Hey guys,
I know I have not been posting to my blog for quite some time. To be exact, it has been over 6 months since my last post. It is ironic how I always promote blog publishing to all my clients, but I fail to do that on my own…
I guess there is only so much you can do once you are in charge of managing nearly every major aspect of your business.
Anyways, I have been getting a lot of questions from my clients relating to on-site SEO, so I decided to talk about it in a blog post.
On-site SEO is simple. Period.
Do not let any SEO company tell you that it is difficult. Because it isn’t.
Because it is so simple to do, it can be abused easily which is why on-site SEO does not hold a lot of weight compared to link building.  I would personally say that on-site SEO is only 10% of the overall SEO strategy, but link building constitutes the other 90%.
Even though it might be only 10% of the overall SEO strategy, do not think that you can choose to ignore it. More often than not,  you will find it quite difficult to rank your webpages if they have not properly been SEOed.
So let’s talk about how you can do on-site SEO for your website without paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to SEO companies.
1. Primary tags: Make sure your keyword terms are in the title, description and keywords tag. According to Google, the description and keyword tags are not that important but it never hurts to optimize for them as well. If you know enough about the services/products that you sell, choosing your keywords for these tags should be a piece of cake. If that is not the case, head over here to do some keyword research!
2. Secondary tags: If possible, you can use subheading i.e. H1, H2 and H3 tags to break your webpage into many relevant sections pertaining to different topics. This way, you can get ranked for many similar and relevant terms. If you have no idea what these tags are, just do a quick search for these tags on Google and you will find more information that you will need.
3. Use sensible page copy: I am surprised at how much people ignore this very point. Sensible and persuasive page copy will ensure that visitors stay for a longer time on your website, which improves conversions and sales. So make sure you know what you are talking about on your sales page, use a unique selling proposition and give your visitor a reason to stay on the website.
I have actually been testing different page copies and one of the major conclusions I have come to is the fact that the amount of text on a certain page has a major pull on the rankings. For example, you will find it much easier to rank using a 2500 word sales letter as opposed to a 250 word one. This is one of the reasons why my sales letter is over 2000 words.
Google is biased towards informational websites and biased AGAINST commercial websites so it always helps to increase your page content to appear as an informational website.
4. Use images: For every webpage that you want to rank, add a relevant image to the top of the webpage. Now, I understand that Google bot cannot “understand” images, but if you use your primary keyword in the ALT image tag, you increase the page relevancy. This can be done without spending a single dime. You can find all the images you need by doing a simple Google search.
5. Add your primary keyword to the first and last sentence in the webpage: Now, Google will never come to you and tell you to do this, but this works quite well. Adding your keywords to the top and bottom of the webpage increases relevancy, giving Google bot more than enough reason to think your content is “relevant”.
6.  Do not keyword stuff: I have tried to increase my rankings by repeating the primary keywords all over the place on my webpage. Instead of getting ranked higher, I have more often seen a decline in my rankings, which suggests that Google is not stupid.
Use your keywords wherever possible, but do not use them to the point that the page does not read properly.
This is really all there is to on-site SEO (for the most part). If by any chance I missed something, please feel free to comment and I will add your suggestions into the post.