General On-Site SEO
- ARTICLES |
Now we are going to get into putting an onsite SEO strategy into practice. I said in the video that SEO is not as easy as it was five years ago, in large part due to the challenges presented by Panda and Penguin that we just talked about.
However, you have some tools available to you now that were not available several years ago and can really help simplify your SEO efforts and make them more effective. One of those tools is this SEO module. Another, very powerful tool that my students and I all have used with great success is the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy. I'm going to briefly show you how to find and install this plugin in WordPress, then get into using it in your SEO strategy.
Installing the High Traffic Academy Plugin
To install High Traffic Academy, or any other WordPress plugin, start by going to the Plugins menu in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard, as shown in the image above.
From there, the easiest way to find the right plugin is to search for the term "High Traffic Academy" in the search box:
That search should return the plugin we are looking for as the first result.
Install the plugin. (Never mind that the screenshot says it is already installed. In that space, you will have a link directing you to install.)
Done! Now that you have installed the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin, you can access it settings from its own menu on the sidebar.
This plugin is quite powerful and has a lot of settings, so you may want to take the included tutorial at some point. In the mean time, though, I will show you how the High Traffic Academy plugin fits into our strategy, starting with keyword density.
Keyword Density With WordPress SEO by High Traffic Academy
Keyword density is an very important part of any effective SEO strategy, but it's not just about inserting a keyword into your content at every opportunity. There's a great deal of finesse involved.
Back in the post-Panda/Penguin section, I told you about how keyword stuffing is a no-no with Google these days. Content that is saturated with keywords is poor, so Panda doesn't like it and keyword stuffing is a form of web spam, so Penguin doesn't like it, either. It's a double whammy!
Of course, you can't very well have no targeted keywords on your site - how will you capture your audience? What you need to do is hit a "sweet spot" of keyword density, which is about 1-3%. So, if you have a 500 page article or landing page, your target keyword should appear 5-15 times for it to be indexed optimally. Anything more than 4.5% is excessive and could be penalized.
Rather than count appearances of a keyword, then manually calculate keyword density - which would be ridiculous - we can use our new WordPress plugin to do it for us.
After installing the plugin, whenever you start a new post or page in WordPress, you will see its widget sitting below the text entry box:
This is where you enter your target keyword for this page, so that the plugin can analyze it for you. You can also specify an SEO title and meta description for display in search results. (Note: in this example, the snippet preview is obliterated so as not to have the domain or site name detract from the screenshot. Ordinarily you will see a preview for your page there.)
Once you have entered a focus keyword and written some content, the plugin can run an SEO analysis on it. Just save your post as a draft and click on the "Page Analysis" tab, which will show you something like this:
Here you can see all kinds of analysis and statistics of your post and how it holds up against important SEO parameters: meta description, keyword density, slug length, page title length, readability, outbound links, alt tags and overall word count.
In this particular screenshot, I've emphasized the keyword density. For this post, our keyword density is too low at less than 0.7%. Google and other search engines will still index this site, it will still be associated with this keyword and it won't get dinged for keyword stuffing, but the density is far from optimal. But, since we have the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin working for us, we get to know that right away, so we can make revisions before publishing.
So, let's say we go back and either revise the content to include more instances of our focus keyword or change the focus keyword to run some new analysis. After that, we might see an SEO analysis that looks different.
Now the figures on keyword density jump to the top of the analysis and have a scary red button next to them instead of the slightly friendlier amber one we saw above. This is because we've over corrected - our keyword density is now too high. It's not ridiculously high at less than a percentage point over the recommended maximum, but it's still at a level we want to avoid. Search engines may not look favorably on our content with that level of density.
The good news is that we didn't make anything else worse in the process. All our other stats are the same as they were or better. But let's fix that keyword density problem:
Now we're where we want to be - our keyword appears eight times in a 581 word post, for a keyword density of 1.38%. We've managed to put together content that is keyword rich without appearing spammy, which will help this site in its ascent up the search results.
The WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy makes this process easy, so that we have to dedicate much less time to thinking about keyword density and more time focusing on content that is relevant, unique and overall good, which is the main consideration for taking advantage of Panda.
Next we'll talk about how to use images in your content as a way to bolster SEO.
Images and Alt Tags
Images are an important part of site content. They break up large chunks of text, making the layout more friendly to the eye. They give people something to look at, so they will spend more time on our site, which is an important part of SEO these days. They also give people an idea of what kind of content they can expect before they begin reading, so they can reasonably decide whether to spend their time on it or not.
All these factors play into keeping peoples attention and holding audiences on your site, but images can also play big role in attracting people to your site. This is because search engines index the alt tags associated with images on a site. Before we talk about what how that works, let's first briefly touch on what an alt tag is.
The alt tag is part of how objects are described in HTML and XHTML code. Strictly speaking, alt is not actually a tag, but an attribute. We call it a tag because we are used to things like meta tags and title tags already, but it's actually not. However, if you call it an alt tag, everyone will know what you're talking about, and since that what it is commonly called, that is the terminology we are going to use here.
The alt tag is used to describe a non-textual element that cannot be rendered from the underlying code through the interpreter. You don't see alt tags on the sites you visit every day on the web because they are hidden in code, but they are there most of the time.
Now, I'm not saying that associating an alt tag with an image on your site will propel you to the top of the Google heap; there are plenty of other reasons that ranks this highly. What I am saying, however, is that an SEO strategy that doesn't include alt tags as part of its focus is an incomplete strategy.
To take advantage of alt tags on your own site, you will have to get your hands a little dirty with some HTML code, but it's very easy to do once you know how. As an example, let's say you are putting up a post on your blog to target the keyword "summer vacation." Maybe you are selling a travel ebook and you want to grab an audience of jet setters who are looking for summer destinations. So, you put a post like this one:
You have about 400 words there, you have a relevant image and you made sure to include your keyword throughout the content. (Just so we're clear, do not put up lorem ipsum text with a target keyword sprinkled throughout and expect good search results. I realize that goes without saying, but I would hate to be responsible for starting a bad habit.)
Now, to put that image to work for us in search results, we're going to edit the alt tag your target keyword, "summer vacation." To do that, click over to the "HTML" tab of the WordPress editor. There, you can see the raw code of your post.
Here we can see all the attributes for that image, including the alt tag, which is currently empty. That's not a surprise; we haven't put on in yet. Since the cursor is already in the right place in the above screenshot, let's go ahead and write an alt tag which will contain our target keyword, "summer vacation":
That's it. Your image has an optimized alt tag and is ready to go. We can confirm that our alt tag is there and that it matches our target keyword by looking at the SEO analysis in the High Traffic Academy plugin.
There it is, friendly green light and all. Now, when someone searches for "summer vacation," not only will Google index our site and find the body of this post, but also the image's alt tag, which boosts our spot in the rankings. And we even managed a keyword density of almost 2% on this post! Now we're cooking.
Now that you know how to handle keyword density and put image alt tags to work for you, let's discuss how to title and describe your content in ways that search engines will like, using the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin.
Title Tags
The title tag is just what you would think it is from the name: the title of a page or post on a site. Not surprisingly, this is one of the biggest factors affecting SEO. A good, appealing title means a higher ranking from search engines and more clickthroughs from SERPs.
What makes a good title? We're going to use the WordPress SEO plugin to help us determine that.
Looking back at the analysis of our summer vacation post, we see a few bullets related to the title.
You can see that the plugin is telling us two things about our title: it is a good length for SEO, but it would be better structured if the keyword phrase was at the beginning. Recall that the title of this post is, "4 Tips for a Great Summer Vacation" and the target keyword is "summer vacation."
So, we have title that is of a good length but not a good structure. Let's see what happens when we bring the target keyword to the front by changing the title to "Summer Vacation: 4 Tips for a Great Getaway."
There we go! Now your title is optimized to appear in results for the search term "summer vacation." People are more likely to get to this site when they search that phrase than they were before we fixed up the title with the plugin's help.
Just for contrast, let's take a look at what the analysis would look like on a bad title for this target keyword. We'll remove the "summer vacation" keyword and make the title long and unwieldy: "Fourteen Tips to Keep You and Your Family Busy While You Take Time Off This Summer."
Obviously, that analysis doesn't look very good. Our keyword is no longer in the title, which will hurt us in search results. The title is now longer than the displayable limit of 70 characters, so potential audiences won't even be able to see the full title, which makes them less likely to click. And, as an additional problem, by changing the post title, we also changed the URL, so now the keyword phrase is not there, either. It will be difficult for this post to get any kind of high ranking.
Fortunately, thanks to the High Traffic Academy plugin, we know these things and we can fix them before the post goes live. Even better, the plugin will alert us to some of these problems right up front in the 'General' tab, without even having to look at the analysis.
That tells us right up front that the keyword is not in the title or the URL, and we can see from the snippet preview that the title is way too long. The WordPress SEO plugin makes this whole process simpler and puts the data right in front of you, so you can tune your SEO strategy much faster.
The next thing we're going to get into is the last item in that red box from the last screenshot: meta tags. Right now, this post has no meta description, which won't work in your favor with search engines. The next section will go over meta tags and how to put them to work for you, again using the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy.
Meta Tags
After covering alt tags and title tags, the final kind of tag we're going to discuss here are meta tags. Like alt tags, meta tags are technically not tags - in code speak, they're elements. But, just like alt tags they are commonly called tags and that has become accepted nomenclature in marketing circles, so that's the terminology we will use here.
Plus, it makes it easier to remember when implementing your SEO strategy to just remember the three tags: alt, title and meta.
So what is a meta tag? Essentially, it's a piece of data about a web page tat is outside the scope of its header, content or other major components. By default, it is blank, but it can contain a description, keywords or really any other data we want. The most common place you see meta tags are in snippets displayed on SERPs.
Everything encircled in red - aside from the date - is a meta description of that page. You can see that "MacBook" is in bold, which means that when searching for "MacBook Air," Google indexed this meta tag and returned the article as a result.
Like title tags, meta tags are important to your viewership for two reasons. First, a meta tag that contains the target keyword has better chance at a good ranking for that keyword. And second, a meta tag this is clear and descriptive elicits more clickthroughs.
Let's look at how to optimize meta tags with the WordPress SEO plugin that we have been using. When we last left our summer vacation post, the plugin was showing a "General" tab.
It's pretty clear from the bright red spots where we need to focus our efforts next: meta tags.
(Don't worry about those other amber dots in the above screenshot for now. They are important for SEO, but they are pretty self-explanatory and continue to show up here because of the nature of the content of our sample post.)
As that red bullet tells us, when a meta tag is empty, the SERP will display copy from the page instead, usually the first 140 characters of the page. The problem with this is that those characters will rarely include our target keyword, or even a reasonable portent of what a visitor can expect. So, the page suffers in rankings and gets passed over by users.
Instead of resigning ourselves to that, let's include a meta tag. The SEO plugin makes it easy by giving us a clearly labeled box in which to enter our meta tag. So, let's put one in, making sure to include our keyword:
That brief description gets out target keyword out there, and provides potential readers with a good reason to click through and read the content. To verify that we passed the SEO test, let's look at the plugin's analysis.
We're good to go! And with that, we have turned this post from being a run-of-the-mill, easily passed over dud to a solid piece of a larger SEO strategy. Search engines will find this page and direct users to it much more readily than they would have when we first started, and thanks to this one WordPress plugin, we were able to do it quickly and easily.
That will do it for the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy for now, but before we get into the role and importance of content, there are two other onsite SEO topics we should discuss. Namely, we have to briefly touch on site structure and common problems that need to be resolved with onsite SEO.
A Few Words About Site Structure
We won't delve deeply into site structure, because it will come up again when we talk about problems to resolve in the next section, and again when we talk about content in a little while. However, it does merit some mention, because now more than ever, the structure of your site matters to search engines.
Think about it: the point of Panda is to improve the average user experience when searching the web and browsing the results. It does this by dropping poor quality sites in the rankings, to the benefit of sites with a higher quality experience. Site structure is a major component of the kind of experience an end user has at a particular site.
To that end, you want a site structure that is logical, cohesive and functional. The hierarchy should flow logically, internal links should follow a sensible order and each link should take the user where it is supposed to. This actually affects SEO in two ways:
First, a good site structure is looked upon favorably by Panda, which improves your site's visibility and ability to pull in an audience.
Second, when a site is easy and enjoyable to navigate, people spend more time on it. Search engines take time on site into account as a metric when determining where your page should rank. More people spending more time on your site = better.
To keep things simple while still driving in content, I recommend a "six pages or less" approach to structuring your site content. We will discuss this in further detail in the upcoming section on content, but the structure consists of these components:
That is all you really need to get in good with search engines, attract visitors and sell your product. You can include a blog, too, if you want to keep updating with fresh content, although that lends itself to some of the SEO problems we're going to discuss momentarily.
This site structure leaves just a simple, two level hierarchy, with the main page being the parent at the top and all the other pages being one level below. It's easy to establish, maintain and navigate, and search engines will like it.
Problems to Resolve
As easy and quick as this SEO strategy is, there are still obstacles that you must be aware of and able to fix. Into each life, a little rain must fall.
In this bit, we'll discuss some common problems that people encounter when creating and maintaining a site. While these are all common, little problems that are usually the result of some small mistake or oversight, they can negatively impact your site's standing in search results if not addressed and resolved.
Common problems include:
Some of these problems are more obvious than others because they downgrade the user experience. Broken links and 404 errors are frustrating to users, because that means they can't get the content they were looking for, while a site with poor structure is difficult to navigate. Any of these will cause a user to leave your site, probably without looking back.
Because these things are difficult on the user, that means they also don't pass muster with Panda. A site that has broken links, 404s or a bad structure - the three are related - will be dinged by Panda and not be able to ascend the search rankings.
The other problems - duplicate tags and content, and missing titles - are indicators of a site that has been generate by bots. Since bots and other content generators don't have human intelligence, they often wind up churning out multiple pages of identical content, with identical metas and titles, or with titles missing completely. So, both Panda and Penguin drop sites like these in the rankings because they look spammy.
Again, this is to your advantage. Being a real person running a site with a compact structure, you have upper hand in getting favorable attention from these algorithms, rather than those with time and technology leapfrogging past you.
Now, even if things like duplicate titles happen because of an honest mistake, a site will still be punished by Panda and Penguin all the same. So, you must stay on top of these things for your site and correct them as they arise. However, if you stick to the tutorial I've outlined above for SEO strategies in WordPress, as well as having a simple site structure like I mentioned above and will discuss more in a little bit, you will have minimal trouble with these types of onsite SEO problems.
However, you have some tools available to you now that were not available several years ago and can really help simplify your SEO efforts and make them more effective. One of those tools is this SEO module. Another, very powerful tool that my students and I all have used with great success is the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy. I'm going to briefly show you how to find and install this plugin in WordPress, then get into using it in your SEO strategy.
Installing the High Traffic Academy Plugin
To install High Traffic Academy, or any other WordPress plugin, start by going to the Plugins menu in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard, as shown in the image above.
From there, the easiest way to find the right plugin is to search for the term "High Traffic Academy" in the search box:
That search should return the plugin we are looking for as the first result.
Install the plugin. (Never mind that the screenshot says it is already installed. In that space, you will have a link directing you to install.)
Done! Now that you have installed the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin, you can access it settings from its own menu on the sidebar.
This plugin is quite powerful and has a lot of settings, so you may want to take the included tutorial at some point. In the mean time, though, I will show you how the High Traffic Academy plugin fits into our strategy, starting with keyword density.
Keyword Density With WordPress SEO by High Traffic Academy
Keyword density is an very important part of any effective SEO strategy, but it's not just about inserting a keyword into your content at every opportunity. There's a great deal of finesse involved.
Back in the post-Panda/Penguin section, I told you about how keyword stuffing is a no-no with Google these days. Content that is saturated with keywords is poor, so Panda doesn't like it and keyword stuffing is a form of web spam, so Penguin doesn't like it, either. It's a double whammy!
Of course, you can't very well have no targeted keywords on your site - how will you capture your audience? What you need to do is hit a "sweet spot" of keyword density, which is about 1-3%. So, if you have a 500 page article or landing page, your target keyword should appear 5-15 times for it to be indexed optimally. Anything more than 4.5% is excessive and could be penalized.
Rather than count appearances of a keyword, then manually calculate keyword density - which would be ridiculous - we can use our new WordPress plugin to do it for us.
After installing the plugin, whenever you start a new post or page in WordPress, you will see its widget sitting below the text entry box:
This is where you enter your target keyword for this page, so that the plugin can analyze it for you. You can also specify an SEO title and meta description for display in search results. (Note: in this example, the snippet preview is obliterated so as not to have the domain or site name detract from the screenshot. Ordinarily you will see a preview for your page there.)
Once you have entered a focus keyword and written some content, the plugin can run an SEO analysis on it. Just save your post as a draft and click on the "Page Analysis" tab, which will show you something like this:
Here you can see all kinds of analysis and statistics of your post and how it holds up against important SEO parameters: meta description, keyword density, slug length, page title length, readability, outbound links, alt tags and overall word count.
In this particular screenshot, I've emphasized the keyword density. For this post, our keyword density is too low at less than 0.7%. Google and other search engines will still index this site, it will still be associated with this keyword and it won't get dinged for keyword stuffing, but the density is far from optimal. But, since we have the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin working for us, we get to know that right away, so we can make revisions before publishing.
So, let's say we go back and either revise the content to include more instances of our focus keyword or change the focus keyword to run some new analysis. After that, we might see an SEO analysis that looks different.
Now the figures on keyword density jump to the top of the analysis and have a scary red button next to them instead of the slightly friendlier amber one we saw above. This is because we've over corrected - our keyword density is now too high. It's not ridiculously high at less than a percentage point over the recommended maximum, but it's still at a level we want to avoid. Search engines may not look favorably on our content with that level of density.
The good news is that we didn't make anything else worse in the process. All our other stats are the same as they were or better. But let's fix that keyword density problem:
Now we're where we want to be - our keyword appears eight times in a 581 word post, for a keyword density of 1.38%. We've managed to put together content that is keyword rich without appearing spammy, which will help this site in its ascent up the search results.
The WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy makes this process easy, so that we have to dedicate much less time to thinking about keyword density and more time focusing on content that is relevant, unique and overall good, which is the main consideration for taking advantage of Panda.
Next we'll talk about how to use images in your content as a way to bolster SEO.
Images and Alt Tags
Images are an important part of site content. They break up large chunks of text, making the layout more friendly to the eye. They give people something to look at, so they will spend more time on our site, which is an important part of SEO these days. They also give people an idea of what kind of content they can expect before they begin reading, so they can reasonably decide whether to spend their time on it or not.
All these factors play into keeping peoples attention and holding audiences on your site, but images can also play big role in attracting people to your site. This is because search engines index the alt tags associated with images on a site. Before we talk about what how that works, let's first briefly touch on what an alt tag is.
The alt tag is part of how objects are described in HTML and XHTML code. Strictly speaking, alt is not actually a tag, but an attribute. We call it a tag because we are used to things like meta tags and title tags already, but it's actually not. However, if you call it an alt tag, everyone will know what you're talking about, and since that what it is commonly called, that is the terminology we are going to use here.
The alt tag is used to describe a non-textual element that cannot be rendered from the underlying code through the interpreter. You don't see alt tags on the sites you visit every day on the web because they are hidden in code, but they are there most of the time.
Now, I'm not saying that associating an alt tag with an image on your site will propel you to the top of the Google heap; there are plenty of other reasons that ranks this highly. What I am saying, however, is that an SEO strategy that doesn't include alt tags as part of its focus is an incomplete strategy.
To take advantage of alt tags on your own site, you will have to get your hands a little dirty with some HTML code, but it's very easy to do once you know how. As an example, let's say you are putting up a post on your blog to target the keyword "summer vacation." Maybe you are selling a travel ebook and you want to grab an audience of jet setters who are looking for summer destinations. So, you put a post like this one:
You have about 400 words there, you have a relevant image and you made sure to include your keyword throughout the content. (Just so we're clear, do not put up lorem ipsum text with a target keyword sprinkled throughout and expect good search results. I realize that goes without saying, but I would hate to be responsible for starting a bad habit.)
Now, to put that image to work for us in search results, we're going to edit the alt tag your target keyword, "summer vacation." To do that, click over to the "HTML" tab of the WordPress editor. There, you can see the raw code of your post.
Here we can see all the attributes for that image, including the alt tag, which is currently empty. That's not a surprise; we haven't put on in yet. Since the cursor is already in the right place in the above screenshot, let's go ahead and write an alt tag which will contain our target keyword, "summer vacation":
That's it. Your image has an optimized alt tag and is ready to go. We can confirm that our alt tag is there and that it matches our target keyword by looking at the SEO analysis in the High Traffic Academy plugin.
There it is, friendly green light and all. Now, when someone searches for "summer vacation," not only will Google index our site and find the body of this post, but also the image's alt tag, which boosts our spot in the rankings. And we even managed a keyword density of almost 2% on this post! Now we're cooking.
Now that you know how to handle keyword density and put image alt tags to work for you, let's discuss how to title and describe your content in ways that search engines will like, using the High Traffic Academy SEO plugin.
Title Tags
The title tag is just what you would think it is from the name: the title of a page or post on a site. Not surprisingly, this is one of the biggest factors affecting SEO. A good, appealing title means a higher ranking from search engines and more clickthroughs from SERPs.
What makes a good title? We're going to use the WordPress SEO plugin to help us determine that.
Looking back at the analysis of our summer vacation post, we see a few bullets related to the title.
You can see that the plugin is telling us two things about our title: it is a good length for SEO, but it would be better structured if the keyword phrase was at the beginning. Recall that the title of this post is, "4 Tips for a Great Summer Vacation" and the target keyword is "summer vacation."
So, we have title that is of a good length but not a good structure. Let's see what happens when we bring the target keyword to the front by changing the title to "Summer Vacation: 4 Tips for a Great Getaway."
There we go! Now your title is optimized to appear in results for the search term "summer vacation." People are more likely to get to this site when they search that phrase than they were before we fixed up the title with the plugin's help.
Just for contrast, let's take a look at what the analysis would look like on a bad title for this target keyword. We'll remove the "summer vacation" keyword and make the title long and unwieldy: "Fourteen Tips to Keep You and Your Family Busy While You Take Time Off This Summer."
Obviously, that analysis doesn't look very good. Our keyword is no longer in the title, which will hurt us in search results. The title is now longer than the displayable limit of 70 characters, so potential audiences won't even be able to see the full title, which makes them less likely to click. And, as an additional problem, by changing the post title, we also changed the URL, so now the keyword phrase is not there, either. It will be difficult for this post to get any kind of high ranking.
Fortunately, thanks to the High Traffic Academy plugin, we know these things and we can fix them before the post goes live. Even better, the plugin will alert us to some of these problems right up front in the 'General' tab, without even having to look at the analysis.
That tells us right up front that the keyword is not in the title or the URL, and we can see from the snippet preview that the title is way too long. The WordPress SEO plugin makes this whole process simpler and puts the data right in front of you, so you can tune your SEO strategy much faster.
The next thing we're going to get into is the last item in that red box from the last screenshot: meta tags. Right now, this post has no meta description, which won't work in your favor with search engines. The next section will go over meta tags and how to put them to work for you, again using the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy.
Meta Tags
After covering alt tags and title tags, the final kind of tag we're going to discuss here are meta tags. Like alt tags, meta tags are technically not tags - in code speak, they're elements. But, just like alt tags they are commonly called tags and that has become accepted nomenclature in marketing circles, so that's the terminology we will use here.
Plus, it makes it easier to remember when implementing your SEO strategy to just remember the three tags: alt, title and meta.
So what is a meta tag? Essentially, it's a piece of data about a web page tat is outside the scope of its header, content or other major components. By default, it is blank, but it can contain a description, keywords or really any other data we want. The most common place you see meta tags are in snippets displayed on SERPs.
Everything encircled in red - aside from the date - is a meta description of that page. You can see that "MacBook" is in bold, which means that when searching for "MacBook Air," Google indexed this meta tag and returned the article as a result.
Like title tags, meta tags are important to your viewership for two reasons. First, a meta tag that contains the target keyword has better chance at a good ranking for that keyword. And second, a meta tag this is clear and descriptive elicits more clickthroughs.
Let's look at how to optimize meta tags with the WordPress SEO plugin that we have been using. When we last left our summer vacation post, the plugin was showing a "General" tab.
It's pretty clear from the bright red spots where we need to focus our efforts next: meta tags.
(Don't worry about those other amber dots in the above screenshot for now. They are important for SEO, but they are pretty self-explanatory and continue to show up here because of the nature of the content of our sample post.)
As that red bullet tells us, when a meta tag is empty, the SERP will display copy from the page instead, usually the first 140 characters of the page. The problem with this is that those characters will rarely include our target keyword, or even a reasonable portent of what a visitor can expect. So, the page suffers in rankings and gets passed over by users.
Instead of resigning ourselves to that, let's include a meta tag. The SEO plugin makes it easy by giving us a clearly labeled box in which to enter our meta tag. So, let's put one in, making sure to include our keyword:
That brief description gets out target keyword out there, and provides potential readers with a good reason to click through and read the content. To verify that we passed the SEO test, let's look at the plugin's analysis.
We're good to go! And with that, we have turned this post from being a run-of-the-mill, easily passed over dud to a solid piece of a larger SEO strategy. Search engines will find this page and direct users to it much more readily than they would have when we first started, and thanks to this one WordPress plugin, we were able to do it quickly and easily.
That will do it for the WordPress SEO Plugin by High Traffic Academy for now, but before we get into the role and importance of content, there are two other onsite SEO topics we should discuss. Namely, we have to briefly touch on site structure and common problems that need to be resolved with onsite SEO.
A Few Words About Site Structure
We won't delve deeply into site structure, because it will come up again when we talk about problems to resolve in the next section, and again when we talk about content in a little while. However, it does merit some mention, because now more than ever, the structure of your site matters to search engines.
Think about it: the point of Panda is to improve the average user experience when searching the web and browsing the results. It does this by dropping poor quality sites in the rankings, to the benefit of sites with a higher quality experience. Site structure is a major component of the kind of experience an end user has at a particular site.
To that end, you want a site structure that is logical, cohesive and functional. The hierarchy should flow logically, internal links should follow a sensible order and each link should take the user where it is supposed to. This actually affects SEO in two ways:
First, a good site structure is looked upon favorably by Panda, which improves your site's visibility and ability to pull in an audience.
Second, when a site is easy and enjoyable to navigate, people spend more time on it. Search engines take time on site into account as a metric when determining where your page should rank. More people spending more time on your site = better.
To keep things simple while still driving in content, I recommend a "six pages or less" approach to structuring your site content. We will discuss this in further detail in the upcoming section on content, but the structure consists of these components:
- Two short articles of about 500 words each
- Two micro articles of about 250 words each
- One product review page of about 1,500 words
- Two videos, one of which will be unique to the site and another that is
- syndicated from YouTube
- Squeeze page
- Home page
That is all you really need to get in good with search engines, attract visitors and sell your product. You can include a blog, too, if you want to keep updating with fresh content, although that lends itself to some of the SEO problems we're going to discuss momentarily.
This site structure leaves just a simple, two level hierarchy, with the main page being the parent at the top and all the other pages being one level below. It's easy to establish, maintain and navigate, and search engines will like it.
Problems to Resolve
As easy and quick as this SEO strategy is, there are still obstacles that you must be aware of and able to fix. Into each life, a little rain must fall.
In this bit, we'll discuss some common problems that people encounter when creating and maintaining a site. While these are all common, little problems that are usually the result of some small mistake or oversight, they can negatively impact your site's standing in search results if not addressed and resolved.
Common problems include:
- Broken links
- 404 errors
- Duplicate pages
- Duplicate titles
- Missing title tags
- Duplicate meta tags
- Poor site structure/hierarchy
Some of these problems are more obvious than others because they downgrade the user experience. Broken links and 404 errors are frustrating to users, because that means they can't get the content they were looking for, while a site with poor structure is difficult to navigate. Any of these will cause a user to leave your site, probably without looking back.
Because these things are difficult on the user, that means they also don't pass muster with Panda. A site that has broken links, 404s or a bad structure - the three are related - will be dinged by Panda and not be able to ascend the search rankings.
The other problems - duplicate tags and content, and missing titles - are indicators of a site that has been generate by bots. Since bots and other content generators don't have human intelligence, they often wind up churning out multiple pages of identical content, with identical metas and titles, or with titles missing completely. So, both Panda and Penguin drop sites like these in the rankings because they look spammy.
Again, this is to your advantage. Being a real person running a site with a compact structure, you have upper hand in getting favorable attention from these algorithms, rather than those with time and technology leapfrogging past you.
Now, even if things like duplicate titles happen because of an honest mistake, a site will still be punished by Panda and Penguin all the same. So, you must stay on top of these things for your site and correct them as they arise. However, if you stick to the tutorial I've outlined above for SEO strategies in WordPress, as well as having a simple site structure like I mentioned above and will discuss more in a little bit, you will have minimal trouble with these types of onsite SEO problems.