Onsite Optimisation

Question 1

Transferring your keyword research on page

Answer 1

• Survey your keywords and group those with similar topics and intent. Those groups will be your pages, rather than creating individual pages for every keyword variation.
• If you haven’t done so already, evaluate the SERP for each keyword or group of keywords to determine what type and format your content should be. Some characteristics of ranking pages to take note of:
  Are they image- or video-heavy?
  Is the content long-form or short and concise?
  Is the content formatted in lists, bullets, or paragraphs?
  Ask yourself, “What unique value could I offer to make my page better than the pages that are currently ranking for my keyword?”

Question 2

Low-value tactics to avoid in on-page SEO

Answer 2

Your content should be there to answer questions that searchers have. The content on your site should also give users are clear understanding of what your site has to offer. Content should be made first and foremost with the user in mind. Examples of low-value tactics include:

• Thin content
• Duplicate content
• Cloaking
• Keyword Stuffing
• Auto Generated Content

Question 3

What is thin content?

Answer 3

• For example, if you were selling bridal dresses, you might have created individual pages for bridal gowns, bridal dresses, wedding gowns, and wedding dresses, even if each page was essentially saying the same thing. A similar tactic for local businesses was to create multiple pages of content for each city or region from which they wanted clients. These “geo pages” often had the same or very similar content, with the location name being the only unique factor.
• Google addressed the thin content problem with the Panda update in 2011
• Google is clear on the idea that you should have a comprehensive page on a topic instead of a series of weaker pages for every variation of your keyword.

Question 4

What is duplicate content?

Answer 4

Just as it sounds, duplicate content refers to content that has been shared across domains or between multiple URLs. “Scraped Content” goes one step further and includes the blatant and unauthorised use of content from other sites. This can include taking content and republishing as-is, or modifying it slightly before republishing, without adding any original content or value.

There can be legitimate reasons for cross-domain duplicate content. Google recommends the use of rel=canonical tag to point to the original version of the web content

Question 5

Debunking the duplicate content penalty myth

Answer 5

You won’t receive a Google penalty like Manual Action from Google, what Google will do though is filter all duplicate versions of the content in the SERP and will show the canonical version of the content to improve the user experience.

Question 6

What is cloaking?

Answer 6

Another tenet of search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine’s crawlers that you’d show to a human visitor. This means that you should never hide text in the HTML code of your website that a normal visitor can’t see.

Sometimes hidden text can be used for positive reasons. Maybe text that makes the page look better and more attractive. You can find out more about how Google handles hidden text in the Moz whiteboard Friday https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text

Question 7

What exactly is keyword stuffing?

Answer 7

Don’t go along with the mindset of “I just need to include a certain keyword X number of times”. Google does take the keyword being mentioned into account, but you also need to add more value to the content aside from just adding the keyword. Keyword stuffing really is the idea of just repeating your keyword time and time again.

Question 8

Auto-generated content

Answer 8

Somehow people can get auto-generated content that just ends up being a string of words mashed together.

Question 9

How should you write your content

Answer 9

Here’s a simple formula for content creation:

• Search the keyword(s) you want your page to rank for
• Identify which pages are ranking highly for those keywords
• Determine what qualities those pages possess
• Create content that’s better than that

Question 10

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Answer 10

If you already have good, quality content on your site that has performed well, try and revamp it for different platforms.

Question 11

A note for local businesses

Answer 11

If you’re a business that makes in-person contact with your customers, be sure to include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) prominently, accurately, and consistently throughout your site’s content.

This info is often displayed in the footer of a site as well as any contact businesses. You’ll also want to mark up this information using local business schema.

If you are a multi-location business, it’s best to build unique pages for each location. Each page should be uniquely optimised for each location. You should even list testimonials that are specific to the particular location. If there are hundreds or many locations, a store locator widget might be the best option to help you scale

Question 12

Some extra on-page factors to consider

Answer 12

• Make sure you only have one standalone header tag
• Internal link structure - more can be understood here https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
• Image Optimisation
• Submit a sitemap
• Formatting for readability and featured snippets
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• URL structure - naming and organising your pages
• Links to pages that are only accessible through the nav can’t be crawled by search engines, so make sure that you have links on page as well.
• Don’t overdo it with the anchor text (on page links) as engines might see this as you trying to manipulate rankings

Question 13

According to Moz, how many links do Google say you should limit to on your page?

Answer 13

A few thousand at most apparently. I think they’re referring to the overall number of internal links here, I’m not sure. Only link when you mean it basically, there is only so much equity that can go around

Question 14

Examples of image optimisation tools

Answer 14

Tinypng or whatever, Optimizilla or ImageOptium for Mac
FileOptimizer (Download)
Online interfac
pngquant

Question 15

Thumbnails especially on ECommerce

Answer 15

Don’t forget to optimise these images as well, they can be a real slow down

Question 16

Making sure that non - sighted web searchers can also interact with your site can be very important for SEO

Answer 16

Accessibility also lends itself to SEO and sometimes you can improve SEO by improving accessibility. MOZ to a guide here: https://moz.com/blog/accessibility-seo-1

Question 17

More resource on Google’s Accessibility guidelines can be found here, including fonts, sizes and so on

Answer 17

https: //www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm
https: //developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/

Question 18

Formatting for SEO

Answer 18

• Text size and color - Avoid fonts that are too tiny. Google recommends 16-point font and above to minimize the need for “pinching and zooming” on mobile. The text color in relation to the page’s background color should also promote readability. -Additional information on text can be found in the website accessibility guidelines and via Google’s web accessibility fundamentals.
• Headings - Breaking up your content with helpful headings can help readers navigate the page. This is especially useful on long pages where a reader might be looking only for information from a particular section.
• Bullet points - Great for lists, bullet points can help readers skim and more quickly find the information they need.
• Paragraph breaks - Avoiding walls of text can help prevent page abandonment and encourage site visitors to read more of your page.
• Supporting media - When appropriate, include images, videos, and widgets that would complement your content.
• Bold and italics for emphasis - Putting words in bold or italics can add emphasis, so they should be the exception, not the rule. Appropriate use of these formatting options can call out important points you want to communicate.

Question 19

Formatting can also determine whether you appear in position 0 within a featured snippet

Answer 19

There is no special code that you can add to your page to show up here, nor can you pay for this placement, but taking note of the query intent can help you better structure your content for featured snippets. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “cake vs. pie,” it might make sense to include a table in your content, with the benefits of cake in one column and the benefits of pie in the other. Or if you’re trying to rank for “best restaurants to try in Portland,” that could indicate Google wants a list, so formatting your content in bullets could help.

Question 20

What makes an effective title tag

Answer 20

• Keyword usage: Having your target keyword in the title can help both users and search engines understand what your page is about. Also, the closer to the front of the title tag your keywords are, the more likely a user will be to read them (and hopefully click) and the more helpful they can be for ranking.
  Length: On average, search engines display the first 50–60 characters (~512 pixels) of a title tag in search results. If your title tag exceeds the characters allowed on that SERP, an ellipsis “…” will appear where the title was cut off. While sticking to 50–60 characters is safe, never sacrifice quality for strict character counts. If you can’t get your title tag down to 60 characters without harming its readability, go longer (within reason).
  Branding: At Moz, we love to end our title tags with a brand name mention because it promotes brand awareness and creates a higher click-through rate among people who are familiar with Moz. Sometimes it makes sense to place your brand at the beginning of the title tag, such as on your homepage, but be mindful of what you’re trying to rank for and place those words closer toward the beginning of your title tag.

Question 21

Placement of keywords in title tags

Answer 21

Moz suggest that you put the keywords you’re trying to rank for closer to the beginning of your title tag. Brand names at the beginning of the title tag for things like the homepage might be ok, but for other things you might want to put your brand at the end

Question 22

What makes an effective meta description?

Answer 22

The qualities that make an effective title tag also apply to effective meta descriptions. Although Google says that meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, like title tags, they are incredibly important for click-through rate.

• Relevance: Meta descriptions should be highly relevant to the content of your page, so it should summarize your key concept in some form. You should give the searcher enough information to know they’ve found a page relevant enough to answer their question, without giving away so much information that it eliminates the need to click through to your web page.
  Length: Search engines tend to truncate meta descriptions to around 155 characters. It’s best to write meta descriptions between 150–300 characters in length. On some SERPs, you’ll notice that Google gives much more real estate to the descriptions of some pages. This usually happens for web pages ranking right below a featured snippet.

Question 23

A note on URL naming conventions

Answer 23

Obviously people are going to prefer to click on URLs that have clear, relevant titles that make sense to what they searched. Make sure each page has a decent name.

Question 24

What happened in the EMD updated ages ago?

Answer 24

Basically, Google changed the algorithm slightly to make it so that domains with search terms in their title would no longer show up, if they’re low quality that is.

Question 25

Page Organisation

Answer 25

You must make sure that your site is properly structured with certain posts appearing in appropriate folders. This means grouping content together if necessary to make it easier for people to search for on-site or also making it easier for search engines to crawl by type of your content.

Question 26

URL Length

Answer 26

Studies have shown that shorter URLs have better CTR, but don’t sacrifice a good, descriptive URL for a shorter one without having a good think about it first. It seems that having granular naming conventions is the best way to go with URLs, as long as the convention makes sense. Don’t date your URL folders with months and years as the content might become irrelevant when it is still evergreen.

Question 27

URL Keyword Stuffing

Answer 27

Be careful when using a prefix for all of your folders. Something like

dental-accessories/dental braces/dental-gum-braces can start to make engines think that you’re stuffing

Question 28

Static URLs

Answer 28

The best URLs are those that can easily be read by humans, so you should avoid the overuse of parameters, numbers, and symbols. Using technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs like this:

http://moz.com/blog?id=123
into a more readable static version like this:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Question 29

Hyphens for word separation

Answer 29

Not all web applications can accurately read separators like underscores and percentage marks, so use hyphens instead.

Question 30

You shouldn’t have case sensitive URLs

Answer 30

You can change uppercase to the best practice of lower case by using a rewrite formula to the .htaccess file to automatically make any uppercase URLs lowercase.

Question 31

Geographic Moderators in URLs

Answer 31

It’s vital that clients use geographic moderators in their URLs which includes using neighbourhoods, regions, counties and cities and so on…

The search engine won’t do this for you

Question 32

Try and make sure that the URL has HTTPS

Answer 32

You will need to sort out your Secure Sockets Layer for this as it encrypts data processed on your site.

HTTP/2 is an upgrade from HTTP but I think HTTPS is still better