Key lessons to mastering on-page SEO for your small business –

Developing keywords (as in our post from yesterday) for your small business is a task in itself. What most don’t realize, is that unless you’re using them wisely, your hard work selecting them will be but a waste of time. And, using them wisely includes on-page SEO or, on-page search engine optimization.

Even though off-page SEO (e.g. link building) offers more benefits, on-page optimization is really the first step you should take to improve your SEO. Off-page SEO is about building inbound links from relevant websites. But how can search engines deem your pages relevant to your keywords if you haven’t made it clear to them what your page is about?   

On-page optimization is essentially this:

     • Choosing the right keyword(s)
       around which to base each of your
       pages

     • Making it as clear as possible to search
       engines that your page is relevant to
       those keywords

On-page optimization the old way
Until Google smartened us up, we plugged our keywords in everywhere. Optimizing your page URL, the page title, the meta description tag, the on-page H1 heading, and aggressively throughout the page content. SEOed web copy was dense, and it looked the part. 
 

On-page optimization the new way
Rather than using the same keyword over and over again, you should use a set of related keywords to help you rank for a variety of long tail keywords. Here’s an interesting take-away: to rank for many of your keywords, take a few of them and add a variation to each. Such as ‘How to’ – ‘Link’ or ‘links’ – ‘Build’ or ‘building’ – ‘ Strategy’ or ‘strategies’. Making your page relevant to many of your keywords will help you to rank for some of them.

Here are four common points of variation:
     • Singular vs. plural
     • Alternate word order
     • Synonyms and acronyms
     • Keyword modifiers

You can use relevant keyword modifiers in your page titles, and throughout the page text. What’s key is to make it sound natural while covering a variety of keyword options. You don't have to consider all your keyword options until after you’ve written your content. Focus first on the article. Once you have your first draft, you can add some keyword variations and keyword ideas.

How to find those related keywords to target
     • Google’s a great way to start. If you begin typing a keyword into a Google search
        box on the Google homepage, Google will try to auto-complete your search query.
        They use aggregate search volume to power this, which tells you two things
        about the keywords they are recommending:
           – Those are keywords other people searched for in the past
           – Those are the keywords Google is recommending new searchers to search for,
              helping to drive traffic to them.

     • Many of the websites that appear in the search results will also include related
        keyword modifiers in their page titles. Clicking through some of those pages will
        also show you related keywords and concepts they are targeting.    

     • Almost all major search engines offer a related searches feature on
        their search results pages. Look through those for additional keyword
        ideas.

Taking the time to properly leverage your keywords with on-page SEO is key. I encourage you to set aside the appropriate amount of time and resources to do diligence with your keyword research and ultimate keyword selection.