On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
-
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite....
These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do)
Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words
Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words
Meta keywords – all keywords
Questions begin here...
H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages)
H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page?
Bold text – does this matter for SEO?
Italic text - does this matter for SEO?
Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data?
Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO?
Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image.
the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/
-
90% of your answers were discovered through SEOMOZ's On-page Analysis tool
Correction for Title Optimization:
1. The visible portion of the page title in the search results extends to 66 characters, after which the engines will often truncate with an ellipsis. In order to optimize for the best possible title (and provide the most compelling call to action for searchers) keeping the title tag under 66 characters in length is recommended.
Correction for Meta Description:
2. Since the meta description isn't used for rankings, and the snippet cuts off after 156 characters (in most instances), it's unwise to have a longer meta description tag. Words beyond this count won't be seen by anyone.
Correction for Keywords:
3. Search engines have, for years, ignored the meta keywords tag as a ranking signal. Although it technically does not harm rankings, it can be used by competitors as a method to extract your targeted terms and thus, we recommend against its use.
H1-H6 Tags:
4.
a. H1 tag above the fold is a bonus
b. Use your Main keyword in H1 tag preferably towards the front.
c. H2 tags is used break down the main topic and is effective
d. H3-H6 should be used as sub topics only if it going to be natural otherwise it may come off as spam.
Bold & Italics text:
5. In testing, search engines appeared to have a preference (albeit slight) for pages that employed a targeted keyphrase with one of these elements than those missing it. This may also be valuable to users who can more easily find references to their search query thanks to this highlighting.
Image Alt Attributes:
6. Keyword usage in the alt attribute of an image employed on a page is surprisingly positively correlated with good rankings. It also helps considerably with image search, a popular and oft-employed vertical/universal search system.
Body Text of Competitor:
7. Body Text: I wouldn't worry about competitors, work on your own strategy
-
Headers are not as important as they used to be since they can be easily manipulated so I wouldn't put in too much time and effort on that. That being said, it's a good practice to use them.
There is no penalty for using same headers but its better to use unique headers for each page so they are not competing with each other.
Meta keywords: it doesn't have value in Google and other major engines at least - it could work against you as competitors can refer to it and easily know what you are targeting.
Bold text: it used to matter - but it's very less now - most likely has negligible affect now.
Internal link anchors can be duplicate - if you have a site-wide text link menu, wouldn't technically those links be 'duplicate' throughout? No penalties/issues. My sugggestion though is to vary it occassionally even internally to get most of it.
Image alt attributes - no issue in have same of it for the Social buttons on all pages. In fact, you don't want to tweak them and try to rank for some keyword. They are just social buttons...
Competitor: They are using DIV Scroll - I would be very careful in how I use it. It doesn't seem user-friendly as the box is too small and there is lot of content in it. I am not too sure if Google can discount it algorithmically but if their staff see it manually, it could be an issue. There is no 100% sure way to know the outcome of using div scroll the way they are using - as of now they probably do get benefit by using lot of text but using lot of content in a little box like that is not a sound long term strategy considering the risk of manual review and also with G-bots getting smarter
-
I'm not sure where to begin here since there are many issues. I think you should start by looking at the Web Developer's SEO Cheat sheet. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
pdf - http://static.seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf
and The Beginners Guide to SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Title: Most Important, Main keyword in beginning
Meta-description - No SEO, but use for SERPs call to Action and attention.
Meta-keywords - No SEO, Remove.
H1 - Important, should be one of the first things a spider crawls.
H2 - Not as important
H3 - H6 - Not important
Bold or Italic - Important - Main keyword should be bold or italic
Link Anchor Text - Important, most important links near the top, and Google will only count the anchor text for the first link. (same link)
Image Alt - all images should have Alt
Content - Content is extremelly relevant. But this section would need a whole page of explanation.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Infinite Scrolling on Publisher Sites - is VentureBeat's implementation really SEO-friendly?
I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article. My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar. They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too. My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not. VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles? Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/ Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion. Thanks in advance! Daniel
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Daniel_Morgan1 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Best Location to find High Page Authority/ Domain Authority Expired Domains?
Hi, I've been looking online for the best locations to purchase expired domains with existing Page Authority/ Domain Authority attached to them. So far I've found: http://www.expireddomains.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VelasquezEF
http://www.domainauthoritylinks.com
http://moonsy.com/expired_domains/ These site's are great but I'm wondering if I'm potentially missing other locations? Any other recommendations? Thanks.1 -
href="#" and href="javascript.void()" links. Is there a difference SEO wise?
I am currently working a site re-design and we are looking at if href="#" and href="javascript.void()" have an impact on the site? We were initially looking at getting the links per page down but I am thinking that rel=nofollow is the best method for this. Anyone had any experience with this? Thanks in advanced
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clickermediainc0 -
Does the Traffic boost SEO/SERP ranks?
Hello, I know a guy that sells Organic traffic, bought 10k from him, will this help me to bost google seo ranks? Attached a screenshoot thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 7liberty0 -
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO?
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO? How can you create good quality White Hat links? For example, how do you convince someone to link to your site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Doorway Page? or just a flawed idea?
I have a website which is on a .co.uk TLD and is primarily focused to the UK. Understandably I get very little in the way on US traffic, even though a lot of the content is applicable to the UK or US and could be made more so with a little tinkering. The domain has some age to it and ranks quite well for a variety of keywords and phrases, so it seems sensible to keep the site on this domain. The .com version of the domain is no longer available, and the current owner does not seem inclined to sell it to me. So, I am considering registering a very similar .com domain and simply using it to drive some traffic to the .co.uk site. To do this, I would have the same category pages and the same (or similar) list of links to the various pages in those categories. But instead instead of linking to a page on the new .com, it would take visitors to the existing page on the .co.uk. I would make this transparent to visitors ("Take a look at these pages on our sister site bluewidgets.co.uk") and the .com would have some unique content of its own. Would this be considered some kind of Doorway site/page (content rich doorway), or is it simply bad idea which is unlikely to drive any traffic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jingo010