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On-Page SEO: Tyton's Guide to 10x Better Rankings
Table of Contents (hide) What is on-page SEO? Why use on-page SEO? On-page SEO ranking factors Content Meta tags Title tags Meta descriptions Canonical URLs URLs Image Optimization Images and user experience Image filenames Title attribute Alt text Image size Heading tags Structured data What is schema What is schema.org What are rich snippets Adding structured data Testing structured data Website Structure HTTPS/SSL Responsive design Internal linking Why use internal linking Building content Using anchor text Do follow links Deep linking Website speed Slow loading files Cacheing Content delivery network (cdn) LSI keywords
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On-page SEO tools
On-Page SEO is one of the most over-looked search engine marketing techniques there is. I truly believe this is because on-page SEO requires constant maintenance and updating to keep your website attractive to the search engines. Many webmaster believe that to have good SEO, you have to buy a ton of links... But this isn't true! If you adhere to the latest on-page SEO techniques, your website can rank with the best of them.
In this guide, we are going to get in-depth with all the latest on-page SEO factors and how to implement them on your website to increase your rankings to the first page of Google.
So what exactly is on-page SEO? It's the act of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines resulting in more (free) traffic. On-page refers the content of the page, as well as the HTML or source code.
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The better a web page is optimized for on page SEO, the better its chances are at ranking for certain keywords.
But why do you need on-page SEO? If you want to grow your website or business then having optimized web pages is a necessity. Google is very picky about the results it shows to its users and if your website doesn't adhere to best practices, it may get lost in the abyss of the SERPs (search engine results pages). Having a website that adheres to on-page SEO best practices increases its traffic from Google and other search engines resulting in high converting, free traffic. Investing in SEO is one of the best investments you can make for a website (assuming you hire the right agency).
So now that you know how important on-page SEO is, lets look at the on-page factors Google looks at when ranking a website.
On-Page SEO Ranking Factors There are mulitple on-page factors that affect search engines rankings. They are:
Content Content is King...Still! The content on a web page is critical to ranking on the first page of Google. Here are some popular types of content:
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Text Images Videos Diagrams Graphs Podcasts Case studies Infographics Creating these types of content around your niche can create a big boost in your rankings as well as referral traffic. People tend to share good content, creating high quality backlinks and moving your website up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Here is a great infographic from Moz about the value of content on your web pages.
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Tyton Media™ Full Service As you canWeb seeSolutions there are https://www.tytonmedia.com
phenomenal benefits to creating high quality long form content.
Good content not only means high quality articles and images but well structured code and well formatted meta tags.
Meta Tags Meta tags (or meta data) are small snippets of code that are placed in the
TL;DR: Every web page should have a unique meta description Great meta descriptions can increase CTR in the SERPs Used for social sharing sites Should be 150-160 characters in length
Canonical URLs I know this one is hard to say.. but its very necessary to add this meta tag to all of your web pages. The canonical URL is a link element that tells search engines the preferred version (or URL) of a certain web page so you can avoid duplicate content issues. This meta tag should be added in the of your web pages and contain the correct URL version to use. Canonical URLs can help search engines decipher the right web page to use for: E-commerce sites with product variants Blogs with paging Large websites with possible duplicate content issues Websites with both HTTP and HTTPS versions Websites that use query strings For examples sake, lets look at the following URLs: http://www.tytonmedia.com/members/cart.php?language=english
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http://www.tytonmedia.com/members/cart.php?language=french http://www.tytonmedia.com/members/cart.php?language=german All of these URLs are seen as different by search engines because it's the same web page (cart.php) with different settings based on the URLs query string. But how do you know which URL version is the best to use? Just pick the one you think is most important or the version that has the most backlinks and search engines will merge these versions into one (in the search engines perspective). Adding Canonical URLs to your website is very straight forward for any HTML novice or pro. If you use Wordpress, setting the canonical URL is super easy. Download the Yoast SEO Plugin and go to the post you want to add a canonical URL to. Go to the bottom where the Yoast SEO settings are and click the gear icon to see the settings. Enter your preferred canonical URL into the field and you are all set!
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Note that ifWeb youSolutions leave this https://www.tytonmedia.com
field blank, the plugin will use the permalink as the canonical URL.
To add canonical URLs to normal HTML web pages simply use the code example below, enter in your URL and place it in the of your web page. Code:
TL;DR: Tells search engines the preferred URL for a web page Add in the section of your HTML Use Yoast SEO Plugin to add canonicals to Wordpress easily
URL The URL if your web pages has a strong influence on your rankings in search engines. Matt Cutts says the first 3-5 words in a URL are the most important and are given more weight so keep your URLs short, sweet and descriptive. We use our main keyword in the URL and sometimes add in 1 or 2 more words depending on the article. Having your main keyword in the URL can also increase the CTR of your pages because like the meta description, URLs with matching search keywords will be highlighted in the SERPs.
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Here is a great infographic by Moz about the anatomy of a URL:
This infographic is a great visual representation of a good URL structure. Each bucket (words in between the /) gets more and more specific and should mimic the layout of your content. When creating your URLs, there are a number of things you want to adhere to: Case sensitivity: Watch out for URLs with different cases. Try and be consistent whether its all lower case or camel case. Use hyphens: Hyphens are the recommend separator for keywords. Don't stuff keywords: Stuffing a ton of keywords in your URL will hurt your rankings more than help them. Short the Better: Shorter URLs provide a better user experience and more weight. Dynamic Parameters: Remove any dynamic parameters like hashes and query strings Match Page Title: Use the main keywords of your page title to create a short/keyword rich URL. Remove Stop Words: When creating your URL, remove any stop words like and, or, but, of, the, a, etc. Punctuation: Take them out of your URLs! Try and use only alphanumeric characters.
TL;DR: Shorter URL > Longer URL first 3-5 words on a URL carry the most weight Use keywords in URLs Remove stop words and punctuation
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Image Optimization Based on a study by Raven Tools, 78% of all on-page SEO issues are related to images. With that kind of high percentage, it's likely that with a little image optimization you can fly by your competitors in the search engines. Here are some tips to optimize your images for SEO:
Images and User Experience Using images that relate to the content is important for a better user experience (which increases SEO). If your article or post is about dogs then you shouldn't have pictures of cats on the page. Images should be good quality, un-pixelated and large enough to be visible across all devices. The best type of images to use are images you create yourself... Try and stay away from free stock photo sites as they are often used by hundreds of other people. Using images on your website can increase the user experience by separating content, creating a visual appeal and providing a smooth transition from one section to another. Looking at the images below, which piece of content do you think looks better?
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This example shows how a web page should have images to break up content and provide a visual release from text blocks resulting in longer visit duration and increased rankings.
TL;DR: Images boost user experience increasing time on page and rankings Use images to break up text content Images should be related to the content The best images are ones you make yourself
Filename The naming convention of your files is very important when optimizing your images. Your filename should include descriptive, content rich keywords about the image itself. Google even says that: The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image.
So make sure that every image you upload has a keyword focused description that explains the image and content. This is our main image for this post that has the main post title separated by hyphens (I always use the post title as the main image filename). Note: Google prefers dashes/hyphens instead of underscores according to Matt Cutts. Changing the filename can be as easy as right clicking on the image and choosing rename.
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Webif Solutions Alternatively, you use Photoshop https://www.tytonmedia.com
or another image editor, you can just save your images with the right filename so you don't have to change them later. Code:
TL;DR: Every image should have a descriptive filename that explains the image Use dashes instead of underscores or spaces for filenames Use a few keywords of your page in filenames
Title Attribute The title attribute does not have any potential SEO benefits but it provides a good user experience by providing a text description of a image when you hover over it. For maximum rankings increases, all of your image should include the title tag.
If you are using Wordpress then the title attribute will be automatically populated with the name of the image (minus the image extension).
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Make sureWeb youSolutions remove the https://www.tytonmedia.com
hyphens or dashes from the Title field for a more friendly description.
Code:
TL;DR: Title attribute does not affect SEO Automatically populated from the filename in Wordpress Shows when you hover over the image Do not use same text as alt text
Alt Text The most important tag on the image element is the alt tag. The alt tag stands for alternative text and is the text description of the image. Search engines use this information to figure out what images are about on web pages since the crawlers are text-based and can't see the images. This is a great opportunity to use your page or post keywords to describe your image. Alt text should be descriptive, concise and to the point but not spammy. Do not stuff a bunch of random keywords in your alt-text or you may get dinged by Google.
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Web A great way to Solutions write alt-text https://www.tytonmedia.com
is to pretend that you are explaining the image to someone who can't
see it.
Code:
TL;DR: Populate Alt Text for every image Alt text should describe the image Don't stuff a bunch of keywords in the alt text
Image Size Image size is also another important on-page SEO factor for images. Creating your images with the lowest file size possibly will help the user experience of your website by allowing your visitors to load images fast without waiting. When someone lands on your website and images don't load, it's likely they will leave fast, which will hurt your time on page and SEO. So how can you make your images load faster?
Crop images to the max length of your content area (for example if your website is 1028px wide, none of your images should be larger in width than 1028px) Reduce the quality of the image enough to reduce file size but keep a good quality photo Use .PNG when possible since they are smaller than JPEGs. Show thumbnails and link to the larger image. You can also use free tools like PunnyPNG to compress your images making them smaller in size.
TL;DR: Crop images to max width of website
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reduce color depth but keep image quality Use .PNG file type when possible Show thumbnails and link to larger image Use a image compressor
Heading Tags HTML heading tags are used (by both users and search engines) to determine a web pages topic or content. These tags are published in the HTML body and range from h1 to h6, h1 being the most important heading and h6 being the least important heading. The
tag is the most important heading tag and should be used on every web page only once. It is often the page or post title and describes the page content to search engines and users. I like to think of h1 tags as chapters of a book that easily allow a reader to scan the content and look for the section they are interested in. Code:
On Page SEO
Meta Tags
Title Tags
How to Use Title Tags
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TL;DR:
tag is critical to all web pages and should be unique on each page. Headings are ordered from most important (h1) to least important (h6). HTML heading tags are used to determine a web pages content
Structured Data Google says, "Structured data refers to kinds of data with a high level of organization, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways." For more detailed information about structured data, check out our structured data for SEO guide.
What is Schema? Schema markup is a code snippet that you add in your HTML web pages to help search engines consume your data and display this data to searchers. Here is an example of the results of including schema on your web page:
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As you can see from the listing, there are a few included rich snippets and they have included both a rating schema and a price schema that give more detail about the business or service. Having this data included in your listing will increase the CTR (click-through rate) of your web pages and boost your rankings.
What is Schema.org? Schema.org is a collaboration project between some of the biggest search engines (as well as other websites) to create a standardized structured markup. Schema.org contains documentation of every schema and available variables for each schema. Some examples of schemas are: Events Organization Local Business Place Product Review Book Movie Recipe
What are rich snippets? Rich snippets are detailed pieces of information added to search engine results to help users with specific queries.
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In this rich snippet, you can see detailed information about this carrot cake recipe like its rating, how long it takes to cook and even how many calories it is. Currently, there are only 7 support rich snippet types: Articles Local Businesses Music Recipes Reviews TV & Movies Videos When building rich snippets be sure to provide as much data as possible so that you create a highly informative result in the search engines.
Adding structured data to your website Adding your structured data to your website can sometimes be a difficult task depending on how many pages your website is. We created a structured data markup generator so you can easily create schemas for your web page.
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Simply choose a schema type and fill in all the fields to generate both JSON-LD and microdata snippets. If you create a JSON-LD snippet, add it in the section of your website.
Testing structured data schemas Once you have successfully added your structured data schemas to your website, you must check if the data is formatted correctly. Google built a structured data testing tool that is great for checking if your structured data is formatted right. Simply enter the URL where you added your structured data and it will show you any errors. Alternatively, you can also look at your google webmaster tools and choose search appearance->structured data in the left column. You can view all structured data on your website and any errors that Google has found.
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Code: { "@context": "http://schema.org/", "type": "Person", "jobTitle": " CEO", "name": "Tyler Horvath", "telephone": "(913) 334-7715", "url" : "http://www.tytonmedia.com" }
TL;DR: Use the structured data generator to build schemas Try the strucutred data testing tool to validate data Manage structured data in google webmaster tools
Site Structure The better your websites structure is, the better chance you have of ranking better in the search engines. How you lay out your website architecture has a big impact on how search engines crawl your site and index it in the results pages. So why does site structure matter? A good website structure will provide a better user experience and reduce your bounce rate which improves dwell time and increases your search rankings. It's also essential for the crawl-ability of your website. When you have a well formed structure search engine bots can crawl your website faster and easier. Here is an example of our website structure:
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Tyton Media™ Full Service There are Web a fewSolutions factors to https://www.tytonmedia.com
keep in mind when creating your websites structure:
Plan: Before even making a website, plan your structure out with a well-formed architectural that is logical and simple. Keep It Simple: When it comes to website structure, keep it simple. Keep the number of categories between 2-7 and have relate-able sub categories for each main category. Internal Linking: Internal linking is an important part of your websites structure. It allows bots to better find and crawl your other web pages. Shallow Structure: A typical user should only have to click a maximum of 3 times to reach every page on your website. This makes for a good user experience and easy navigation.
HTTPS/SSL HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure and is the web standard for secure communication between your browser and any server. In 2014, Google announced that they are now using HTTPS as a ranking signal which gives a small ranking benefit to sites with secure SSL connections. Google provides the following tips to get started with HTTPS: Use 2048-bit key certificates. Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate. Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain. Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address. Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains. Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt. Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag. How do you make your website SSL secure? Making your site SSL secure is now easier and cheaper than ever. Lets encrypt offers free SSL certificates and is used by a number of large companies like Facebook and Mozilla. Once your SSL certificate is installed, you should be able to go to https://www.yourwebsite.com and see the green lock in the left side of the address bar.
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If you get a message that there is both secure and non-secure items on your page that means there are resources pointing to a non-secure website.
To find what out which URLs are pointing to non https pages, right click on your website and click view source. Search for 'http:' and you will see all the non-secure links that are in your HTML. To fix them we simply use this easy method... Take out the 'http:'! So your internal links should all look like this: //www.tytonmedia.com/services/seo/
If you are using Wordpress, there is a plugin called SSL Insecure Content Fixer that will automatically force HTTPS on every page and update any non HTTP URLs to HTTPS.
TL;DR: Get a free SSL from Lets Encrypt Remove all instances of 'HTTP:' and use relative paths USe the SSL Insecure Content Fixer for Wordpress
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Design/Responsive Did you know that having a mobile-friendly website can boost your rankings on mobile search? Google prefers responsive web design out of the handful of techniques and gives priority to websites that are responsive to all devices. Not to mention that: 48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.
To test if your website is mobile friendly just use the Google Webmasters Mobile-Friendly Test to analyze your web pages.
Make sure that all your pages pass the test and fix any errors that Google spits out.
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Although its important to note that even though you pass this test, your website could still see high bounce rates if your responsive design is not good for the user. You should test your website design on all devices too see the user experience your visitors are having. This is the only way to reduce high bounce rates, increasing your rankings in Google.
TL;DR: Google prefers responsive designed websites Use the Google Mobile-friendly test to check your web pages Manually check your website on all devices (mobile, tablet, laptop, etc)
Internal Linking Internal linking is an important part of your websites structure because it allows bots to better find and crawl your pages. An internal link is a link that connects one page of a website to another page on the same website.
Why use internal linking? Helps with website navigation and user experience Passes link juice from one page to another Defines the structure and architecture of the website Improve rankings for certain keywords Now that you know all the great benefits of using internal linking, lets look at how to great a good internal linking campaign for your website.
Build a lot of great content In order to have a good amount of internal links on your website, you have to have a lot of content
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to link together. Creating high quality content that links to other pieces of great content on your website provides brand value and allows search engine bots to crawl your site and all its great content.
Use anchor text in your links Anchor text is the visible text of a link that is often underlined.
In the example above, the anchor text is 'Affordable Web Design'. Using anchor text in your internal links will help rank that page for that certain keyword in Google. Anchor text should be natural sentence fragments that are part of a normal sentence.
Don't use nofollow links In 2005, search engines came up with a tag for the element know as the nofollow element.
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This allows websites to link to other web pages and not pass any link juice to the link referral. You should use nofollow links when linking to: Paid Websites Competitors Questionable sites or content The same page multiple times But other than these, using normal follow links will create a good flow through your website, passing link juice to all your internal pages... which brings us to deep linking.
Deep Linking Linking to your deepest content will provide a lot of benefits like: Raising the authority of all your web pages Increase your websites relevance Build your websites visiblity But what do they mean by deep?
Deep refers to your content that is the most amount of clicks away from your homepage. This allows your entire website to be seen and indexed by Google and other search engines. To test your deep and internal linking, use this internal link analyzer by SEO Review Tools.
TL;DR: Use follow links to create good internal linking flow Create deep links to your deepest content Use natural anchor text in your internal links Build great content to link to internally
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Website Speed Having a fast loading website is a key part of a good user experience. 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. — Econsultancy
A fast loading website not only keeps people from leaving your site, it also allows bots to crawl it faster. But how do you know your websites speed? We use this great tool by Pingdom that tests your web pages speed and gives you some insights on what you can do to speed things up.
As you can see our load time is great at 1.67 seconds but we could work on some things like combining CSS and JavaScript files into one, minified file. So lets look at some of the issues we had and see if we can't fix them and get a better grade.
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Slow Loading Files/Scripts Looking at the bottom of the page, you can see all the resources the web page is loading and how long they took to load. I can see that the longest scripts to load were some javascript pixels from LinkedIn that track conversions.
Since, we don't really run LinkedIn Ads anymore (they convert terribly) we can remove this script from our pages to see if we can increase our performance grade.
Cacheing Loading all those resources every time increase the load on your server, making your website slower. Cacheing dynamically saves a web page to the server in HTML form so its less in size and doesn't have to load all the scripts and resources every time. I know, cacheing sounds very difficult to do... but it can be quite simple. Wordpress users can download a plugin called W3 Total Cache that can speed up your website 30-40%. After enabling the plugin our performance grade increased significantly:
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Tyton Media™ Full Webalso Solutions OurService load time lowered https://www.tytonmedia.com
to 1.50 seconds... That's .17 seconds faster than before!
CDN Using a CDN is another way to speed up your website. CDN stands for content delivery network and its a group of servers that deliver web pages or web content to a user based on their geographical location. Pretty much you can host your content on a company's really fast servers. Using the same W3 Total Cache plugin I mentioned before, you can upload and enable a CDN for your Wordpress website. Simply sign up at Amazon Web Services Console, configure your billing and head to the Security Credentials page to retrieve your Access Keys.
Next, copy the Access Key ID and Secret Key and head back to your Wordpress admin area and go to W3 Total Cache (Performance) and then CDN.
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Webdistribution Solutions Click 'Create https://www.tytonmedia.com
and the plugin will automatically create a distribution in Amazon
Cloudfront.
All your media will begin uploading to the Amazon servers and you can check the status by heading back to the Amazon Web Services Console and going to the CloudFront section. There, you should see the distribution that was created by the plugin:
That status will be 'In Progress' until all of your media is completely uploaded to the Amazon Servers. This can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes depending on how much media you have in Wordpress. Once that status is 'Deployed', you can now change the hostname to the one provided in the 'domain name' column in the AWS Console.
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Click save and now all your images and scripts should be loading from Amazons web servers. to check just view the page source of a web page and look for your hostname URL which should be used in all of your images. Here is an example of it working on our website:
Now your website should be as fast as lightning, ready to provide a better user experience to all your visitors as well as better on-page SEO for better rankings.
TL;DR: Leverage browser cacheing Use a CDN to host media files Remove or Optimize slow loading scripts Combine JS and CSS files (and minify them) Use W3 Total Cache for Wordpress websites
LSI Keywords Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) are keywords that are related to a certain keyword you search for in search engines like Google. Looking at the bottom of Google search, you will see keywords related to the search you made. These are LSI Keywords for the keyword 'web design':
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Tyton Media™ Full Service Solutions Using LSI Web Keywords in your https://www.tytonmedia.com
content and articles will give you a boost in the search engines and allow you to rank for these other keywords as well. Another great way to find good LSI keywords is to use Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool. Just head to the 'Search for new keywords' section and type in your main keyword to pull back a ton of great LSI keywords.
Sort the results by average monthly searches and look for keywords that have a low or medium competition and use these in your content to help rank for these terms as well.
TL;DR: LSI Kewyords are keywords related to the searched keyword Use LSI keywords in your content to rank better Go to the bottom of a Google search to see LSI keywords Use Google Keyword Planner to see more LSI keywords
In Conclusion Now that you know the important of implementing all these on-page SEO strategies on your website, you will see a good increase in organic rankings and traffic. For more great information be sure to sign up to our newsletter so you can get more content like this before we post it! If you have any questions or comments about this post, feel free to comment or ask below!
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