SEO For Blogs Part 5 – On Page Optimization Continued – Some More GEMS!

Dave: Where that information appears and why it’s important is if you come over here.

Let’s say I’m going to go back to our trading systems. That is our title tag and that is our meta description. That’s why it’s really important to make sure that your title tags are written with copywriting in mind.

I think it’s important when doing SEO. You always put usability first, because I think that ultimately, when the spider comes to your website, it’s not going to pull out its wallet and purchase your product. That’s the end user. Always optimize with a view for optimizing for usability first, then SEO, what I’m talking about, second.

You can see here, you want to make sure you have some good copywriting skills and you put your keyword in that title tag, and then you also have it in the description because Google’s going to bold those. That obviously draws the eye to it.

Gideon:    Does it make a difference where exactly you put that keyword in your title tag? For example, is it better at the beginning or does it not matter too much?

Dave:    People say it’s better to weight it towards the front. We swap it around a little bit. Again, I would err towards going for usability. As long as it’s in there, then go for usability first and then the other stuff, you’re down to a point where you’re splitting hairs.

If let’s say you went after a keyword and you couldn’t rank for the keyword that you wanted to go after, you would look at what your competition is doing, reverse engineer what they’re doing, and copy what they’re doing and at least you start there first.

If they had the keyword at the front, you might move the keyword to the front of yours and then that would be a way to try and slowly work that.

Most stuff, especially with off-page optimization, you can just overcome any issues when it comes to search engines by just sending more links to the page that you want to rank for.

Gideon:    This is extremely helpful. There’s your title that you’ve got to get right. You’ve got to get the meta description right and the meta keywords. Those three things are absolutely key for when you’re creating your new blog post, for example, to think about that.

First of all you do your research, do your keywords, and then you optimize those three things for the search engines. Sounds awesome.

Dave:    Then for the on-page, like on the rest of the page, here’s your actual post. For this post here, what you then want to do is take your keyword and make sure that you put the keyword in early and often. You want to make sure that you have it in the first paragraph.

A lot of people talk about density and all that sort of stuff. Don’t worry about density. Push that to the side,
as long as you mention it two or three times.

It can be a little bit more. You probably don’t want to have it a little bit less. It does depend on the amount of words that you’ve got on the page.

I don’t really worry about density so much anymore. I try and have it early. I’ll try and have it in the first paragraph. I’ll try and mention it a couple of times throughout the article or whatever the post is and then also down at the bottom of the particular post as well I like to add the keyword.

Let’s just hope that this page has been optimized correctly. I’m going to go right click using this search status thing and I’m going to go here. Where is it? I’m looking for keyword density. Highlight Keyword. We’ll just type in, selling a website. You can see here. Bang, it’s in there. It’s not in the first paragraph so that’s a bit of a bummer, but that’s okay.

It’s a little bit further down in the page there. We’ll keep scrolling down. We’ll see if it’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again down in the last paragraph and also mentioned down in the tags as well.

It’s a good idea to load your keywords into your tags as well. I’ll show you that in the back end in a moment.

That’s the basic on-page optimization. Choose your keyword, use what I was talking about, load it in your title and your meta description and your meta keywords, and you put it throughout the site, and then you should be fine.

Gideon:    That is very cool. That’s very useful. Thank you. That’s awesome.

Dave:    I’ll show you the back end now so you can see how easy it is with WordPress. I’m just logging in here.

Gideon:    If you’re watching this and you’re thinking, “This is quite overwhelming,” I think if you just follow these initial simple steps that Dave’s talking about, maybe watch the video a couple of times, to my mind this all just really super boosts your ability to get found by the search engines and help you get that extra traffic from the search engines. It’s really good.

Dave:    From the back end, it’s quite simple. You’d obviously put your keyword in here. You can edit the permalink structure. Usually what I’ll do if I’m here in editing it – and I won’t do it now because we’ve obviously started sending links to these pages – but I would just have the keyword that you’re trying to rank for as the link like that. That’s a good idea.

You do a little bit of your keywords loading them in here. I’m in Thesis at the moment so it will vary slightly but the All-in-One SEO looks very similar. You will just get the option to do a custom title tag, a custom description, and your meta keywords which I talked about.

That just goes to show you don’t have to hop into the back end coding side of things. It’s really quite easy. Just type it in there.

Gideon:    I’ve just been ignoring that stuff. I’ve done some focusing on the title and the content of the blog post, but everything else I’ve just been ignoring. This is really good. I’ll be doing this from now on for sure.

Dave:    When it comes to driving the traffic to your websites, just organic traffic, making these slight changes that we’re talking about now will make the world of difference.

I’d also go ahead and drop your keywords in your tags here as well. That’s always a good idea. Sometimes I’ll put a few more and sometimes I’ll put a few less.

Another thing that you’ll want to keep in the back of your mind is just when you set your permalink structures. This is a really important thing. Hopefully I can find it. There you go. It’s under Settings on the right hand side or left hand side when you’re in your WordPress. If you just go for something like this, you can set your custom structure.

If you just copy that you’ll be fine. /%postname%/and then finish with the slash again. You can just copy it there and if you set that, your permalink structure is going to be better and more indexible by the search engines.

If you look up here, a lot of times it’s set to the default and you’ve got question marks in there and the search engines don’t like that as much.

Gideon:    Good. This is a whole bunch of stuff here and specifically now this is all on page SEO stuff, right? I’m just conscious of the time as well and your time, David. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about the on-page stuff or can we talk a little bit about the off-page stuff as well?

Dave:    I’ll finish with two final things with the on-page stuff. Number one, I would make sure that you set up some plugin. There’s plenty of free plugins there. Look for a plugin for generating a site map. That’s a good idea and then you can submit that to the Google webmaster tools. It just helps with making sure your site gets indexed completely.

The second tip is don’t stress so much with no-follow. A lot of people are getting out there trying to do page rank sculpting and channel a lot of their page rank to specific pages and they do that by no-follow.

The way that no follow has recently changed and [inaudible] has come and said, “It’s not operating the way it used to.” You’re best if you just throw that to the side and send the links to the pages that you want to have ranked. Make sure you know what pages you ultimately want to have ranked and then send as many links to those pages as you can.

I also would suggest turning off no-follow for comments, because it will attract spammers. I would say when you’re first starting out the chances of you being on the radar of those spammers isn’t going to be very high anyway, and the more you can encourage people to comment on your blog, the better.

If you turn the comments off you can ultimately approve and disapprove whatever you’d like, so it’s better to just sit there and manually approve them. Just don’t approve the ones that are clearly not adding any value. It’s going to encourage people to want to comment on your site.

Gideon:    Awesome. Turn the no-follow thing off for that? Awesome, very good. How are you doing for time, David?

Dave:    I’m good.

Gideon:    Do we have time to talk about the off-page SEO tips?

Dave:     For sure. I’ll move through a little bit quicker.

Gideon:    This is extremely useful and I’ve learned a ton already and I’m sure our listeners and viewers will be learning in time too. It’s really, really good. Let’s keep going.