If you’ve been doing search engine optimization for any length of time, you should have rolled with the punches and been privy to, or indeed part of a series of Google algorithm updates. Really, if you haven’t had a site “tank” in the SERPs, or been affected by an update, you haven’t been doing SEO long enough, or haven’t been trying hard enough. I’ve blown enough sites up over the years with testing, that I’ve learnt a thing or two about how Google reacts.
There are so many SEO courses constantly hitting the market, and so many half-baked strategies that it can be really hard to know where to start. Well… where you should start, even before you think about building a single link, is your on page. Yes it seems obvious, but I constantly see new SEO’s making the mistake of shooting a heap of links to a site without taking the time to deal with on page issues.
Table of Contents
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page search engine optimisation, also known as technical SEO in some circles, essentially relates to anything to do with a website’s structure and/or content that will affect rankings in the search engines. This may include factors such as URL structure, SEO titles and descriptions, H tags, content optimization, image optimization, schema, page and post length, website speed, and a range other factors that help (or harm) a website in the rankings.
Why is On-Page SEO so important?
This is a question that shouldn’t need to be answered, but obviously it does, as so many webmasters (and SEOs to be honest), fail to see the real benefits. Google and the other search engines want to serve the most relevant content for any particular search query string. The end result needs to be serving a web page that answers the questions a searcher is looking for in the most efficient, and relevant way.
If the page is thin on content when answering a question or explaining a concept, Google will deem the page to be irrelevant (or not as relevant as another page), and rank this page lower in the search engines. If the page has too much content, i.e. not relevant enough content or padded out with irrelevant content, it will also rank this page lower. The key is to deliver a page of content that most effectively and efficiently provides the information the searcher is looking for.
To give a web page the best chance of achieving this, the on-page needs to be considered before building links, or sending traffic. It goes further than this also. If the content is highly relevant, the user is likely to stay on the page longer and produce lower bounce rates, which are all part of the ranking signal for that page.
How do you create a highly Search Engine Optimized web page?
This is the million dollar question, and for each topic, market or industry, the answer will be different. There is always different competition and content, so each is different. The real answer is “it depends“. There is no recipe to follow, although there are rules of thumb that will help. So how do we know even where to start? Well… it makes sense that the best place to start, would be to simply check out the top competition for a page you are trying to rank. You can reverse engineer the competition manually, or you can use tools. We’ve used any number of tools, including one of our favourites ahrefs.com.
However we’ve recently been using PageOptimizer.pro to help with on-page analysis and changes. These types of tools are not entirely new, but we’re impressed with this tool due to its simplicity of analysis, and ease of use.
PageOptimizer.pro – how it works
The tool works, simply by comparing your site (or page) with a list of competitors that you choose. It then collates all the data and presents a matrix of improvements that need to be made to match the on page setup of your competitors. These include but are not limited to:
- Keyword in Main URL
- Meta Title
- H1
- H2
- H3
- H4
- Paragraph Text
- Image alt
- Anchor Text
- Bold
- Italic
- H2 to H3
- H2 to H6
- H4 to H6
- HTML Head & Body Tags
SEO Matrix Example:
Choosing Competitors
Unlike some other similar tools, PageOptimizer.pro gives you the option of which competitors to analyse. It makes sense to choose similar types of sites in you niche. For example if you are analysing for a local business, you would analyse similar local businesses on page 1 of Google. You may exclude directory type sites such as Yelp, or Yellowpages, or social media sites such as Facebook, as a true comparison could never be made.
Interpreting the Results
Again, the nice thing about this tool is its ease of use. It will tell you if you should add more H tags, add the keyword to the URL, or decrease the keyword density in the easy-to-follow matrix. It will also analyse keyword variations if you choose to add them into the analysis.
Making the on page changes:
While the tool does all the analysis, you still have to go and make the changes manually on your site. This is obvious, but if anyone ever develops a tools that can do this automatically, it will make millions.
Results
We’ve been careful to roll this tool out, and so far we’ve only used on our test sites, and a handful of robust client sites. The results have been encouraging however. With one mature page in a highly competitive niche and term, we saw a jump from page 7 to page 2. Note, however, that this page was very poorly optimized in the first place, but it actually made a good case study for this reason. It’s also nice to be able to work with a checklist of sorts, and you can cover all bases.
The tool actually has more features, but this will certainly get you started. So far we’re very impressed and it does cut down the time significantly when analysing a page. With all these tools though, we tend to use them as an initial guide, and then we can tweak within the context of the page or article.
Pricing
We always find it refreshing when a tool offers a pay per use model. With this tool you can purchase credits and only pay for what you use. Starting at $1 per report (per page), it’s incredibly cost effective.
Video walk through
You can view a video walk through of the tool below:
Want us to do it for you?
If you’d like Silicon Dales to analyse your on page SEO and make improvements, get in touch today.