The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

It used to be that all you had to do was write a decent page of keyword-based content, add some meta tags, and then start building links. If you were even halfway good at it, you could expect to achieve respectable rankings. SEO is a lot harder now.

Specifically, on-page SEO is a lot harder now. And it’s getting harder.

What’s making on-page SEO so hard? Why is it getting harder?

There are several reasons why on-page SEO is getting more difficult with each passing day. For starters, Google changes its search algorithms more than 50 times a day, so it’s near impossible to keep up with the changes.

Secondly, there are so many search factors to keep up with that no one can feasibly master them all. And we can’t be sure any more just how much weight is given to specific on-page factors such as keyword density, keywords in subheads, meta tags, page titles, etc. Plus, the addition of schemas and structured data means that some SEO factors may be subject to certain conditions and your rankings may or may not have to do with anything related to those conditions.

For instance, all else being equal, if you use a particular bit of structured data and your competitor doesn’t use any, your competitor could still rank higher for you on some search queries even if you rank higher than him on others.

SEO is getting to be more and more subjective all the time – subjective in the sense that each page is judged on its own merits without consideration for what’s going on in other parts of the web.

There are basics to on-page SEO that every webmaster should pay attention to, but beyond those, your best bet is to test, experiment, and measure. No two web pages are a like and no two search queries are either.

Most web pages that suffer from mediocre search rankings can have those rankings increased with just a few simple tweaks. In most cases all it takes is 3-5 small improvements that take less than 5 minutes each to fix. Here are 5 very small web page improvements you can make to better your website’s SEO in less than 30 minutes.

• Alt tags – Got a photo or image that you are adding to your page? Include an alt tag. Make sure that your alt tag uses your primary keyword for that page. The alt tag is to notify the search engines that the photo is there and what it is about. It will definitely increase your SEO to have alt tags on all your images.
• Inline JavaScript – This kills so many web pages that it’s not even funny, especially if the JavaScript is at the top of the web page’s code. Take that inline JavaScript and put it into an external file, then call it into your web pages with a single line of code. That alone should increase your web visibility because search engines don’t crawl JavaScript and you want to watch your code-to-text ratio.
• Unique meta descriptions – If you have two or more web pages with the same or similar meta descriptions, rewrite the meta descriptions until they are all unique.
• Keywords in subheads – Subheads are often overlooked in pages with lots of text, but if you add subheads every third or fourth paragraph and ensure you have your keywords in those subheads, then that will go a long way to optimizing your web pages.
• Optimized meta title – Like the meta description, a unique meta title can do wonders for your on-page SEO. Don’t just take your page’s headline and make it your meta title. Instead, write a unique meta title using the same keyword that is in your headline.

If you follow these 5 simple steps, you should find your on-page SEO improving your search rankings almost immediately.

If you run an online web store and are concerned that your SEO might not be up to snuff, never fear. You can always improve your SEO and here are 6 on-page ways that you can give your SEO content a boost. All of these are easy to implement and will produce positive results for your onsite SEO.

1. Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
2. Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
3. Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
4. Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
5. Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
6. Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.

Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.

Every once in a while I read a blog post or hear some SEO somewhere, or a social media marketer, start proclaiming that SEO is dead or keywords are useless. But I notice that they have pretty well optimized web pages themselves.

The question comes to mind, What are their motives?

Maybe they’re trying to create a ruse to throw other SEOs off track and stop optimizing their web pages. Or maybe they’re sincere and misguided. Or maybe they just have some brilliant insight into the future direction of SEO. Whatever the case, I’m pretty sure they’re wrong about keywords. They are not useless nor are they out of fashion.

Keyword stuffing is useless. Keyword density is WAY out of fashion. But keyword-optimized web pages are still very much en vogue.

The search engines still return results for search queries that match keyword-optimized on-page content. As long as they do, keywords will still serve a purpose. But managing your keywords in a way that search engines will reward them is paramount. Otherwise, you may not rank as you think you should or you may find yourself at odds with search engine policies. Both scenarios are bad.

Don’t listen to the naysayers who say that SEO is dead or keywords are useless. Maybe some day they will be, but that day is not today.

There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.

On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.

A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.

Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?

There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.

There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.

One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.

Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.

The argument continues – are backlinks more important or is on-page SEO more important? There is a growing number of SEO professionals who believe that backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. But most of us still chant that content is king. Which is it?

Personally, I think backlinks aren’t important at all until you have some on-page SEO working in your favor. What’s the point to building links to a page with no content? Even if you succeed in boosting that page’s rankings, visitors to the page will be disappointed to find nothing there. But a well optimized web page that answers a question for a lot of people within a particular niche is a gem, with or without backlinks.

Don’t get me wrong. You’d be a fool to build a web page today with no link building plan. But I’m simply illustrating the importance of quality on-page SEO. That’s the starting point. Everything else, from there, is upward mobility.