advice

Though there are specific factors you can make adjustments to, there is also some extra parts of OnPage optimization that you should know about, even though some may not have any direct impact on your rankings.

Google Panda, The Core OnPage Algo

Panda is the algorithm that (apparently) is AI/Machine learning based. It uses various algorithms to calculate the quality of content on a page, and uses microdata (such as schema, alt tags and markup) to understand what a piece of content is, or is saying.

In early 2016, Google made the change and updated Panda into the core algorithm, they quickly reverted the change just to add it back in a few weeks later due to problems with it. This means that there is no longer any “major panda updates” – They’re all consolidated into a “core” or “quality” update, as Google now calls them.

As long as your content is well structured, you don’t really need to worry about Panda. I suggest learning about formatted data to better understand it though:

Panda also makes auto-generated content and spun content a lot more difficult to adequately use. Though theoretically, you could just use a spinner like WordAi and manually edit the articles to be of a higher standard.

Social OnPage (OpenGraph, Twitter Cards etc)

Though Google won’t index the code for this, most of the big social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc) have code markup to read and convert a page into a more share-able asset.

As an example, Facebook has the “OpenGraph” which allows you to customize a ton of different things, depending on the settings you input. You can choose the content type, so Facebook can recognize what type of content a page is: Video, Article, Business, Person, Place, Movie and so on.. And then customize the title, description and various other settings (mainly related to either audio, video or a Facebook App – Which can be linked into your page being shared).

I personally use a premium plugin calledΒ WP Social SEO Pro to edit my social formatted settingsΒ on this blog, but there are various alternatives out there too.

This means the meta title/description you optimize for the SERPs can be changed when used to share on social networks – This is extremely beneficial when it comes to optimizing a page in Google, in comparison to a user seeing it shared on social media. No direct ranking correlations, but better for CRO/Marketing purposes.

Topical SEO & Silo Structure

I’ve already covered both topical SEO and silo structureΒ in previous posts, so I won’t be going into extensive detail here.. but I highly recommend you read through both of these posts.

OnPage Optimization Tools

There are a variety of tools out there to help you drastically improve your OnPage SEO, or just generally speed up time.

Auditing Tools

As I mentioned towards the top of this post, it can be a real pain to manually go through a site and make OnPage updates. Thankful for you, there are a ton of tools out there that can generate reports for you that allow you to make changes extremely quickly.

Meta ForensicsΒ 

By far my favourite tool on the market, it is a browser based audittor that generates reports in a matter of minutes for a very fair price. It’s an input and generate type system, and the site features some example reports for you to see what kind of data you’re paying for.

It’s my favourite tool due to the combination of simplicity, speed and accuracy.

Screaming Frog

You get upto 500 URLs on the free app, but have to pay Β£99 for the full tool – Not nearly as clean as MF, but it is desktop based and covers all the basic spots such as 404s, titles, descriptions etc.. but with no real analysis – You have to do manual analysis yourself.

DeepCrawl

The most comprehensive tool on the market, but it is enterprise level so comes at a cost. You’ll quickly end up spending hundreds of dollars (if not more) if you have clients/sites with any significant number of pages – 100k URLs/month is $79. I have 1 client with that many alone.

DC is consulted on by tons of the best SEOs in the world, and is consistently updated. It also runs in the cloud, so is extremely fast even with massive size sites.

Keyword Research

Though in the past I have stated that I think almost all keyword research tools are a load of sh*t, there are uses for some tools out there. I have already done a post on how to do keyword research here, I suggest you follow this for a way to efficiently use these tools.

SEMRushΒ 

Though I think Ahrefs has more data, SEMRush was built for this and has more countries available – It’s a great way to find keywords your competing pages are ranking for.

Ahrefs Positions Explorer

Exactly the same as Ahrefs, just has a bit more data and isn’t as formatted as prettily.

Conclusion

To conclude this guide, I just want to make sure I get one main point across, if it’s the only thing you learn from this entire guide. Make your website user-friendly, and it will be Google friendly too. All of the things mentioned above not only help Google, but will help the users of your website as well. Write your content for humans, don’t write it for search engines. Keep in mind that the goal of your site is to make money, not just bring in search traffic – Which is what a lot of SEOs forget about.. Even black hats.

Would you rather have 10,000 visitors where one person buys your product, or 100 visitors where five people buy your product?

If you follow every step in this post, you’re not only going to have a kick-ass site that is well-optimized, loads fast, and increases your conversions, but you’re going to have a resource that people want to share. Remember that this process takes serious time, and rarely anybody ever has everything β€œperfect” with their OnPage SEO. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Hopefully you guys (and girls) enjoyed this guide. Don’t forget to drop a comment and subscribe to my newsletter below to get a 7 day FREE SEO course.

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Madhushalini
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Madhushalini

Great Thanks for the advice. I will start updating my website more regularly. Short, simple and crispy information…Cool! I think that measurement of SEO activities is very important things – it shows you the proper way. This is what we are all in the process of doing. Total SEO revamp of our web design website.

I think this information will help me to improve the SEO of my blog. Simple and to the point. SEO = Quality content, competitive & realistic KW or key phrases, optimize your links and avoid spamming – simply the key to getting good rankings. Keeping the content fresh is really key. Also remembering to gain inbound links for specific pages and articles can really help.

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3 years ago
Cobus
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Cobus

Great to the point advice, thank you Charles…

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1 year ago
Adam
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Adam

Excellent post my friend. What do you make of this patent? http://www.google.com/patents/US6763148

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

It’s definitely more for image search, unlikely to affect the current SERPs.

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3 years ago
Riley
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Riley

As always, good stuff Charles! Just point of clarification, are you still using 10k-15k words on every page? From what I have seen it doesn’t need that much, but I also only work in local non-popular SEO industries (aka not law).

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

That was just an example, and for a competitive niche – Local or lower competition niche SERPs don’t need anywhere near that πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Jess
Guest
Jess

Charles, do you think that having too many words on page could hurt your SEO efforts?

For example, if you’re in a local niche and your top competitors all have less than 500 words on page and you have 2,500+ words, do you think would that negatively impact your rankings?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

I think it’d have quite the opposite effect πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Ryan Smith
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Ryan Smith

Great post Charles! I agree that site speed is a killer to get right. I’ve literally been spending the last 2 days looking at ways to speed my site up but finally managed to get it down from 6-8 seconds down to around 2 seconds.

It’s the sum of the smaller parts that makes everything happen.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Exactly, and that’s an awesome time saving man! I spent a while on this blog (and the server) and it’s pretty rapid now ^.^

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3 years ago
sohaib
Guest
sohaib

great guide man. I purchased your parasite seo guide last week. Working on it these days. If I succeed at it, I’ll surely ping you. Thanks mate.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Awesome man, glad you’re enjoying it ^.^

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3 years ago
Chris Varnom
Guest
Chris Varnom

Hey Charles. Awesome tutorial. I have been looking for something like this for a while.

Thanks for pulling all this together. I will get to work implementing your guidance.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

No problem Chris, glad you enjoyed it πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Sian
Guest
Sian

Do I still need to buy your on page book after reading this?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

The OnPage book helps take WP sites to the next level, I’ll show you exactly how I do things in WP AND how to speed up a site with 5 minutes work.

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3 years ago
tony
Guest
tony

The alt text is there for the purposes of informing the sightless. Think of it that way.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Boom! Great find, exactly πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Jason
Guest
Jason

What is your opinion on url structure with duplicate keywords in it? For example:

http://www.coloredpen.com/red-pens
http://www.coloredpens.com/red-pen

I’ve heard never to duplicate a keyword in the url, but I’m not sure if this is meant for a keyword you are going after or any keyword?

Above I have both singular and plural of the keyword pen.

Is there anything wrong with the above if I was to be going after related keywords including pen and pens?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

I don’t see why there would be anything wrong with that, I’ve seen plenty of sites ranking with duplicate keywords..

There’s a lot of brands who have a keyword in their name and an online shop with categories around those keywords too, they rank perfectly fine.

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3 years ago
Hafis
Guest
Hafis

Great tips, thanks.

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3 years ago
Justin Philip
Guest
Justin Philip

A perfect post on on-page seo dude. Always loves your way of writing lucid and to the point. Agree with all the points you mentioned. Can i know which wp plugin you use for index list of content right in this post aka Table of contents?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

It’s called Table of Contents Plus πŸ™‚ Best thing about it? It’s Free! ^^

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3 years ago
rahul
Guest
rahul

such an excellent guide brother
a newbie like me will follow every step told by you

loved the part in which you discussed LSI

regards,
Rahul

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Glad you enjoyed it dude πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Richard
Guest
Richard

Great article Charles! I agree 100% about site speed, we`ve just re-launched our agency site and are hitting 100/100 pagespeed scores, few more tweaks across the entire site and we should hopefully have site-wide pagespeed scores of 100/100!

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Nice going man! I really need to dedicate some more time to this site’s speed, but it’s a pain in the ass haha, G will definitely be using speed as a ranking factor in the future though, and it does (kinda) already.

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3 years ago
Michael
Guest
Michael

Mr Floate,

Very nice article as usual and very well written. Just like to touch on the section regarding bounce rates.

As someone who has done PPC (Google AdWords) in competitive industries, bounce rates in my opinion are not a metric for PPC. I don’t however have any data for SEO analysis, although the advice I think you give could be solid for SEO but like I said I don’t have the data to support it.

My thoughts and experience are for example if you are desperately looking for a loan and you click on a paid ad offering the lowest rates and easy acceptance on the landing page with a simple form to complete or a phone number are you really going to scout around the site looking at its TOS etc. and interlinking pages? I think not. And every major lender does this. They don’t care about bounce rate, they care about conversions. Filling in the form or phoning up is all they want. Do Google care about this and about how long they have been on the site? In my experience I don’t think they do. They don’t give jack S##T. All they look at is your budget and spend and then you’re CTR. Your control over your budget and CTR is what makes a PPC campaign profitable for you and not Google in my experience.

I am not an expert in bounce rates but in terms of PPC I have never been affected as people spend just enough time to fill in the form or call which is maybe less than a minute or so if they call the number. So time spent on site or looking at other pages on the site makes the bounce rate look horrendous in Google Analytic’s. Which is why I don’t look at it as a metric.

Keep up the good work bud. Learning a lot from you.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

I meant more in terms of the value of PPC, if you spend $1,000 and 95% of the people bounce back, you’ve more than likely just wasted a large portion of that $1,000 πŸ™‚

If you fill out the form, then it normally wouldn’t be a bounce anyway, as it’s an entry interaction on the page OR the page re-directs to a thank you/complete page.

It’s not that Google care, I was just stating as a NORMALITY that it’d effect your PPC campaigns if you had high bounce rates due to the expenditure.

Glad you’re enjoying the content πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Michael
Guest
Michael

Mr Floate,

Many thanks just to add in some things and please don’t think I am being contentious! I certainly do not intend that or any disrespect to you. As I said, I greatly admire your work

Your points below:-

I meant more in terms of the value of PPC, if you spend $1,000 and 95% of the people bounce back, you’ve more than likely just wasted a large portion of that $1,000 πŸ™‚

Ha Ha Ha…If that happens then you shouldn’t be running a PPC campaign! ANYWHERE! Especially not Google AdWords! You may as well burn it or send me the money! You can do so here (LINK)! Just kidding!

If you fill out the form, then it normally wouldn’t be a bounce anyway, as it’s an entry interaction on the page OR the page re-directs to a thank you/complete page.

Yep agreed but I have clients in industries that don’t fill out a form. Just use the contact number that is on the landing page. So no thank you page element, bounce rates are crap but they still rank.

It’s not that Google care, I was just stating as a NORMALITY that it’d effect your PPC campaigns if you had high bounce rates due to the expenditure.

Not sure what you mean by this? Can you expand at some point in the future? My understanding is the big G will happily take your money on PPC till it becomes uneconomical for them to do so. Thus serving ads with better CTR for them rather than crappy ads no one clicks on despite the budget and the ad spend. So if they want to spend G will keep taking the money until the advertiser see’s sense and drops out the game due to competition it cannot compete with.

Sorry this could become a completely different thread that has digressed! Apologies for that!

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Use tracking software to stop it being counted as a bounce for the calls ^^

Sure, I still need to work on a proper PPC Guide at some point, haha it’s cool man! πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Ian Harmon
Guest
Ian Harmon

Great post Charles. Good solid actionable info. What’s your take on anchor text for internal links? Do you treat them like inbound links and not over optimize?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

I try to mix up the anchors, but always keep them keyword related – Normally I go with a mixture of exact and longtails across the site, putting exact match links on the highest ranked pages πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Alex
Guest
Alex

Charles, what are your thoughts about geotagging images (exif) on your website, as well as schema ?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Always good to add on, especially if it’s a local site πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Leiif
Guest
Leiif

Thanks for the reminders. I have a site that was deindexed. I suspect it was deindexed because I didn’t have a good htaccess or robots.txt in place and I had but didn’t use a autoblog plugin. I followed most of these tips and provided useful info with most pages being between 1000 and 2000 words. Could you do a couple of posts. One about proper htaccess and robots.txt and another on getting a site reindexed?

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Neither of those 2 things would seemingly affect your site being indexed or deindexed though.. Unless you blocked GoogleBot from viewing your site.

You get deindexed for using techniques that Google classes as breaking the webmaster guidelines.

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3 years ago
Danijel
Guest
Danijel

Hello Charles! I have a question. As You wrote in the article: “Note: If your website is geolocated (e.g. targeting UK customers) then make sure you’re hosting in the same country as well”. I have a site geotargeting a English language countries, mostly the US so I want to Know does it affect my seo and rankiongs if my server is LOACTED in Croatia? Should I get a US hosting?! What is Your opinion!
Keep on! aLL THE BE

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

It likely won’t affect it, but it’s always a good idea to have the server in the country you’re targeting, as it just adds to the overall trust.

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3 years ago
Alex
Guest
Alex

@Charles – fantastic post. Every now and then you find these great SEO’s blogs and you get lost in them. It’s been 4 hours and I’m still reading your post. Far too many tabs open! (Had a similar thing when I first found viperchill.com!)

I know you say big content is better but I found I had to break up my large content.
http://lab41.co/growth-strategy/

Instead of 1 very, very long article that was way too slow too load due to it’s size, it’s now split up over 9. (which was a pain to do!)

So there definitely is a trade-off between length and overwhelming people!

Keep up the good work.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Interesting idea, it could pay off in terms of ranking for more longtail keywords, but if you want to go after the big boys it works a lot better to have one, insane piece. I have seen what you’ve done work very well for sites like DigitalMarketer ( http://www.digitalmarketer.com/6-million/ ) as well though.

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3 years ago
diamond sharma
Guest
diamond sharma

I must say i have been followimg many seo blogs from quite a long time and have learnt alot about on page seo(yeah all the points you mentioned) but the way u write this article i like a spoon feeding for a noobie.
Cheers bro
Loved the article

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3 years ago
Rahul Ashok
Guest
Rahul Ashok

Hey Charles,

That was an excellent take from your end on on-page SEO. I had doubts regarding the keyword density, but now I am confident enough to maintain the naturality of content by including keyword variation.

Thanks for such a deep post!

~ Rahul

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Thanks Rahul πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Shane
Guest
Shane

Damn Charles, I learn more from your free content then paid “memberships” and shiny objects bravo to you.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Thanks Shane πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Sagar
Guest
Sagar

Hey Charles What do you think about the maximum number of h1, h2 and h3 tags we should use in a page. I personally think it depends on the content and there is not maximum number that should be used.

But many SEOs talk on this. What’s your opinion on this?

PS. Great Article Man.. Keep doing the awesome job!

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

I don’t think they matter much, I’ve used 40+ in some of my guides on this site and they rank fantastically.

Obviously, you shouldn’t be putting a H2 every 50 words, but it’s good for sectioning content properly.

Thanks! ^.^

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3 years ago
Efrain Avelar
Guest
Efrain Avelar

Very impressive post Charles your killing it here nothing but good content very informative to the point talk about bounce rate like i said your killing it.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Thanks man! Glad you’re enjoying it all πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Brian Driscoll
Guest
Brian Driscoll

Great post Charles! Just wrote a huge guide and came here to make sure I am using the latest methods for on-page SEO. Just saw a blog today that said, “meta descriptions are important for telling Google…” *Scoff!

I’m not an SEO pro (yet), but isn’t that complete BS? Anyways, thanks for always using the latest research and providing a place to get relevant information for the times.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

Yup, meta data overall plays like a 2% factor in comparison to everything else.. You have to mould everything to work together with OnPage, there’s no 1 factor alone πŸ™‚

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3 years ago
Imer Imran
Guest
Imer Imran

Hi Charles
Thank you for a really good post. One question, I’m not sure whether the domain name is considered as OnPage SEO or not, but is (-) symbol in the domain name will make an effect for ranking, for example, domainname.com, and domain-name.com.

Imer

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

The domain name can be considered as a ranking factor, but generally more for lower volume keywords.

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3 years ago
Ellen Watson
Guest
Ellen Watson

Charles, could you create a guide on how to do Facebook marketing for newbies? Would really appreciate it. Thanks.

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

It is in the works, when I finally get time to do it!

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3 years ago
Chris
Guest
Chris

A work colleague sent me this link, because I am having some issues with On-page SEO. Can I ask you 2 questions? 1) I am building a national PPL site which already has 20 different pages in 20 different cities and towns ranking. So, I am basically keep adding new pages for more cities to it. Recently, I have been optimizing 2 new pages, did the On-page SEO to my best knowledge, and then indexed them. What happened is, my 2 pages had all main keywords ranked in position 10-20 within 48 hours which is good. But 4 days later, ALL my keyword rankings dropped to position 100+ and never came back up. If you dont mind me asking, but how do you explain this behavior? Did I over-optimise my keywords? Thanks!

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3 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

It’s the Google dance, or the freshness algo.. As soon as a new page is created, Google jump it up (before they can properly analyze it etc) and then they’ll put it at it’s true position a few hours or days later.

Are you using duplicate content as well?

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3 years ago
OfSuf
Guest
OfSuf

Hi Charles, great tutorial! I wondering if I could ask you a question. I have a website that the Pingdom measured loads in 9 secs, which is bad. I don’t have the time to optimize the site on my own. What trusted service can I use to get the speed up for my site? Thanks.

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2 years ago
Charles Floate
Author
Charles Floate

PBN Butler do WordPress speed optimization for like $199 I think πŸ™‚

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2 years ago
Stephen
Guest
Stephen

Thanks for writing an easily understandable post. I love the “jump” table of contents. I use this too. Super effective. Looking forward to the next post.

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2 years ago
satyendra sharma
Guest
satyendra sharma

Nice and valuable information. thanks for sharing with us.

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5 months ago
ABOUT ME
Charles Floate
I'm a British SEO consultant specializing in link building. I run an E-Commerce SEO Agency & a small affiliate site empire. This is my blog, where I cover online marketing strategies, tutorials, news and do product reviews.

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