Step By Step On Site SEO Practical Guide (2018 Edition)

On-site SEO is one of the major aspect of any SEO Campaign. There are more than 200 factors which Google perceive in order to judge a webpage.
Summing all those factors, Any Seo campaigns can be categorized into two sections:

1. On-Site SEO
2. Off-Site SEO

So, What exactly is On-Site SEO?

On-site SEO is a process of optimizing your website for both User & Search engines. Gone are those days when search engines were not much powerful and spammers used to manipulate the search engines’ algorithm using different black hat techniques; rank their websites & get away with it easily.

But Now, Search engines have become more powerful & user friendly. Since the penguin & Panda updates, Google focuses more on quality & relevancy than ever before. On the other hand, it equally penalizes the black hat marketers who try to manipulate its algorithm.

So, why not using their Algorithm in our favor instead of just trying to manipulate their rules & get penalized. Let’s use search engines’ rules accordingly to our benefits, And this is where the power of On-site SEO steps in.

Through proper On-site SEO, you will optimize your website in such a way that it becomes both user & search engine friendly & accessible to both.

Exact Process:
A website is not enough to establish your web presence & starting your business online in this competitive world. Once you have a complete designed website based on your brand & Audience,It is now time to implement proper On-site SEO in order to increase your online visibility.
These are the processes you would like to follow:

Keyword Research: This is the first step of On-site SEO. Doesn’t matter which business you belong to, people are always searching for your products & services online. All you need to know is your audience & what they are looking for. In short, You need to find out those Queries or search terms which people are looking for on the internet.

Keyword Research is simply the process of uncovering those search queries or keywords which people are searching via search engines.

So, How’d you do it?

Consider You are running a business related to Kid’s stuff like toys, diaper, baby chair & sittings, etc.
This is just an example. Your business can be related to anything or venture.

Step1 : Audience Research The first thing you need to do is research your audience. Knowing your audience is the most important thing to do before moving any further steps. It is important to know your audience to uncover their lifestyles, demography, hobbies, etc in order to target & re-target them well.

So In the above case, your target audience is going to be mothers with kid (age probably 30–45 yrs) and maybe gandma too..

Step 2: Brainstorming This step involves incepting the keywords based on your Audience, Location & Main services. In the above scenario: Services: Kids wear, Kids toys, Kids sitting (Just to name few of those)

Location: Miami, Florida, USA (Targeting Local Place, State & Country)

Let’s just start with a single keyword: Kids wear. So, The possible keywords from these combinations would be:
Kids wear, Kids wear in Miami, Kids wear in Florida, Kids wear in USA, Buy Kids wear, & many more..

So, we just brainstormed 5 excellent keywords from a single product that you are offering.
Let’s move on to the next step.

Step 3: Google Suggestions This is one of the super easy methods to uncover new keywords for your business. All you need to do is type a single keyword and Google will provide you multiple suggestions related to your search query at the bottom of the page. Let’s do it.

This is the result that I got from my side after searching for Buy kid’s wear. You may get different suggestions based on your location & search query.

You can easily filter some of the good keywords from the above suggestions.
You would want to add keywords like Designer Kids wear, Kids western wear, Kids dress collection, kids party wear, Kids wear brand, etc.

Here you go. We have just added 5 more keywords based on the single keyword that we obtained from a single product.

Let’s move onward towards the next step:

Step 4: Google Keyword Planner This is one of the free tools under Google Adwords. It is used to find out the average monthly search, competition & CPC of the keyword. It is also used to uncover new keywords based on the keyword you input. To use Keyword Planner, you need to sign in to the google Adwords account.

Here is the link to Google Adword Signup.

All you need to do is input a single keyword, and it will provide you a list of similar & relevant keywords with their respective monthly searches, competition, CPC & more..

From the above list, you can easily filter out the keywords based on your services, relevancy, location & other requirements.

Step 5: Keyword Tools

Keyword.io: This is a free, yet one of the amazing tool for uncovering long-tail keyword ideas for your business services. This also provides you the flexibility for finding keyword for various search engines and e-commerce sites. Here is the link for Keyword.io tool.

b) Ahref: It is a paid tool but a worthy one. This allows you to uncover your competitors’ keywords and later use it for your benefits. This is very easy to use tool for keyword. All you need to do is input your competitors’ url & it will split out all their keywords & strategies.
Here is the Link to Ahref tool.

c) Semrush: This is one of the best tool for keyword research. It works similar to Ahref. You need to input the competitors’ website and it will output all the lists. It also allows you to maintain your own dashboard of your preferred project and will report you daily, weekly or, monthly as per your need. This is an all-in-one SEO tool for digital marketers & entrepreneurs.
Here is the Link to SEMRush tool.

With these all steps, you will be able to discover hundreds of keywords in no time.

Now It’s time to filter those keywords and finalize them for the next process, which compels me to bring in the next point for the On-site SEO.

Keyword Analysis:

Now that we have an adequate number of keywords, the turn is to filter them on the basis of various factors.

Those factors include:

a) Long-tail Keywords: Long tail keywords generally refer to the two or more words keywords relevant to your products or services with less competition & a good search volume. For Example: Buy Kids Wear Buy Kids wear Online

Kid wear USA, etc….

b) Monthly Searches & Competition: This is one of the most important factors while analyzing keywords. Higher the search volume; higher the competition. So, You’re always recommended to select average or low monthly search volume keywords with a low or average competition.

It is obvious that short keywords have high search volume & equally the high competition. In order to avoid that, you should choose long tail keywords with low or average competition for starting out.

c) Relevancy:
Relevancy is something you should always take care of entire On-site SEO campaign. You should only select those keywords which are relevant to your product, services or offerings.

d) Place: In order to enhance your local search visibility, it is always recommended to add your local place with some of your keywords. Ex: Kids wear Miami, Buy baby clothes in Florida.

This way, it increases your local search visibility and helps rank your keywords for your local business.

After completing these steps, we would now be left with some decent number of high quality, relevant & user-friendly keywords with a good average monthly search volume & fair competition. It now turns to move onto our next process.

Meta Setup

Meta Setup is the process of optimizing your meta elements which makes it easier for user & search engines to find your webpage. You can imagine it as the about section of your webpage which tells the search engines what the page is about. It is one of the considering factors of Google Algorithms & also plays an important role in keyword ranking.

Meta setup has basically 4 components. They are:

• Title
• Description
• Heading Tag
• Alt Tag

Title:
The title indicates the main subject of your webpage. It appears at the top of your impression on the search result.

Best Practice:

• It should contain your primary Keywords.
• It should be of maximum 70 characters including spaces.
• It should be relevant to the respective pages.
• It’s not recommended to use click-bait on your title.
• It should be eye-catchy & hold some value for users.

Descriptions:
As the name suggests, it is supposed to describe your webpage in such a way that it becomes easily understandable & accessible to users. It should be written in such a way that the user can easily understand the concept & subject matter of your webpage immediately.

Best Practice

• It should contain your primary keyword & possibly the keyword that you used in your title.
• It should be not more than 300 characters according to the latest update by Google. Previously, it used to be 160 characters.
• The description should be clear, understandable & clear to the subject matter.

For WordPress website, you can simply place your Meta setup using Yoast Plugin for free.

Here is how you can do it
— Install & Activate The SEO Plugin.

– For each page, you can edit the meta tags simply as shown in the figure below.

Heading (H Tag): HTML Basically allows 6 heading tags from H1-H6 to be used in a webpage. However, H1 is the most important heading tag that is used as a ranking factor by Google. H1 tag is used to describe a webpage in a short term. But is different from the Title Tag.

H1 tag is the one that appears at the top of the web page.

Best Practice:

• Use Your Primary keyword in the H1 tag, & possibly the keyword that you have used in your title.
• Don’t make it much longer.
• The H1 Tag should be relevant & to the point.

AlT Tags:

Alternative or Alt tag is the element that you use to describe an image used on your webpage. Google or any other Search engine is not that advanced to recognize an image on the Web and it is, therefore, we write the Alt tags in order to describe your images to the search engine. It is also considered one of the important factor of On-site SEO. Ex:

Best Practice:

• Trying using keywords in your Alt tag.
• An alt tag should be used in such a way that it can describe an image even to the blind people.
• It should be relevant.
• You should use unique Alt text in every image you have used on your website.

Url Structure:

Url structure defines an important role in keyword ranking. Since it is the URl which gets indexed fist by a search engine, it is therefore always recommended to use an optimized URL structure. Example of an url:

{http://webpreneurshub.com/what-is-webpreneurship-and-what-it-means-for-your-startups/}

Best Practice:

• Try using your primary keyword in the url. Ex: if your primary keyword is Buy Kids wear, you can change the slug to Buy-kids-wear so that your url would look something like this:
  Youdomain.com/buy-kids-wear.
• It should not be much longer.
• Don’t use Non-custom URl in case of the WordPress site.

For WordPress website, It is always recommended to use Custom Domain. By default, The Url structure comes with a date but you need to go & change the setting for better results.

Here is how you can do it. Step 1: Go to Dashboard Step2: Goto Setting Step 3 Go to Permalink

Step 4: Change the default option to Custom Structure as in the pic below.

Google Analytics:

Setting up Google Analytics for your website is one of the most important aspects of On-site SEO. Analytics help you track various data on your website. These include Users, Demography, places, pages, conversion, sessions, page views & more. In general, It’s Google Analytics which gives provides you every data relating your website users which can be further used in making important decisions.

How to setup Google Analytics

• First of all, you need to sign up for the google analytics account. Here is the link to Google Analytics.
• Once you have signed in, you can opt for creating a new account under Admin section.
• While creating a new account, you need to fill the basic information of your website & all.
• Once, you have filled the form accurately, Just hit “Get Tracking Id” button at the end of the form.
• You will get a unique tracking Id for your website which is supposed to be placed in the header section of your web pages which you want to track.
• Once, you have placed the tracking code in the header of your website, Google will now start tracking your web pages from next 24 hours.

Webmaster Tools:

Webmaster tool or google search console is yet one of the most amazing free tool by Google for analyzing your website Technical & Non-technical issues. It gives you a general overview of your website and notifies you as soon as there is anything wrong with the website. This is one of the important tools for your website health.

Main Features Include:

• Search Traffic
• Search Appearances
• Messages
• Google Index
• Crawl
• Security issues
• Web tools

A search console dashboard looks something like this.

Setting up Webmaster Tools for your website:

• Sign up for the search console using the link.
• Once, you have signed in, Click on “create a new property” on the top right of Dashboard as shown in the pic.
• After clicking on “Add A property”, you will get a dialogue box where you need to enter your website name correctly.
• Once you have entered your website name, you will get various options for verifying your ownership. You can opt for any of these methods.
• Once, you have successfully implemented setting the webmaster tool for your account, you would now definitely want to submit your Sitemap to Google.

Submitting Sitemap:
In case of WordPress, Yoast SEO Plugin generates Sitemap automatically. In other cases, you need to create a sitemap for your website & submit it to google.

Once you have created your sitemap, Go to Crawl option in dashboard & click sitemap.

Once you click on the sitemap, You will get an option to add your sitemap. Simply Add your sitemap URL to that box & Hit Submit button.

Here you go, Your Sitemap has been successfully submitted. You can even test it before submission.

Optimized Content:

You must have head “content is King” hundreds of time on from many marketers, gurus & blogs but Why is it so?

The main intent of any search engine is to display the most relevant pages from their databases of millions & billions of pages against a search query. That’s is pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

Search engines mainly focus on user experience these days and your content got to be original, relevant, unique & problem-solving.

So, How would you do it?

Contents are of various types. Some of those includes: — Articles — Images — Infographics — Video

– Webinar & many more.

Here, we are going to talk about the best practices to follow while publishing text contents for your blogs, website, or any pillar page:

• Your content should always be unique & original. Never try to use plagiarised contents on your website.
• Try to write long, focussed, & relevant contents on your blog.
• Focus on Keyword Targeting after you have written contents.
• Don’t practice black hat techniques like content spinning, content farming, content exchanging, etc
• Don’t try to overstuff your keywords unnecessarily throughout your article. You may be penalized for Keyword stuffing by Google in that case. So, Always play it safe and place your keywords wisely only where it can fit naturally.
• Focusing on writing problem-solving contents for your users. That way, you can create & Trust & brand for your business.
• Always be consistent when it comes to Content writing. Post your contents on regular basis. whether it can be weekly, bi-monthly or monthly, but always maintain your writing consistency.

Conclusion:

So, This is all about On-Site SEO. After implementing these steps on your website, you can definitely optimize your website to its best and build the platform for organic keyword rank. In the next article, we will talk about the other aspect of SEO, apart from On-site SEO, which is Backlink.

So, Stop committing the similar startup mistakes and focus on On-site SEO before diving onward.

Let me know your thoughts on these On-site SEO techniques and comment your suggestions in the comment box below.

Your advice would be highly appreciated.

I would love to know if these techniques worked for you.

• What is Webpreneurship And What It means for your startups In 2018?

Originally published at webpreneurshub.com on April 2, 2018.