On-Page SEO refers to optimizing the content and organization ON your website in order to achieve better rankings in Google. This section is a bit lengthy but it’s extremely informative and one of the most important parts of this guide. If you have the best site in the world, it doesn’t mean anything if no one can find it on Google. Okay so lets get started.
Getting Started:
Okay enough reading, time to get your hands dirty with some actual tweaking now. The first thing you need to do is log in to your wordpress admin page, you should know where and what that is by now (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and head on over to the plugins section on the left sidebar. From there click ‘Add new’ then search for a plugin called ‘All-in-One SEO Pack’ and go ahead and install it by clicking the install button. Contrary to the plugin’s name and description, it isn’t the magic solution to ranking well on Google, but it is an incredibly useful tool to help get you there. Okay, now that you got this particular plugin installed, heres what we need to do to get your newly created site optimized for search engines:
Optimize your Site’s Title Tag
A site’s ‘Title Tag’ refers to the text that is displayed on the top left of the browser. See the picture below.
The title tag for the website above is ‘Free online MMORPGs and MMO Games Directory List – MMO Hut’. The “- Mozilla Firefox” part is just the web browser I’m using. If you used internet explorer it would say “-Internet explorer”. This is actually one of my other websites I’m currently working on. I’m trying to rank on Google for the keywords ‘Free Online MMORPG’ / ‘Free MMORPG’ / ‘MMORPG’ and ‘MMO’. My main keyword though is ‘MMORPG’. See how my title has the keywords I want to rank for a whole bunch of times? Google associates a website’s title tag with the content on the website, so if your Title page has the keyword you’re aiming to rank for in it, it’ll certainly help you rank for that particular keyword. The title tag also appears in the Search Engine results, so you want something that actually makes sense rather than a just a whole bunch of keywords slapped together. See Below:
Okay, so now you know what a ‘title tag’ is, so let’s get a good one set up for your site. Go ahead and go to your Wordpress admin page and head on over to Settings on the sidebar then click ‘All-In-One-Seo’ tool. This is the plugin we installed at the top of this page. This particular plugin lets you manage a lot of little things on your site which helps us optimize it for search engines. From here, you can edit your site’s title tag by typing some text into the ‘Home Title’ area. You should make your title relevant to what your site is about and also include some important keywords in there. If your site is about Earl Gray Tea, a good title tag would be something like ‘Earl Grey Tea Information – All About Earl Grey Tea’. This way the title makes sense, and has the keyword you’re trying to rank for in it twice! Try to use your main keyword at the beginning of the title because search engines place more weight on the words at the beginning of the title. Just a heads up, a website’s ‘title tag’ is extremely important in a site’s ranking, so be sure not to skip this step =).
Aside from optimizing the ‘title tag’ on your homepage, you’ll need to optimize all the title tags on each of the articles on your site, which is rather simple. Just go back to each of your articles and scroll down to the bottom where it says ‘All in One Seo Pack’ and go ahead and click it. From there you can edit that particular page’s ‘Title tag’.
Whatever you named your article should be the title of that page. Leave the ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ sections blank for now.
Additional Information
In this particular example the Title tag ‘Earl Grey Tea Information – All About Earl Grey Tea’ only targets one keyword, ‘Earl Gray Tea’, but you can have a title tag that targets multiple keywords if your particular website has more than 1 popular keyword that essentially mean the same thing. For the sake of simplicity I strongly recommend you use a title tag that targets only 1 keyword. Trying to target multiple keywords is a bit tricky as the more keywords you have in your title, the less weight each one has. Learn how to correctly target multiple keywords in your Title by heading on over to the Advanced Techniques section, but I strongly urge beginners to only target 1 keyword on their homepage to start.
Optimize your Site’s Meta Description
A website’s ‘Meta Description’ is the text that appears under the title in a search engine. The purpose of a ‘Meta Description’ is to describe what your page is about to people on search engines so before they click on your page they’ll know what to expect. See the picture below to actually see what the ‘Meta Description’ is.
Now that you know what the Meta description is (The highlighted text above), you need to set one up for your website’s homepage and optimize it your website ranks better on Google and other search engines. The meta description sort of tells the search engines what your page is about, so try to use the keyword you’re trying to rank for at least two or three times in the Meta Description. This should help your rankings on the search engines. Keep in mind, the ONLY place someone can even see your Meta Description is on the search engine pages, so don’t worry too much about making it grammatically perfect or anything like that, as NO one will actually see it on your page.
Okay, To change / update your ‘Meta Description’ just head on over to your Wordpress admin page and click ’settings’ then go to the ‘All in one SEO Tools’ page. From there you can set your website’s ‘Meta Description’. Once again, try to use your keyword here at least three times without making it look like spam. If your site is about ‘Earl Grey Tea’ a good Meta Description would be something like
“Learn everything about Earl Grey Tea and Earl Grey Green Tea! This is the ultimate Earl Grey Tea resource on the net!
The Meta Description I just typed up has the keyword ‘Earl Grey Tea’ in it three times and also has the keyword ‘Earl Grey Green Tea’ in it once. Since ‘Earl Grey Green Tea’ is also searched a fair amount of times, by including that keyword in the Meta Description, it would improve my ranking for that particular keyword, and the beauty of having a keyword like ‘Earl Grey Green Tea’ is that just by using that, it also helps the site rank for ‘Earl Grey Tea’ because the word ‘Earl Grey Tea’ is inside of ‘Earl Grey Tea’. If you can, try to include at least three keywords in your site’s Meta Description, but keep in mind the ‘Meta Description’ is limited to 2 lines, or 160 characters. Anything after that will be cut off on Google and won’t help you.
You’re almost done with On-page SEO, Just one last step!
Optimize Your Site’s Meta Keywords
This last step is real easy. Just head back over to your Wordpress admin page, go to settings-> All-in-one-seo and from there find ‘Home Keywords (Comma Separated) and put a small list of keywords there. Back to the Earl Grey Tea example, if your site is about Earl Grey Tea, some good keywords to put in the ‘Home keywords’ place is something like ‘Earl Grey Tea, Earl Grey Green Tea, Types, Tea, information, about”. Don’t think too hard about the keywords you place here because this particular aspect of On Page SEO plays only a tiny role in determing a site’s rankings.
Tada! You’re done with On Page SEO! Now comes the hardest part… Off Page Seo!