Keyword Research & On-
Page Optimization
Keyword Research
The first step in SEO optimization for any website is Keyword Research.
Google’s Keyword Planner Tool helps in researching & building the list of
keywords you can target for your website.
To start with Keyword Research, use one or more seed keywords and find more
related keywords using the Keyword Planner Tool.
Keywords can be selected based on Search Volumes and Competition level.
Keyword Research (contd.)
For new websites, it is often difficult to rank for popular keywords. In such
cases, you can start with long tail keywords. E.g. If your popular keyword is
Digital Camera, your long tail keyword could be How to use Digital Camera
You can research keywords based on location/country.
You can exclude certain words from the keyword suggestions by including them
in negative keywords.
Apart from Keyword Planner Tool, you can do a Google search with the seed
keyword as search query and find the keywords your competitors are using in
the Titles and Descriptions.
On-Page Optimization
Meta Tags
Title and Descriptions are the most important meta tags.
Title can be 60-80 characters long.
Descriptions can be 160-200 characters long
Avoid using stop words like “in”, “the”, ”at” etc in Meta Tags.
URL Structure:
Hyphens to be used to separate the keywords. Underscores
act as characters.
Shorter the URLs with the right keywords, better SEO
friendliness.
URL Structures tells Google the hierarchical structure of your
website.
Internal Linking & Hyperlinks:
All pages of the website must be linked from at least one
page (self linking excluded)
If a page is not linked from any of the website pages, Users
and Search Engine Bots will not be able to reach the
page.
Hyperlinks much have 2 attributes which can be made SEO
friendly: Anchor Text & Title Attribute (Tool tip)
Image Optmization:
Image name: Name of the image must have the keyword
associated with the image E.g. canon-digital-camera.jpg
Image Size: Smaller the image size (in Kbs), better load time
for the page.
Alt text: This attribute is a description for the image. Since
Google cannot read the image content, the Alt text aids in
understanding what the image is about.
Breadcrumb:
This section is either included in the upper section of the
page or footer section.
It tells about the hierarchical structure of the website and the
current page.
It helps in creating internal linking for the pages.
Breadcrumb is a user friendly URL structure on SERP.
Canonicalization:
If you have multiple URLs with the same content and serving
the same purpose to the users, they can be canonicalized.
Multiple URLs with same content result in duplicacy. To avoid
this duplicacy, all the URLs can be set to a single
canonical URL. This will tell Google that, instead of
considering all URLs, the single canonical URL can be
considered for indexing and ranking.
Robots.txt and robots meta tag:
Robots is used to block a page from Google Index.
Robots.txt is a file which has to be placed in the root folder of
the website. It consists of user agents for which the pages
need to be blocked and directory/folder path which has to
be blocked.
Robots meta tag is placed within the <head> </head> tag of
the page which needs to be blocked from Google.
Keyword Optimization:
The text content of a page must have the keywords you are targeting for the
page.
Keyword Stuffing: Avoid stuffing the keyword in the content. I.e. avoid
mentioning it more than 4-5 times in a 400 word text content.
Keyword Density: Density of a keyword shouldn’t be more than 4-5% including
close synonyms.
Keyword Prominence: Keywords should be strategically placed in the content.
Keyword in the beginning will help rank better. If the content is of 3
paragraphs, the keyword should be mentioned once in every paragraph.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI):Using the synonym of the main keyword or
using words which are closely related to the seed keyword, will help the
website rank better.
Heading Tags:
Heading tags are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 with the most
importance given to H1, then H2 and so on.
Main Heading of the page can be set in H1. Subtitle can be
set in H2.
Including all Heading tags is not mandatory.
Page Load Time:
Time taken to load the page should be minimized.
Optimization techniques for the page can be found on
Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool.
Higher load time leads to lower ranks on Search.
Mobile Friendliness:
A responsive website is always preferred over unresponsive
one.
If you wish to make your website unresponsive, then create a
mobile version for it and set it in the alternate tag of your
website. With this alternate tag, Google would know what
the mobile version of your website is.
Structured Data:
Structured data refers to organized data. When information is highly
structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize
and display it in creative ways.
Structured data can be applied to Businesses with name, address,
contact number, user reviews and more details. Similarly, it can also
be applied to Movies, Restaurants, Books etc.
Breadcrumb can also have Structured Data with specifications about
hierarchy and position.
User friendly 404 page:
If user lands on the page which doesn’t exist, instead
of showing a the default 404 page, you can
customize your 404 page to make it user friendly
and retain the users.
Retaining the users on the website will result in lower
Bounce Rate which will inturn make your website
SEO friendly.
HTTPs
A secure website is one of the factors to rank well on Google.HTTPs website
are given more importance than HTTP websites.
If you own an HTTP website you might find the referral visits getting tracked in
direct. Any referral visit from HTTPs website to HTTP website is considered
as a direct visit. However, a referral visit from HTTPs website to HTTPs
website. So consider making your website as HTTPs one.
Open Graph Tag & Twitter Cards
Open Graph tags and Twitter cards are used for specifying
Details about the page to be displayed when shared on
Facebook and Twitter respectively.
Title, Description, Image, URL are some of the attributes
which can be specified for the tags.
XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps in XML format are Search engine friendly as it
mentions all the required attributes about the URLs.
Attributes for the URLs include: Priority, Change Frequency,
Last Modified date.
You can also include Images and Videos along with their
caption and description in the sitemaps to let Google know
and crawl them efficiently.
Thank You ...
