![\"einstein-kicks-onpage-seo-ass\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/einstein-kicks-onpage-seo-ass.jpg\")
Alright, so we’re still doing this on-page SEO thing. Apparently Google bot hasn’t developed a brain yet and needs some guidance on what web pages are actually about. With that in mind, it seemed like the best way to teach the process was actually optimizing a page together, and what better page than this? Sounds fun right?<\/p>\n
Before diving into our best practices, it’s crucial to have our target keywords already researched and ready to go. I can’t stress the importance of this part of the process enough. This will be the determining factor of our future success and search visibility, a compass of sorts that will lead us to the point of maximum profitability on our efforts.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a keyword research expert to get some popular search terms, the process is incredibly intuitive and the tools are provided by Google for free.<\/p>\n
The first tool is so simple you might not actually believe it, suggestions from the Google search box itself<\/strong>! This provides us with an incredible resource of suggestions and keyword ideas but there is more, typically these terms are suggested by “popularity<\/em>“, so not only are we finding good related keywords but they are also the most popular as well. It’s a win, win.<\/p>\n For optimizing our page here, the obvious example is targeting “on-page seo” as a root keyword to work with.<\/p>\n We can immediately see some potential additional keywords for targeting as well, although some of them are not completely relevant to this post. “Factors<\/strong>” for example is not necessarily relevant since we are just covering how to optimize a page and not actually diving into current on-page factors per say. Although I did just naturally mention the keyword quite well and we’ll touch on that more in sec.<\/p>\n From there, you’ll be using the Google keyword planner<\/a> to check search volume for these keyword suggestions you have just jotted down. This data is never 100% accurate so take it with a grain of Google, but it’s the best we’ve got to work with.<\/p>\n At this point we’ve discovered our target phrases which will guide the content creation, and we have also written 344 words exactly, so it’s time to backtrack and analyze everything we have done up until this point as our title<\/em> and intro<\/em> are both crucial<\/span> points of emphasis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Without beating a dead horse but hopefully beating it to death at the same time, keyword density is not<\/span> something you should worry about<\/strong> at all beyond simply having your target keyword appear completely natural.<\/p>\n Let me repeat that and hope that the bold, exclamation points, and capital letters hammer this point home for life, you don’t need to worry about keyword density, just write your content and incorporate your keywords or a variation NATURALLY!!!!!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n With that said, and slightly contradictory, our keywords, a variation, or something closely related (LSI keywords<\/a><\/span><\/strong>) must be at least present<\/span> for Google to rank us<\/strong>. But density or any other sort of snake oil formula can be thrown out the window, for good.<\/p>\n We’re rewinding, and taking notice of all the nifty on-page SEOing we’ve done so far. To hammer it home, here are the main keywords we’ve just targeted.<\/p>\n Something quick to notice, the keywords above are just an image and not actual text, if we actually listed them it would potentially skew our targeting and make the page un-natural ;-)<\/p>\n At this point we have successfully incorporated these phrases naturally in the title<\/em> and opening paragraph(s)<\/em> of the post (use Ctrl + F if you don’t believe me). Mission accomplished, we just SEO’d a page.<\/strong><\/p>\n And that about covers the quick and easy approach, if you put in that effort then you are going to be light years ahead of your competition in most industries. But there are a few more on-page tools in your bag to leverage, so now we’ll dive into the nitty gritty covering all the important areas Google analyzes when assessing pages to use when optimizing your big money pages.<\/p>\n These are the important “areas of emphasis” as we like to call them here at Audit WP, note that they are also listed in order of importance. For the record, we can’t make definitive statements about on-page factors until Google sends us a copy of their algorithm and unfortunately we’re still waiting on that. But if they did send us an exact roadmap, it really wouldn’t be that beneficial. In 2014, optimizing a page shouldn’t be done in a robotic way, those days have come and gone. Keep it natural and don’t over-think it, if there’s one thing to take away from this guide it’s that.<\/p>\n Our title is a crucial component of our on-page success. We should always incorporate our main phrase in the title, this is going to receive some of the most weight from search engines. But we must strike a balance between our SEO intentions and a kick ass title.<\/p>\n Let’s say we were targeting “Best SEO services in Antarctica<\/span><\/strong>”<\/p>\n Now we could just literally use that as our title and it would still get the job done but we’d be pretty much killing our article’s chances of getting shared naturally with such a boring title. Try giving it a little copyblogger type swag<\/a> or make it somewhat interesting.<\/p>\n Instead, we could do something like:<\/p>\n Now we killed two birds with one title tag. Another important thing to note is the actual character length of the title since there is a limit placed on this.<\/p>\n Using Yoast’s SEO plugin<\/a>, we’ve got the perfect area to preview our work and craft the perfect SEO friendly compelling title.<\/p>\n You’ll notice the target phrase is in the “Focus Keyword” field which does some actual page analysis for us, pretty nifty, thanks Joost! The second thing to notice is the SEO Title and character length<\/em>, it is important to keep this within the 70 character limit and not go over. This is a very common issue we find with our SEO audits, excessive title length or titles that are too short. So make sure you utilize the entire field length but don’t go over.<\/p>\n It’s incredibly simple, but don’t overlook this step, especially when creating a top notch piece. Ideally, we never<\/strong> want to change this URL after we go live, it’s possible, but requires the technical savvy to implement proper redirects and is generally something we try to avoid.<\/p>\n Again analyzing this page, we see the permalink – This is perfect, our root keyword is in the permalink and it couldn’t be more relevant. One thing to note, sometimes it might be better to go broader with your permalink. This won’t restrict the ranking potential of the page, as with our efforts here, we’re hoping to rank this page for the secondary keywords as well such as “factors”, “checklist”, etc.<\/p>\n But the opposite could also occur, it might make more sense to have specific pages targeting each of those terms. In that case we would have multiple pages with more specific targeting. For this monster guide though, it made sense to gun for everything with one page, and that is what we did. The takeaway is to always be strategic with your targeting and permalink choice.<\/p>\n Yet another largely overlooked area of importance when optimizing a page, often completely left out all together. The meta description is that cute little description that comes up in the actual search results. It’s very important to create a unique and keyword rich meta description for your key pages and if you incorporate it into your post creation routine, from here on you’ll never have to worry about it again. Without it Google will just pull in whatever text it chooses, or your SEO plugin might automatically generate a description from your intro paragraph.<\/p>\n Sometimes that might work out and give you a keyword rich description, but you might not always have your keywords in the opening sentences which would then screw up your meta description.<\/p>\n And beyond just writing one that’s unique and keyword rich, also keep in mind that you can leverage this text and write something compelling to increase clicks from searchers.<\/p>\n Here is what I settled on for this page.<\/p>\n Keyword rich, within the character length of 155 characters, uses the entire field, and has a strong call to action for the searcher. Once again, use the preview field from Yoast to perfect it. Now we can see a pretty preview of how our page will display in search results.<\/p>\n Check, now we’re writing kick ass meta descriptions, let’s move on.<\/p>\n Now that we’ve gotten some of the heavier stuff out of the way, it’s all downhill from here. Don’t over think this, just keep in mind that your main keyword(s)\/variation(s) should be within the first few hundred words of content. Easy, you mention what you’re about to write about in the introduction, writing 101. For the length part, it can be a bit of a loaded question. There are plenty of sites ranking with very little content, yes, but as general rule of thumb we recommend a minimum of 200 words for pages you’re trying to rank on competitive terms. But remember this is 2015, don’t just stuff in 200 words of trash, that will backfire on you. Do what’s natural, this mamma jamma post is obviously well over the 1,000 word mark which definitely gives it a slight edge but is by no means a requirement for ranking.<\/p>\n Always, always, always remember to strive for quality over quantity, just keep the minimum in mind as a rough guideline.<\/p>\n These are the html tags for subheaders throughout your content. Typically the post title is always wrapped in the H1 tag, and if it’s not, it should be. Simply view the source code on your site and verify that the post titles are indeed using an H1. Now that we have confirmed our post title is structured correctly, throughout our content there may be relevant places to create sub-headers and better break up the text. For these sub-headers we use our H2 tags and this gives us an additional opportunity to optimize another point of emphasis. Notice the first H2 sub-header used on this article, we’ve got our main keyword in there along with the added variation “checklist”. Simple and easy, but once again often overlooked.<\/p>\n Instead, we simply go with a name that makes sense. If it’s a picture of a European green toad, we could name the picture:<\/p>\n And that’s it, with image SEO the best approach is K.I.S.S., keep it simple, stupid.<\/p>\n Don’t be afraid to link out to relevant resources in your content, linking out to people is not<\/strong> going to “drip” out some of you precious SEO juice. It’s a component of a quality page, sites link to other sites, so don’t be afraid to do so. Looking back through our page here, we have several external links to relevant authority sites giving us a nice natural mix and improving the overall relevancy of the page. Like everything else, keep it natural and don’t be afraid to link out when it’s relevant and beneficial for the reader.<\/p>\n That about wraps it up, we started with a simple piece covering the broad strokes of optimizing a page while actually optimizing a page, a bit of irony and hopefully incredibly revealing for beginners and even advanced SEOs brushing up on their on-page game. With enough practice the process should become second nature and just part of your content creation.<\/p>\n We’ve broken down the different aspects of on-page optimization, explored all those little nooks and crannies, and created a model\/example to reference. So bookmark this page and use it to reference back over time and be sure you’re covering all the bases. If you have any questions be sure to comment below.<\/p>\n There’s no excuse for lazy on-page SEO, it’s the foundation for everything else to come in the SEO process so be sure to get it right!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alright, so we’re still doing this on-page SEO thing. Apparently Google bot hasn’t developed a brain yet and needs some guidance on what web pages are actually about. With that in mind, it seemed like the best way to teach the process was actually optimizing a page together, and what better page than this? Sounds… Read More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"onpage-seo-keyword-suggestions\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/onpage-seo-keyword-suggestions1.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"target-phrases\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/target-phrases.png\")
<\/p>\nThe On-Page SEO Checklist<\/h3>\n
\n
Title Tags<\/h4>\n
Chilling Facts About So-Called “Best” SEO Services in Antarctica<\/span><\/h4>\n
![\"yoast-preview-title\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/yoast-preview-title.png\")
<\/p>\nPermanent URL or “Permalinks”<\/h4>\n
jacobking.com\/on-page-seo<\/code><\/p>\nMeta Description<\/h4>\n
![\"meta-description-screenshot\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/meta-description-screenshot.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"onpage-seo-meta-description-screenshot\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/onpage-seo-meta-description-screenshot.png\")
<\/p>\nIntro and Overall Length<\/h4>\n
H1, H2 and H3 tags<\/h4>\n
Images<\/h4>\n
![\"European-green-toad\"](\"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/European-green-toad.jpg\")
When uploading images to WordPress it’s important to know that the file name converts into the permanent url and becomes the title of the image. Now given everything we’ve just gone over, it should be obvious why we wouldn’t want our image names to be something like:<\/p>\nimg_280843908.jpg <\/code><\/p>\neuropean-green-toad.jpg<\/code><\/p>\nExternal Linking<\/h4>\n
Concluding the OnPage Madness<\/h2>\n