Website SEO

After seeing the great ranking results that I got for this blog, you might be wondering how I did the on-page SEO for this website. A large part of the reason that certain pages on this website rank really well is because those pages are using good on-page SEO protocols. If l had been really sloppy with my search engine optimization techniques on this site, then there is no doubt it would not rank as high as it does.

My main focus was getting the homepage right. That is what I really wanted to rank well. The rest of these internal pages have not really gotten much search engine optimization attention. Some of them rank well. I didn’t really make an effort to target any specific keywords with most of those internal pages.

Here is what I did to get the homepage ranking well

1) For starters I chose to use WordPress for a content management system. You may have noticed that blogs based on WordPress tend to rank really well in the search results. At least they do when they are self-hosted WordPress blogs. The ones on the wordpress.com website do not rank very well. Actually, I find it kind of funny that those blogs don’t use the same basic good SEO tactics that are so easily implemented on a self hosted WordPress blog. Anyway…..

2) I used one of the standard free WordPress blog themes to build this site on. It is based on the Twenty Ten theme that comes standard with WordPress 3.1 as of when I downloaded it. I like that theme because of where it positions the blog title. It puts it right at the top of each page where it is nice and prominent. I removed the header graphics completely from the theme because I did not want to put a picture in there.

3) One of the most important things I did for this site was to make sure that blog title was one of the major keyword phrases I want to rank for. You see, I think that the search engines look at website topicality in addition to page topicality when determining how relevant a page is for a specific search. When someone is searching for a topic, would it be smarter to return a bunch of pages that are topic specific from irrelevant sites or from sites that are more closely relevant for that search phrase?

I believe that my site gets a boost in ranking because the whole theme of the site centers around that one topic. Everything on this site related directly to whether or not article marketing works. The general topicality of your site can make a difference. Another immediate benefit in doing this is that it ensures that every page on your website has one link pointing back to the homepage using the keywords you want to rank for. That link is also the most prominent link on the page.

4) I made sure that the title tag in my HTML for the page had the keywords I want to rank for. I made sure those keywords appeared in the proper order. That helps.

5) I made sure the homepage contained highly relevant textual content for the keywords that I was targeting. I covered the topic thoroughly. The page is long because there is a lot of good  information on that page. I made sure that both my primary and secondary keyword phrases appeared on that page at least once.

6) I placed some links within the pages of my website and the sidebar to link to the other pages on the website. When I created these links, I made sure that I used relevant anchor text for those pages. Links from within your own website can help more than people think.

on page SEO

Here are some things I did that may have made a slight difference in my ranking

7) I added graphics to some of the pages while, in most cases, making sure that the pictures were somehow relevant to the topic of the page.

8) My keywords were used in bold text on the page. I don’t think this helped all that much. It maybe an ever so slightly better way of enhancing page relevance. In actuality I did not make them bold for SEO purposes. I made them bold because I wanted you to be able to pick them out on that page more easily. There is a lot of text on that page, so I wanted to make them stand out somehow. Making them bold was the method I chose.

Plugins I Used to Help Improve This Site

9) All in one SEO pack — This plugin lets you easily customize your page titles, the meta descriptions for each page and the keywords HTML tag. That allowed me to write decent meta descriptions for each page so that it would hopefully help get more search engine click through.

10) Google XML Sitemaps — This is a good plugin that helps get your whole site indexed.

11) Global Translator — This translates your blog for the people who arrive there from countries that don’t use English.

12) Share This — This is my favorite plugin for adding social media links to the bottom of each page.

Other Things I Did That May Impact SEO

13) I set the permalink structure of the internal pages so that the URL will be a bit shorter and so that the keywords would be in the URL for each page.

14) I can’t say that I spent a lot of effort on making the website visually appealing. However, I did try to lessen the unappealing aspects of the site like that big header graphic that the Twenty Ten theme comes with. I know from experience that a website that is visually appealing will attract natural links much more quickly than a website that is less visually appealing. Keep that in mind for your site. In most cases, hiring a professional graphic artist to upgrade the appearance of your website is well worth it. My objective for this site was to keep it low budget.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *