Hello again! I have been very busy the last six plus months optimizing the SEO strategy of many ecommerce websites. I feel I have acquired so much valuable experience. I have also been working as search engine evaluator so I got to read a bunch of technical manuals about search engines which helped me understand so much more about how powerful algorithms like the one of Google and Bing work.
Currently I’m on vacation so I have a little time to write another post. This one is all about On Page SEO strategies you must use in order to succeed online. This information works for ecommerce websites in any industry, niche blogs or microsites. I hope you find value. Also I’m wishing you Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I’m hoping 2021 will be a better year where we will once again be free to travel the world and meet our wonderful friends and family members openly.
What is On Page SEO
Onpage optimization (On-page SEO) is a set of strategies and measures a website owner has full control over in order to impact the search rankings of a given page on the internet.
Here are some of the best On-page SEO actions you can take. These are ranked in order of importance:
1)Target keyword should be in domain/page URL (also known as slug)
2)Keyword in Title
3)Keyword in H tags
4)Keyword in description/meta description
5)Keyword in content
Why on Page SEO is Important
I choose not to include pictures or more data to keep the privacy of the customer and his competitor undisturbed. The fact is if the competitor would take some time to disavow all of the spam links pointing to the website with vulgar, overly sexual keywords, he could even get more #1 page positions making my work even harder to overtake him in the ranks!
The fact is they did not have very many referring domains that were not from spammy sites. And yet, they were ranking very strongly in position #1 and #2 of Google for all the electronic appliances of the brand name they had included in their domain name.
This is strong evidence that if you include your target keyword in the domain when you first create your website you are already a lot more likely to succeed even if the other parts of your SEO are not the best. Read that again because is worth a fortune!
Based on all the data I have seen and the websites I have analyzed the last year, it appears to me strongly that Google is starting to give more of an advantage to very niche sites and microsites that focus around a very specific topic or product line.
So the search engines can mine this information to know what each section of the post is about and more importantly it can help search engine evaluators more quickly determine what section of a post should be highlighted for a particular query. It is then that this answer can appear directly within the Google SERPs or as rich snippets that come up at the very top of the search and can result in most of the traffic for the given target query.
Here is a good video about rich snippets:
The target keyword should always be in the meta description of the post as this is text which also appears within the Search Engine Result Pages. It’s also very important to craft meta descriptions which entice the visitor to click on that search result and go to your page.
At 3dcart while working on numerous websites that had boring, improperly optimized meta descriptions I am able to track larger click through rates coming from organic search and among the main reasons for this is because the meta descriptions are properly optimized by experienced SEO copywriters. Of course we also do the other optimizations I mentioned as well so that when everything is combined together the results stack on one another and that’s when the customer can see much better results than previously. Many business owners don’t optimize their websites because they just don’t have the time!
I find it important to share this information because the higher the customers rank the more budget they can invest for marketing efforts like SEO. Also, the more clients that rank well within a platform, the more authority such platform commands and the bigger it will become!
The last tip I listed at number 5 is keyword in content. While it has become less important to include the target keyword within the text for 2-3% of the text to boost the keyword density (because it leads to over optimization/spamming/keyword stuffing), I’m still finding is very important to include LSI keywords and to include many words which are related to the topic in question.
My friend Kevin Indig who recently became the Director of SEO at shopify did an analysis of hundreds of websites and how they had been impacted by the recent Google Core Algorithm update of December 2020. He found the website that lost the most traffic is Wikipedia, resulting in -2.79% or roughly 100 million desktop hits lost. Wikipedia is a prime example of the advantage to writing keyword dense content with a lot of industry specific and topic related words because many of the pages in Wikipedia are really in depth about the subject or interest being written about.
Seeing they only loss but a little fraction of the traffic is fair to say that Google will continue to reward bloggers and content creators who dive deep on the topics they have chosen to write or talk about. I think since Google is also highlighting the most important information that is relevant to a search result, long form content is still the best approach to rank and to achieve organic traffic in the case of bloggers. Video is still the channel that continues to growth the fastest.
More Techniques to Improve On Page SEO
Optimize alt tags for the images on your website. See this post by Yoast SEO about optimizing image alt tags.
Use the Google feature “People also ask” in order to find more related topics or relevant questions to answer in your post. By answering the questions you can more easily match the search intent Google has for the query in question and you can also make the page content more in depth with more related words which will help it rank better.
Here is a good video about people also ask google:
When searching for the target query or keyword in Google the autosuggest feature can surface ideas as to other important related searches people are making which you can also include in your content. This strategy was popularized by income school and it has proven very effective because searches that make the autosuggest feature of Google often times have a lot of volume and they can also be long tailed keyword combinations for which there is very little competition, meaning is much easier to rank for the term!
Structured data/schema markup can also greatly help on page SEO especially for ecommerce stores. I’m working on a daily basis with ecommerce stores in all sorts of niches and verticals who signed with 3dcart and one of the most powerful features without a doubt is the ability to easily add structured data to the pages without having to code.
If you have ever seen search results containing start ratings and including product price information and other important data this is done with structured data. Among the reasons it helps is because the format of structured data on a Google Search Results listing makes the page in question appear more trustable. Also, often times these pages take more space within the search results too, signaling at a conscious or unconscious level to the visitor the page is more important and they should click on it.
One other way to greatly improve On-Page SEO is by using the hemingway editor which will give you a readability score for the information you write about. Is best if you write for 5th and 6th grade level English as your audience will more easily understand and be able to digest the information. I’m guilty of not using this tool but I’m also writing to help business owners and webmasters who I believe can understand this information about SEO and digital marketing.
I will share more important tips later as I find more time. If you find this information useful this other blog may prove useful as well. Be well.
-Rey