On Site SEO
Our initial SEO analysis will have highlighted the areas that need changing to boost your presence within search engine result pages. Once the SEO process begins it will fall into two different categories – “On Site SEO” and “Off Site SEO”.
On site SEO requires the creation of content that Google considers as relevant to a specific search query, following are five key steps carried out by WaxSEO to increase your search relevancy.
On Site SEO Keyword research
This is a two part process. Firstly it involves discovering the phrases people use to find your services or product online. Keyword tools will be used to determine search volumes that these words or phrases receive. This exercise is extremely important because slight variations in the phrases will have dramatic effects on volume.
For example…
The phrase “website designers” has a monthly search volume of 1,000,000, whereas the phrase “website designer” has 2,740,000. So here just the omission of the letter ‘s’ resulted in nearly three times the amount of searches!
The second part of keyword research is how much competition there is for a particular phrase. How often it has been used in content by other websites will determine whether a high ranking will be relatively easy or very challenging. The optimal keywords for your site will obviously be relevant to your product or service, highly searched for but, importantly, reasonable to compete for with a medium amount of competition.
On Site SEO Content
Keyword analysis has been completed and now they must be worked into the content of your website. The perfect scenario will be to focus on one or two keywords/phrases per page with the text relevant to those specific phrases.
The reasons for this are, if you were to target more than two, when read it begins to sound unnatural. A simple test is if it sounds strange to you it will definitely sound strange to Google too!
Tags
The content is written, reads well and has good keyword density. Next we need to “tag” the page to enable Google to understand what phrases you are trying to rank for. This is implemented via the URL, page titles and meta descriptions (if the terminology is beginning to confound you visit our SEO glossary page for further explanation).
Keyword rich URLs. Including the keywords you are targeting in the URL can significantly boost your rankings. This will usually be appended to the main URL for example in this case the main home URL will be waxseo.com but this particular page of the site is waxseo.com/onsite-SEO.
Page Titles. Once again it is good SEO practice to include the keywords in the meta page title, alerting Google to the phrases you want to rank for.
Meta Descriptions. When you search for goods and services on the search engines the results page return results with a sentence or two appearing below the clickable link. This is called the meta description. When keywords are featured in that description the keywords searched for will be highlighted thus raising the chance of the user clicking through.
Website Architecture
Your website is now set up and it is crucial you complete a full review of it’s structure. Not only is this important for a potential user’s experience, it is also necessary for the search engine robots that will crawl your site. A website must be easy to navigate so that it’s information is accessible quickly and logically. Robots must be able to easily find all your pages.
This is implemented by using a clearly labelled and defined XML sitemap available. Another benefit of the sitemap is whenever new content is added, it will alert Google.
Also using Webmaster tools we can ascertain whether there are any technical errors within the sitemap or whether any pages no longer exist. This does not have a dramatic effect on SEO,but it is good practice to keep your site clean.
Measuring SEO Effectiveness
There are three keys aspects to this, traffic, conversions and successful keywords.
Traffic. It is easy to get the wrong message from monitored analysis. For example it doesn’t matter if you rank in the top 3 organic results if it is not generating actual traffic to your site! So monitoring the amount of organic search traffic and the keywords being used to bring them, will give you an idea for what you are or aren’t ranking for.
Achieving Conversions. To fully monitor how well your SEO strategy is performing it is important to set visitors actions that you want them to perform. It could be to purchase, fill out a contact form, download an ebook or call you. Google Analytics performs this process once you have configured your goals using there software. Used correctly you will be able to see what keywords/phrases are most effective and build on that.
Keywords. Everything is going well! Your domain authority and page continue to grow and you are beginning to rank for other keywords and phrases that you are not necessarily targeting. Monitor this and see how your SEO strategy is beginning to unfold. Should it remain static then further keyword analysis may be necessary reconsidering which phrases you have selected.