Wednesday 19 March 2014

Key Facets Of On-Page SEO

Having spent the last year making sure I got fully and totally "skilled up" in Search Engine Optimisation, I am pleased to say that all that learning is now starting to pay dividends. I am probably one of the more advanced SEOs in the U.K right now.



You can find my website at Digital Marketing Online.

And, my clients are pretty happy with what my colleagues and I are delivering for them at the moment. Indeed, I put the proof up on this blog only last month.

But there have been some changes in the way the algorithm work recently which means there has been a slight change in focus in some aspects of on-page optimisation.

So, before I talk about the nuances of the what the latest update means for you and your site (rankings) let me just re-cap on the basics of on-page SEO.

Firstly, you need to make sure your keyphrase is in your page title (and hence the URL). This is without doubt one of the most important things to get right.

Next we need to look at meta tags. People tell me the metas are not important any more - WRONG! way wrong (as Bruce Willis would say).

The meta description is what Google uses as the snippet for your listing in the SERPS in 95% of instances. How can this not be important? Anyway, your keyword / phrase should be in the meta description with at least 2 or 3 related variations of the keyword. Better still if you can get variations within a key phrase string. What do I mean?

Something like this - "best free online guitar lessons for beginners". This cover a multitude of related guitar lesson keywords / phrases. With thanks to Alex Becker for that example.

You should also get a similar variation in your meta title tag.

Meta keywords? I agree, mabe not so important, but they do no harm, so I always use them.

Your content should be as wide ranging as you can make it without going off subject. Google really likes broad subject matter sites these days. The algorithm is now really rather good at understanding the true meaning of content. It understands related terms really well (like car and automobile are essentially the same thing), and also likes the article to cover connected issues as well. Main keyword / phrase only 2-3 times but also use other related and closely related terms.

And finally images. The number of sites that I see that do not name images with their keywords and do not "alt img" tag them. This is a cardinal sin! Make sure you give your images relevant file names so... keyword.gif and alt tag them with a relevant keyword / phrase as well.

There's loads of great info on our site which you can find at http://digitalmarketingonline.co.uk and moreteachings on our Blog.

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