On Page SEO, The Steps to Page 1
This is the question gets asked most often when we meet with clients. How do you do SEO? The answer is very complex it is something that I can talk for hours about. But let’s dive in to give you a rough idea what the countless hours are put towards. First, let’s take a look at the periodic table of SEO. This is what our marketing agency in Toronto goes over when we start new projects.
As you see this works as a regular periodic table. It shows you the most important parts of SEO in the “Factors Work Together” section of the table. Let’s divide this into two sections On page SEO and there will be another post for the Off-page SEO.
On page SEO:
In other words, this simply means everything internal on the website. Such as the code and all the content on it. In order for you to rank this must be optimized to the max before you even begin doing off page SEO. As you can see in the table the most important is the content. This essentially is everything you have on the site, such as articles and images. The content cannot be spammy it has to be relating to your website. As an example, a fitness site cannot have content that is totally irrelevant to the industry like writing about architecture. Not only that but is the content well written? The Google crawler has evolved many times over the years and now it can even tell how well the article is written. Do you have spelling or grammar mistakes? Does the article make sense? Does it really answer the question that is being presented? It can even crawl images, it understands what each image is and if it related to the article. If you are discussing a new technique for gaining muscle then it would be irrelevant for you to use car pictures for example. Google knows all this, at all times you have to keep this in consideration when developing content for the site.
This is why for our digital agency when we take on new clients we always include a blog in the SEO package. It really helps you stand out. It shows Google that you truly care about your online presence. In Google’s eyes, they will rank you if they see that you present value. As long as you do that you’re in the good books.
Crawling this is crucial, the number of clients that come to us always have the biggest issue with this. The crawler is a robot that goes all over the sites and finds content. If it can’t understand the content on the site, then your SEO effort will go down the trash. Content helps you rank, but crawlers determine your ranking.
It is very crucial that your websites have a silo structure. The Crawler almost always goes in from the home page and then branches out to sub-pages. What you have to do is make sure all your pages are linked properly so that the crawler can go over the whole site. Because guess what? If a crawler goes to a broken link it will stop there and not see any more pages. While those pages can be crucial to your success. To see how your site structure looks download a software called Screaming Frog.
This software imitates a crawler and shows you how Google see your website from the crawlers eyes. This is a great tool to fix your website map and find broken pages, links etc. Not only that but it also shows you missing title tags, H1 tags along with meta descriptions and alt tags.
Now the third section of on page SEO, if your not a developer you might not know what the title and meta description is. The image above shows us just that. The title should sum up what that certain page is about, while the meta tag is simply a more detailed description of what the page is about. These are the places where you want to jam pack with keywords.
In the example above a person searched for “Saturday Night Live” now take a look at the first result. It has a direct match, not only in the title but also in the description. The title and meta tag are crucial to rankings as that’s where you need to put the keywords that you wish to rank for.
Next is the H1 tag, this is done in the code of the website. It defines what is important in order, the H1 tag is most important and it has a higher font size. The lower you go down the smaller is the text size and the less importance it has. It is pivotal to have keywords in the H1 tag as ones again that’s how the users will find you.
The title tag, meta tag, and h1 tags are all done by developers. With our SEO service, we always do a site audit with screaming frog to determine what needs to be fixed. Then we either fix it our self or at enterprise levels, we always get the development team to implement the changes.
Search Engine Optimization is a very long process but if done correctly it will prove itself in the long run. It is your long-term cure rather than a symptom remover like PPC(Pay Per Click). If you want to rank and stay there we are your agency! With top experts in the field, we only practice white hat SEO that will keep you ranking for the long term.
If you would like to get a free site audit send us an email and we will get back to you promptly. Visit our services page to see what else we can offer you.
