Not An SEO Expert

I know. You’ve made sure you have no broken links and spell checked your entire site. You have a master plan of onsite cross linking to force PR to the landing pages you covet most. You’ve done your keyword research and perfectly selected your title tags, category names and bolded not too many keyword, but just enough. You are done with onsite SEO right? Maybe, but too many times people trying to make their websites work for them think they finish onsite SEO except for adding the occasional keyword rich articles.

First of all, check and recheck the basics. For example, right now someone in your market is experimenting with new title tags, maybe it working. It’s a great feeling when you notice your competition jump in the SERPs and you already know why they did it. Your competition is your best resource of onsite SEO information. Let them A/B test for a month and then make a change, only to see you match it in days.

Secondly, make sure you have a landing page for every related keyword phrase. I know this is somewhat basic, but new search phrases are popping up all the time in most markets. Sure blue widgets might get searched 10k times a day and faded blue widgets only 500 times a day but that’s 500 potential customers. Write an article or a review or whatever, but make sure there’s a landing page for every phrase that a potential customer might type in the search bar.

Thirdly, think and rethink your internal linking. You have total control of your onsite links. This is your most powerful tool. Not only can you move page rank but you can define product pages in any manner you wish. Each page of your website has a job to do, make sure each is doing its job with maximum efficiency.

Well that’s three example of onsite SEO that you might be ignoring, there are many more. The moral of the story is that you are never done. The idea that you build a site and then promote it is for page 3 sites. If you want to get to the top of the SERPs for any keywords that matter you’ve got to constantly look for improvements and onsite SEO is the only SEO that you have total control over.

Filed by Bryan at 5:21 am under SEO