On-Page SEO is sort of like foreplay in some ways. While you want to make sure you take care of the technical details, you want to make sure you also have a good experience for the visitor. We are going to take a look at some ways you can make sure you have good on-site SEO if you’re an affiliate marketer.

On-Page SEO Basics

You may already be familiar with the basics of on-site SEO, but we are going to go over them again for those new to optimization and as a refresher for those of us who should have all these things in practice – standard practice – already.

• Title Tags – One of the main indicators of what a page is about should be the title tag. While Google does not always use the page title in the SERPs, you want to make sure that it matches the content of the page.
• Meta Tags – There is some debate over whether meta tags are even used, but in some cases for some things they are still used. They may not have as much weight or affect on a page as they once did, but they’re still something that should be used correctly.
• H1 to H4 Tags – While some might say only use H1 tags or stop at H2s, using a broad range of header tags – from H1 down to H4 at least – you are going to have to break down the page into good sections. This is good for the user and for the robots when they come to scan your page.
• Internal Linking – Another area of on-page SEO that people sometimes tend to forget about is the internal linking or the silo site structure. Paying attention to links that are on the site is important for many different reasons.

There are, of course, many other things you need to think about when working with on-page SEO for your website(s), but these are the basics. Once you have the basics conquered, it’s time to go beyond and really ramp up your on-page SEO. In some cases, less is more is advisable.

Beyond On-Site SEO Basics

Here are some of the important things that should be thought about and put into practice if you really want to take advantage of on-page elements for better SEO.

• Getting the Visitor Ready – If you are an affiliate marketer and you want to make conversions, you want to make sure you get the visitor ready to buy when they’re on your website. This means having engaging content that teases them into wanting more – which you can provide via an advertiser. Even if you are not an affiliate marketer, however, there are reasons to go with quality content on page.
• Sticky Content and Bounce Rate – Another benefit of quality content is that your visitors are going to stick around you site, possibly bookmarking it and telling their friends on their favorite social networks. In addition to being something used to warm them up to the idea of sales, your content should also build trust and get them to stick around the site and tell their friends – increasing the site’s authority.
• The Perfect Link Structure – I was reading the other day about tests using the #anchor tag at the end of a URL when there was more than one link on a page to another particular page on the same website. The idea was that the #anchor addition made it different for Google, which usually just counted the first anchor text it found – or at least that is what is thought. To be honest, no one but Google really knows. Because of this, one of the best bets for on-site SEO is to just deal with over the top quality content that actually engages the reader. (Are you still reading?)

These are just a few ways you should be thinking about on-page SEO when you put it to work for your web properties or while working for clients.

Future of On-Site SEO

While the definition of on-page SEO is not going to change, there may be new indicators for Google and other search engines as to what is considered a good page – aka quality content. Someone recently wrote about headless browsers and SEO – the new Super Googlebot. It’s an interesting read and it goes along with the idea of quality content being a great idea for on-page SEO. As the search engine bots (Googlebot, Bingbot and others) all become more powerful, attempting to fool the search engines or manipulate their SERPs is going to become harder and harder.

In the end, it all points back to the user experience. If you have quality, engaging content with flavor and spice, there is a good chance they’re going to be back for more. Whether they bookmark you or just run across another reference to you on a third website, if you have quality  content there is a very good chance your visitors are going to love it and reward you (with visits and long durations on the website) for doing such a good job. At that point it becomes about conversions and making money, but the first goal should be making the reader happy. They are the ones that hold the key to unleash the traffic magic on a website.

And if there is one thing that readers love, it’s quality content that does not waste their time. This is why it is so vital to create something useful – something that goes beyond what everyone else is doing and attempts at least to look at things a little differently. When it comes to things like on-page SEO (which most black hat SEOs don’t even think about too much these days with linking seeming all important), in the future it is going to become more and more important to have all your on-site bases covered if you want to do well.

If you have any further thoughts or questions about on-page SEO, leave a comment below. We’d love to hear your stories from the front lines of the SEO battles being waged out there. Thanks!

When it comes to on-page optimization, I have quite a bit to say. This post is a good start … for now.

define: On-Page Optimization

Don’t you love that Google operator that allows you to quickly get a definition for a word by using define: in front of it? I do too. In that spirit, here’s a quick blurb about on-site optimization for SEO purposes.

On-Page Optimization: Those factors that are on an actual webpage. Namely, the title tag, the meta tags, any graphics (and alt tags), the text and content of the page as well as all of the other HTML and code on the page that is displayed when it is loaded in a browser (or seen by the Googlebot or another search engine bot.)

The opposite – off-page optimization – deals primarily with links coming into a website that you are trying to optimize for the search engines.

Importance of On-Page Optimization?

In Google’s eyes (most likely) on-page factors have a lot of weight because webmasters have control over this aspect more than off-page factors. (Although there is link buying and selling, you can expect to be penalized by Google if found out. Because off-page factors can be gamed, they must line up with other on-page elements.) Of course, Google was started using incoming links as the primary way to distinguish their listings from other search engines. Over the years, however, on-page factors remained an important foundation. And there’s a good analogy for us to go with.

If you think of a website as building a house or building, the on-page work you do is the foundation as well as the building itself. (You want to add the small details that make it really shine.) If you have a good house/building/website, it is easier to get people to link or point people to your website – which is the purpose of SEO when you break it down – ie traffic.  So on site optimization should be your number one priority if you are just starting a website. Additionally, if you have a website that has tanked in the SERPs, you are going to need to take a hard and honest look at your website to make sure you have good quality, a technically sound website that operates well and looks good too.

Important Factors for On-Site SEO

Here is a look at some of the basics you need to cover for good on page optimization for the search engines (and your website visitors…)

• Basic HTML Elements – The first thing to look at are the basics – title tag, the meta tags (should be unique), and the structure of the text in the document – think header tags like h1, h2, h3, etc. You should have ONE h1 tag, maybe a couple H2 tags depending on length, with more h3 tags with good sub-headings to break up the text.
• All the Extras - Additionally, you are going to want to have an appropriate amount of USEFUL graphics of photos. It is easy to grab something from Flickr (or even worse steal something from Google Images), but if you want your content to really shine (to the search engines and your visitors) you are going to want to find relevant graphics or photos for your article – whatever it might be. This may cost a little bit of money, but in most cases it can pay for itself many times over with a well rounded and put together page that attracts traffic and revenue through conversions on clicks.
• Easy to Read – From using short sentences to making sure the CSS is configured best for all audiences to using bullets when appropriate to using the right amount of graphics and white space, there is a lot to think about when trying to make a page easy to read – for both the search engine bots and human visitors.
• Easy on the Ads, Please – While more ads should mean more money, this is not always the case. In fact, sometimes less ads can mean more.  These days, there are talks that Google is starting to look at the ad/content ratio “above the fold” on all web pages. This is sure to be one of many indicators they use in the months and years ahead to rank pages for their SERPs.

This is more of a sampler of some of the basics, but in later posts we will go into on-site SEO in greater detail, focusing in on a single aspect. For now, however, I wanted to throw some thoughts and ideas out there and see what our readers are thinking when it comes to on-site optimization.

 Some Good On-Page SEO Links

• 4 Graphics to Help Illustrate On-Page SEO
• Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization
• I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now

If you have any questions or thoughts about on-page optimization for webpages or entire websites, please leave a comment below. We love to hear from our readers and await your input with much anticipation. In all seriousness, if you have any comments about on-site SEO leave them here and start a conversation.

In the days of old, before search engines got smarter and more knowing in the ways of those who are not averse to “gaming” the system, many an SEO “professional” has been known to find ways to gain higher rankings via questionable SEO tactics. However, these methods have been deemed so popular that they are still practiced today even though they are outdated and are no longer as effective as before (what – you think Google won’t catch up on what you’re doing?). Here are some tactics you need to stay away from if you want to move on with the times.

1. Keyword stuffing

Nobody really does any keyword stuffing anymore, or do they? A quick check around the usual SEO and webmaster forums shows that people are still into this outdated method – come on, guys, it’s so 1990’s! No longer will search engines rank your site higher if you stuff your content with repetitive keywords – their algorithms have since matured and will no longer take any BS from errant webmasters.

Alternative: Keywords are still important, but use them wisely instead of merely stuffing them like a, well, overstuffed turkey come Thanksgiving. What’s better is to create content that people will love, placing keywords in your site’s headers, titles and meta descriptions as well as putting them higher up in your site’s hierarchy.

2. Spamming blog comments

So what if you could outsource dirt cheap blog commenters on Digital Point or Fiverr? Aggressively spamming sites with your in-comment links will all be for naught especially since Google’s infamous no-follow tag may cause your link to be ignored not just by people but by search engines too.

Alternative: End the contract between you and your longtime blog commenting team and hire a good editorial writer instead! Creating content that’s actually valuable as opposed to comment-spamming will bring you more benefits in the long run.

3. Search engine submission

Search engine sub-what?? Again, this is SO yesteryear. There are SEO professionals who still staunchly believe that search engine submission is a MUST, so much so that they are still avid subscribers of such services. With Google being so much smarter than it was before, this act is rendered obsolete and webmasters need not spend precious time and money submitting their sites.

Alternative: Harness the undeniable power of social media and spread links to your website by dropping in on Twitter or Facebook. Populate your Twitter stream with links to useful content within your site, or better still, get the job done faster via Ping.fm.

4. Meta tag “optimization”

Once upon a time, stuffing meta tags with keywords was placed higher in an SEO professional’s to-do list but today, Google has made it clear that they don’t pay much attention to it.

Alternative: To better optimize your website, you should take initiative to fill in the appropriate categories and insert proper tags. This sure beats finding (or worse, buying!) plugins that will automate the meta tagging and description process.

5. Link exchanging

Almost everyone does this, but not everyone knows that Google frowns upon this act. It is deemed a violation and if you regularly participate in link exchanging schemes, it is best to quit while you’re ahead.

Alternative: Why not exchange testimonials with business vendors you’re working with? That way, you’ll instantly gain a link to your website (and possible recognition and perhaps, more leads?). If this is not a win-win situation, I don’t know what is!

They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, but did you know that it can be a savvy business strategy as well? Business history is filled with stories of companies who imitated others and became more successful than the original innovator. Coca Cola, for example, took the diet soda idea from RC Cola, while MacDonald’s copied the fast food concept from White Castle.

In SEO, imitation is also a valuable marketing trick. With this article, I hope to show you how to harness imitation to help you get the best results.

Keyword Research – Use The Wisdom of EzineArticles Crowds

Ezine writers are usually aiming for long tail keywords, which can often be found in the titles. By reading through Ezine article titles, you can find great keyword ideas. Just type “keyword site:ezinearticles.com” without the quotation marks and take note of the results. For example, here’s what comes up when I search for the keyword “learn seo”. (For more results, I selected the “results in the past week or month” option in Google’s “more search tools” menu)
See? You now have several ideas for excellent keywords.

Competitor’s Links – If they’re Commenting on a High-Profile Blog, They Must be Doing the Same for Other High-Profile Blogs

According to my experience, if people are commenting on one do-follow PR7+ blog (as an example), they are also commenting on other do-follow PR7+ blogs. This also applies to other kinds of platforms.

So how can you use this knowledge? Go to Open Site Explorer url, enter the root domain into the field, and select “links from external pages only” and “to all pages of the root domain”, and also “Followed+301” if you prefer, then sort the results by domain authority. You will find that the resulting url format is www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.domain.com/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!domain.

A bit complicated isn’t it? There’s an easier way to do it. Instead of going through the whole process, you can simply take the url and add a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!domain at the end. You can now find some easy-to-get links from authority domains.

Discover Similar Keywords Where Your Competitors Rank For

Use SEMRush to find other keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for. With the free version of SEMRush, you can see up to ten of these keywords that a domain is ranking for. Using these highly searched keywords for your own site will help you compete with high ranking pages with the same topic.

There are some people who have expressed concern about the problems that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page may cause. The popular belief is that only duplicates can be allowed to use the rel=”canonical” specification, and that it’s a strict “don’t” for the original. This is actually a misconception. Let me help you understand it with some diagrams.

This is the standard way of using rel=canonical. When your content appears in different places, rel=canonical tells the search engine where the original version of a post is. But you can also do this:

It won’t harm the system. Googler Maile Ohye answers the question this way:

@Wade: Yes, it’s absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel=”canonical”. It won’t harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you.

So there you have it — there’s no reason for concern. In fact, using rel=canonical on the original page has another advantage: it makes sure Google indexes your page’s http rather than https version and attributes links  to the proper one.

It is not a particularly well known concept amongst certain webmasters, but it is essential to have a clean and crawlable website structure. Without this in place, from an SEO point of view, you are heading for dangerous territory. The reason is simple. If your site cannot crawled and indexed, then you won’t be able to consider other aspects of SEO, such as content optimization and link building techniques.

During the course of most SEO initial audits, it often becomes clear that canonicalisation becomes a hot topic of discussion. Canonicalisation is the process that prevents the site from displaying the same information at more than one URL. Basically it is in your interest to minimise, or preferably eliminate, the number of URLs that have the same content – or face the consequences of duplicate content issues.

There are a number of different ways that a site can present canonical issues, and as an SEO practitioner, you will need a plan to tackle these. For example, do you see your site resolving with both the non-www and the www, or perhaps with the http and https headings? Maybe some folders are resolving with or without the trailing slashes? The solution for handling these types of canonical issues generally includes 301 permanent redirecting requests, which redirect potential duplicate content to the ‘canonical’ URL. As mentioned above, the non-www version of the page would then be redirected to the www version.

RewriteCond Host: ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.yourdomain\.com$1 [I,RP]

Redirect importance
A decent redirect system is important to have in place for aspects other than just canonical issues. Recently I was involved in the redesign of site for a client, which involved moving core pieces of content including product landing pages, which resulted in new URLs. It was vital that each page was mapped, so that a permanent 301 redirect was put into place to transfer visitors via the old URL to the new one.

RewriteRule /oldpage.htm http://www.mysite.com/newpage.htm [I,O,RP,L]

When I say visitors, I am not only referring to the human kind. Search spiders will also follow these header requests, and if incorrectly written (or not written at all) will deliver an error message – a poor user experience, and one that can be costly in Organic search.

ISAPI Rewrite: .htaccess for the Windows environment
How do you address the canonical issues that have been mentioned? Checking Google for these problems overwhelmingly returns references to .htaccess and mod_rewrite. These are great solutions, but rely on the site being hosted on an Apache server. What if you are using a Windows environment to host the site? There is now a solution available, which is relatively easy to install and implement – it is called ISAPI Rewrite. Version 2 uses an httpd.ini file, and allows you to add your rewriting rules, it much the same way that you would if using an .htaccess file. Version 3 has been produced to mimic .htaccess for Apache. The developers realized how popular .htaccess for Apache had become and developed a solution that allows you to write exactly the same code for both platforms. This was a smart move, on their part, as it enabled developer s to port the same code from one platform to another with minimum fuss.

ISAPI Rewrite is available at a reasonable cost – a single user license can be purchased for $99, with a better cost available on a shared hosting plan.

Bio

Peter is a SEO consultant and works with a van leasing company in the UK

How many people can’t do without an occasional visit to a beauty salon when they are in need of feeling refreshed? How many others visit gyms on a regular basis to keep themselves fit and agile? The answer is, of course, many people do either or both of these things. All very understandable, this makes it all the more strange that the very same people are happy to let their website go stagnate.

A business’s website is the digital equivalent of a shop window, even if the business does not sell actual products. It is where potential customers or clients come to see what the business can offer. And just like the local fruit shop, if the contents are stale and unappetizing, they will move on to see what the competition has to offer.

While many people quite correctly concentrate on website content, many fall into the trap of letting their website content go stale. What is important to remember is that if a website does not change over time – no matter how great some of its content may be – it will begin to look tired and dull. Not to mention the fact that search engines love fresh content!

If you have neglected your site lately, what is needed is a website content makeover or a bit of spring cleaning. Like all things that are familiar it can be difficult to see what others see, which is why it may well make sense to use an external company to help refresh your site. They will see the site with “fresh eyes” and will be able to offer constructive feedback that will almost certainly more than repay any fee charged.

Before approaching any external company, it is always worth trying to cast a fresh eye yourself over your site and look for some key points.

· Review your keywords. Try to put yourself in the position of a potential customer and imagine what terms they will key into a search engine. When you’ve made a list, make sure these terms are featured on the site, ideally as meta titles, in your meta descriptions, throughout your H1-5′s, and within the content too. Don’t neglect internal links either! If you already know your keywords, why not perform some keyword research and make sure those keywords haven’t changed. More than likely you might find a few more keywords to target, and others that aren’t performing to take off your site. Tools: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, and SEMRush.com.

· One of the most basic things to look at is whether the site is easy to navigate. Complicated graphics, unreadable font, and hidden menus are all very artistic, but can prove very frustrating for anyone browsing the site. Simple navigation is crucial.

· Look at the actual content. Is it of a high standard and written in a clear, simple style that is easy to understand? If not, re-write it and if you don’t feel confident doing this, hire a writer to make sure it’s as good as it can be. A modest investment here can make all the difference. Remember: look at who will be reading the content, and put yourself in their shoes. If you are too ‘close’ to the subject at hand, you might just miss something.

· Remind yourself exactly what it is you want your website to accomplish and then ask a friend or business associate to look over the site. Ask them what they think you’re trying to achieve and see if your ideas match. If they don’t, it’s time for a makeover.

· Finally, check out the websites of your competition to see what they’re doing wrong (as well as right) and make sure you learn from their mistakes. Look for any ideas to help you improve.

Following these points will ensure you are on the right track to a website makeover and website spring cleaning that will both enliven your website content and help increase business through search engine optimizing.

Bio:

Steve Lazuka is the owner of Interact Media, a business blog writing service based in Ohio. His knowledge of content writing and experience has proven successful for both clients and his own site. He also writes on his company blog and provides useful information for content marketers.