How much moola is it worth to be on the front page in Google? Heck, lots. You could stack coins to the ceiling and still not meet the value of it to a business. Global scales of traffic, for free. That’s why good SEO’s charge a lot and (as competition fires up for a front page slot) their job is getting much harder too.
In a nutshell, optimizing your website for search engines like Google is a combination of both on-page and off-page elements. So this morning, I received notification of a post from SEOMOZ which I thought was so good I’d be remiss not to share it with you. It’s called “Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization“. And it starts off with a nice picture:
Title - so since I started helping businesses with their SEO I’ve told them to include their most important keywords to the left (google reads left to right). I’m glad that SEOMOZ agrees with me. In their correlation data studies, this is what they found:
This graph shows that using the keyword term/phrase as the very first words in the page title has the highest correlation with high rankings (and subsequent positions correlate nearly flawlessly to lower rankings).
Meta Description – the meta description does not affect your rankings but it does affect the quality of traffic your page gets. First of all, Google bolds the search term matchin its snippet – but also the description helps a visitor to figure out whether they should bother to open your page (and qualified traffic is better quality traffic).
Meta Keywords – Ok, I don’t bother with these although Yahoo! has been the last of the search engines to use them. Now Yahoo! has been taken over by Bing, bye bye meta keywords. They stuff your code and serve no purpose.
Meta Robots – another piece of code I don’t use unless I don’t want a search robot to cache the content.
Rel=”Canonical” – can be used for larger and more complex sites because they prevent potential duplicates or unintentional, appended URL strings from creating a problem for the engines and splitting up potential link juice.
THE URL.
- Shorter is better.
- Keep keywords close to domain name (which is why category structures such as the ones found in this blog are so great for SEO).
- Subdomains have a slight keyword advantage over subfolders or pages. I have found the subdomain structure very effective in achieving front page ranking.
- Word Separators – Hyphens are still the king of keyword separators in URLs. So call your page this: my-favorite-stuff rather than my_favorite_stuff.
And there is a whole lot more at SEO MOZ’s How to Build the Perfectly Optimized Page.
But finally (and you’ll get these too at the original SEO MOZ post).
Curiously, though perhaps not entirely surprisingly to experienced SEOs, the truth is that on-page optimization doesn’t necessarily rank first in the quest for top rankings.
Actually what counts looks like this:
- Accessibility – content engines can’t see or access cannot even be indexed; thus crawl-ability is foremost on this list. (And although it isn’t specified in the SEOMOZ post, you can add crappy code stuffed into pages into the list of site-crawler no-nos.)
- Content – you need to have compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but compels visitors to share the information. Virality of content is possibly the most important/valuable factor in the ranking equation because it will produce the highest link conversion rate (the ratio of those who visit to those who link after viewing).
- Basic On-Page Elements – getting the keyword targeting right in the most important elements (titles, URLs, internal links) provides a big boost in the potential ability of a page to perform well.
- User Experience – the usability, user interface and overall experience provided by a website strongly influences the links and citations it earns as well as the conversion rate and browse rate of the traffic that visits.
- Marketing – A strong marketing campaign has the power to attract far more links than content may “deserve,” and though this might seem unfair, it’s a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable.
- Advanced/Thorough On-Page Optimization – applying all of the above with careful attention to detail certainly isn’t useless, but it is, for better or worse, at the bottom of this list for a reason; it doesn’t add as much value as the other techniques described.
Go on. You know you wanna do it. Check out the original post…
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