on site optimization seo

On-Site Optimizations – SEO Guide

Tutorial by Ryuhei Yokokawa
10.28.2015

The most basic type of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is On-site optimization.  This is the stuff you have control over.  Its about making it easy for Google to understand your content.

1. One Focus Keyword per Page

Make sure that you have a separate keyword for each page on your site.  Otherwise, you’re cannibalizing opportunities inside your own website. With this in mind, you should use the keywords in your article multiple times. Be sure to place your keywords in these strategic tags:
  • Title tag
  • URL
  • H1 Tag
  • H2
  • Meta Description
While its good to get the keywords into the article, being greedy and over-stuffing your article can hurt you too. If you use WordPress, Yoast’s SEO is a great way to test your keyword density.  We even wrote a plugin on top of Yoast’s SEO for ACF.

2. Catching 404s for older pages

We all go through a couple of websites per domain.  If the search engine can no longer find the content, they’re unhappy. To redirect your old url to the correct new content, you can do a couple of things.  If you’re on a CMS like WordPress or Joomla, its pretty easy.
  • For WordPress, you can use:
    • 404 Redirection
    • 404 Redirected
  • For Joomla, you can use:
    • sh404sef
If you have a lot of 404 pages to deal with, you can use Google Webmaster tools to help you along the way.  If you haven’t connected with Google Webmaster tools, here’s a tutorial. Google Webmasters can tell you (in their priority) pages that require redirection.  You can go to “Crawl”-> “Crawl Errors”. If you’ve just signed up the the service, it may not show you much.

3. Adding Alt properties to all images

Adding alt properties to images can add more context for Search Engines.  They can’t see the images after all.
<img src="https://y-designs.com/wp-content/themes/yd_primer/img/global/yd-logo.png" alt="Seattle Web Design | Y-Designs, Inc">

4. Make sure your content is long enough.

Some folks have said that 300 characters is enough to convince Google that the content is good.  We believe in 400 words+ for good content. That said, don’t drag out what you don’t need to.

5. Make sure that your page isn't blocked by Robots.txt

Ask your SEO about your robots.txt today.  Robots.txt let’s search crawlers know what they are allowed to see (or not). It’s a convenient tool especially if you have pages you don’t want people to easily find.

6. Test your site's speed.

You can test your site speed using GTmetrix.com .  Anything less than 3.5 seconds is bad news. If your website is running slow, there is a good chance Google may not be able to reach your site.  

In Conclusion:

If you do good on-site optimization, there’s a good chance Google will start to pick up your content.  Without good optimization, Google won’t crawl your site very well. The next move would be to strategize your keyword distribution on your website.  If this all seems over your head, you can always contact us.  Find out more about our content marketing services!

Beyond On-site Optimization:

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