I've done SEO for 27+ years, starting before there ever was a Google.
This page contains what I feel are the most important "on page" SEO ideas and concepts you need to know in 2022 and beyond.
These first three are, without a doubt, the most important and essential things you need to master to make money with SEO.
1 Mindset: Don't choose keywords - Let the keywords choose you. Most advice given (and taken) is to come up with the best keywords for your site. By letting the keywords choose you, find good keywords FIRST, THEN create sites and pages for the best of the best keywords..
Public Thread: Don't choose keywords. Let keywords choose you or How to REALLY make money with SEO
https://pheeds.com/phorum/showthread.php...t=keywords
2 Keyword Research and Selection - With good, solid research and effort, you can find PLENTY of valuable keywords with low competition that you can rank for with no or few external links. Put in the time to find the keywords that give you the best possible chances of success. And keep digging. Constantly over time. Your goal isn't to find some good keywords. It's to find and create content for as many keywords as you can, using sound and reasonable SEO practices.
Visit these threads for keyword resources:
Free Keyword and SEO Tools for 2022
The BIG list of premium marketing tools that offer free trials
3 Be a Productive and Efficient Content Making Machine - You need to create a system and organize your tools and resources so you can produce QUALITY content as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible. There are few certainties in life, but one is that a page you never post will never get traffic.
If you spend time and use common sense to uncover the best keywords, and let this research guide you, and create quality content for these keywords, you are giving yourself a huge headstart on making SEO work for you.
However, if you come up with an idea for a site and only THEN do SEO, you're in for a uch tougher time, IMO.
Highly Recommended Resources:
Rytr AI Content Assistant - Yes, I'm an affiliate. I'm also a paying cusotmer and use it daily. Rytr will help you write better articles faster and about more topics, meta descriptions and a lot more.
Get Access to All VIP Forums and Downloads - Discover the things that worked 25 years agos that still work now. You'll benefit from my experiences with long-term SEO and content creation.
Content Silo - Free to all. Get organized and be more productive. The Content Silo has multiple work areas for writers and lots of links to the best and coolest resources for writing content. It's the perfect companion for Rytr and all AI content helpers.
See More Important On-Page SEO Factors below:
More Important On-Page SEO Factors for 2022
E-A-T is Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google uses EAT for topics it feels are important for things like health, legal issues, financial advice, etc., where bad info can cause serious harm. Google is going to give more trust to a site like the Mayo Clinic that some random person on the Net.
You can give your pages a potential boost by quoting and linking to respected sources. Use the Google Scholar search to find "EAT-friendly" sources. You can always find a link to Scholar on the Content Silo page:
?https://pheeds.com/misc/ContentSilo.html
Title Tag - The title tag has been the most important single place for keywords for my 26 years of SEO, and it probably still is. Make sure to use your primary keyword (from your research) in the title tag. Also, consider adding "modifiers" which are common search words to your main keyword, like:
This list of "Buyer Keywords" includes a lot of good title modifiers with buyer potential:
https://pheeds.com/phorum/showthread.php...el+Numbers
Meta Description - Sometimes Google uses it, sometimes they generate their own description. It's important because a good description can increase your click-through rate in the search results pages. Include secondary keywords that are in the content of the page, as Google tends to highlight these words in bold.
I like using ?Rytr (aff link) for meta descriptions. Writing a meta description or two isn't hard. But over your SEO career wyou will write 1000's of meta descriptions. It'd good to have a little help. AI content helpers aren't just for long form articles. Rytr and others have a meta tag description feature if you want some inspiration. Also, try the Call to Action, Copywriting AIDA and PAS features too for more meta description ideas. The #1 goal of the meta description is to get people to click.
Header Tags - Use the H1 tag once with your main keyword at the top of the page. Use variations and secondary keywords in H2 tags. Generally speaking, your Title tag and first H1 tag should use the same main keyword.
Headlines in Header Tags - Not only should header tags be used for relevant keywords, they should also use basic copywriting principles. Particularly your H2 tags should use headlines to capture attention and to increase interest and encourage folks to continue reading your entire pages.
You can always find a link to a Headline Generator on the Content Silo page:
?https://pheeds.com/misc/ContentSilo.html
Image Optimization
File Size: Make your images as small as possible. I use Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature because I've found it works the best for making images small. There are some good, ?free online image shrinkers on Google Search.
Original Images - There are reports Google favors pages with original images over stock images used on multiple sites. Use Google's Image Search to check if the images you're using can be found elsewhere. I'm not sure what needs to be done to modify stock images to make them "original" in Google's eyes?
?https://www.google.com/imghp - Image search...click the little camera icon.
Name the image using a keyword, using hypens:
Include a keyword in the ALT tag.
URLs and Page File Names - In WordPress, this is handled automatically for youm based on the page title. When creating pages using an HTML editor, the file name will be used as the URL for the page. This can be the same as your page title, but doesn't have to be. In most cases it's probably best to save your page using your main keywords only, including hyphens:
1989-ford-truck.html
Anchor Text - Anchor text doesn't only affect the relevancy of the page linked to, it also affects the relevancy of the page the link is on. Google has always loved anchor text and stronly consider the anchor text on the page you're optimizing. The tendency now is to probably over-optimize anchor text. Don't. Just be sure to look at the words in the anchor text on your pages and consider the relvancy while avoiding over-optimization by including a few "non keyword" words in your anchor text.
And remember, you can link a page to "iteself" by using "anchor links" to skip to other parts of content on the same page. If you see a "Top of Page" link that takes you to the top of the same page, that's an anchor link. And anchor links use anchor text too.
Internal Linking - Of course, anchor text matters. So does structure. Every page has "some" authority in Google, or its banned. The homepage on any domain tends to have the most authority of any page on the site. This means a link to a page coming from the homepage/index page will likely push more link juice than other pages.
Your most important pages should be linked to from the home page, using contextual links, and should NEVER be more than two clicks away from the homepage. You can create content pages with their primary purpose to generate and push link juice to imporant pages. Often, a page on page 2 in Google can get a boost to page 1 with just a little internal focusing of links.
Keyword Prominence - This is how early and soon a keyword phrase is used. In page content, the usual advice is to use your main keyword in the first 100 words. I would try to work it in sooner. Prominence also applies to things like header tags and page titles. For example:
The first example doesn't have "ford trucks" at the begining, while the second has it first so "ford trucks" has more prominence. However, the second example uses a longer modifier so it has more total words resulting in "ford trucks" having less keyword density (which could be good, bad or neutral). Don't worry about this too much for elements like page titles or header tags. Just be aware and mix it up to see what works for you.
LSI Keywords & Co-Occurance - I won't get too techinical here other than to say that "LSI" is often incorreclty by many SEO "experts". For our purposes, what both LSI and Co-Occurance mean to us is how the words OTHER THAN the main keyword help define the theme of a web page. What OTHER words you would expect to find on a page about "Apple" to help Google figure out what a page is really about.
For example, let's say our main keyword is "Apple.
Page 1 about "apple" also contains the words: iphone, apps, itunes, steve jobs, mac
Page 2 about "apple" also contains the words: pie, cider, cinnamon, bake, flour
Page 3 about "apple" also conatins the words: John, Ringo, Paul, records, Beatles, Liverpool
All three pages are about "apple" but the other words tell Gooogle that each page is about totally different things. Adding words Google expects to also find along with your main keyword with help increase relevancy for that main keyword.
Tip: ?Go to the Content Silo and look for a link at the top called [font]?TxtOptimizer [/font]. Go to TxtOptmizier and enter the URLs for some top ranking pages. This tool will find keywords it thinks those pages are missing. This is a good strategy for coming up with some good LSI/Co-Occurance keywords for content. Don't forget to also use the LSI keywords that ARE on these pages and use them too.
Boost Your Page Speed - The FASTEST pages by far are html pages using W3.CSS. W3CSS is faster and easier to use than Bootstrap. Both CSSW3 and Bootsstrap are much faster than content management systems like WordPress. WP has to access a database, even if all the speed optimization features are used. There are many other reasons to use WP, so be sure to make sure that you do everything you can to speed up the load time of your WP pages.
But, if you want the very fastest pages, the I recommend Bootstrap or even better, W3.CSS.
Now matter what you choose, try to eliminate the need to call third-party files like CSS files hosted on another server. If you can host them locally on your own domain it saves the browser the time it takes to notify other servers to give them the info they need. Your pages are only as fast as the slowest external CSS or Javascript file your pages need to load.
Unique Content - By “unique”, I’m not just talking about duplicate content with words and sentences rearranged. Create a page that has more content, includes different topics from the other ranking pages, includes your own opinions and experiences, etc.
Contact/TOS/About/Affiliate Discloure Pages - Trust is important and honest. Transparent businesses (and people) don't hide. Create the needed pages and link to them in the footers of every page.
Domain Name - There's been a debate about "exact match" dommains where the domain name is an exact match for a keyword. My guess is it probably helps a bit, it almost has to. However, any "exact match" can only exactly match one keyword phrase. And there's 100's of different extensions now like .club and .tv, so an exact match wouldn't seem to have an advantage over the other 100's of exact match domain names.
IMO, it doesn't have to be an "exact match". Having a domain name containing an important keyword is a good indication of what the site is about, both to Google and to real people. The price of domain names is also a "barrier to entry".
It's also possible to buy domain names with existing links that help boost your rankings. But this has more to do with off-page SEO and is best for another discussion.
Domain names may be banned from Google because of a bad/spammy link profile. Just because you bought a new domain today doesn't mean someone else hasn't used it before. Domains with existing links can be very beneficial...or very harmful.
I discuss potent domain name strategies in detail in the VIP forums:
Get Access to All Pheeds VIP Forums and Downloads
Structured data (Schema) - In the most simple terms, Schema is information about a web page to help tell the major search engines what the page is about. It's "structured" (formatted) in a certain way and uses particular definitions to make it as simple and easy for the search engines to understand.
Look to use schema for the following types of content, plus video, etc:
Articles
Events
Products
People
Organizations
Local Businesses
Reviews
Recipes
Medical conditions
Google and the other engines will use the schema info as the basis of "rich snippets" which appear on the search results pages. If you're using WordPress, any decent SEO plugin will give you access to schema.
If you design pages with HTML, you can use a schema generator to create the code then add it to the HTML of your pages.
Google SERP for ?schema generator SEO.
How to Boost Your SEO by Using Schema Markup
?https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-started-using-schema/
Totally One-of-a-Kind Search Querries - Decades ago in Google's early days, nearly 50% of all search querries where "one of a kind", meaning that eact phrase was only searched for a single time.
I've read reports that today the number of one of a kind searches is now 30%, as Google gets better and people are most search-savvy than bac k then. But...this is still almost 1 out of every 3 searches performed, Google doesn't have a clue what to rank. You can get a lot of traffic from these obscure keywords. The strategy is to use lots of combinations of keywords. Your goal should be to use as many reasonable keywords in as many reasonable ways as possible. Don't just "stuff" keywords. Instead, create content around a variety of keywords and modifiers you know people are looking for.
Mix Things Up and Don't Be Perfect - It's more important to be productive than perfect. Try page titles with only your main keywords. Try page titles mixing your main keywords and secondary keywords. Sometimes add a modifier to your titles and sometimes don't. Same with your header tags and all the other elements of your pages.
Use Good Spelling and Grammar - Get a good grammar and spell check plugin for your favorite browser and use it.
This page contains what I feel are the most important "on page" SEO ideas and concepts you need to know in 2022 and beyond.
These first three are, without a doubt, the most important and essential things you need to master to make money with SEO.
1 Mindset: Don't choose keywords - Let the keywords choose you. Most advice given (and taken) is to come up with the best keywords for your site. By letting the keywords choose you, find good keywords FIRST, THEN create sites and pages for the best of the best keywords..
Public Thread: Don't choose keywords. Let keywords choose you or How to REALLY make money with SEO
https://pheeds.com/phorum/showthread.php...t=keywords
2 Keyword Research and Selection - With good, solid research and effort, you can find PLENTY of valuable keywords with low competition that you can rank for with no or few external links. Put in the time to find the keywords that give you the best possible chances of success. And keep digging. Constantly over time. Your goal isn't to find some good keywords. It's to find and create content for as many keywords as you can, using sound and reasonable SEO practices.
Visit these threads for keyword resources:
Free Keyword and SEO Tools for 2022
The BIG list of premium marketing tools that offer free trials
3 Be a Productive and Efficient Content Making Machine - You need to create a system and organize your tools and resources so you can produce QUALITY content as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible. There are few certainties in life, but one is that a page you never post will never get traffic.
If you spend time and use common sense to uncover the best keywords, and let this research guide you, and create quality content for these keywords, you are giving yourself a huge headstart on making SEO work for you.
However, if you come up with an idea for a site and only THEN do SEO, you're in for a uch tougher time, IMO.
Highly Recommended Resources:
Rytr AI Content Assistant - Yes, I'm an affiliate. I'm also a paying cusotmer and use it daily. Rytr will help you write better articles faster and about more topics, meta descriptions and a lot more.
Get Access to All VIP Forums and Downloads - Discover the things that worked 25 years agos that still work now. You'll benefit from my experiences with long-term SEO and content creation.
Content Silo - Free to all. Get organized and be more productive. The Content Silo has multiple work areas for writers and lots of links to the best and coolest resources for writing content. It's the perfect companion for Rytr and all AI content helpers.
See More Important On-Page SEO Factors below:
More Important On-Page SEO Factors for 2022
E-A-T is Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google uses EAT for topics it feels are important for things like health, legal issues, financial advice, etc., where bad info can cause serious harm. Google is going to give more trust to a site like the Mayo Clinic that some random person on the Net.
You can give your pages a potential boost by quoting and linking to respected sources. Use the Google Scholar search to find "EAT-friendly" sources. You can always find a link to Scholar on the Content Silo page:
?https://pheeds.com/misc/ContentSilo.html
Title Tag - The title tag has been the most important single place for keywords for my 26 years of SEO, and it probably still is. Make sure to use your primary keyword (from your research) in the title tag. Also, consider adding "modifiers" which are common search words to your main keyword, like:
- best
- 2022
This list of "Buyer Keywords" includes a lot of good title modifiers with buyer potential:
https://pheeds.com/phorum/showthread.php...el+Numbers
Meta Description - Sometimes Google uses it, sometimes they generate their own description. It's important because a good description can increase your click-through rate in the search results pages. Include secondary keywords that are in the content of the page, as Google tends to highlight these words in bold.
I like using ?Rytr (aff link) for meta descriptions. Writing a meta description or two isn't hard. But over your SEO career wyou will write 1000's of meta descriptions. It'd good to have a little help. AI content helpers aren't just for long form articles. Rytr and others have a meta tag description feature if you want some inspiration. Also, try the Call to Action, Copywriting AIDA and PAS features too for more meta description ideas. The #1 goal of the meta description is to get people to click.
Header Tags - Use the H1 tag once with your main keyword at the top of the page. Use variations and secondary keywords in H2 tags. Generally speaking, your Title tag and first H1 tag should use the same main keyword.
Headlines in Header Tags - Not only should header tags be used for relevant keywords, they should also use basic copywriting principles. Particularly your H2 tags should use headlines to capture attention and to increase interest and encourage folks to continue reading your entire pages.
You can always find a link to a Headline Generator on the Content Silo page:
?https://pheeds.com/misc/ContentSilo.html
Image Optimization
File Size: Make your images as small as possible. I use Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature because I've found it works the best for making images small. There are some good, ?free online image shrinkers on Google Search.
Original Images - There are reports Google favors pages with original images over stock images used on multiple sites. Use Google's Image Search to check if the images you're using can be found elsewhere. I'm not sure what needs to be done to modify stock images to make them "original" in Google's eyes?
?https://www.google.com/imghp - Image search...click the little camera icon.
Name the image using a keyword, using hypens:
- 1989-ford-truck.jpg
Include a keyword in the ALT tag.
URLs and Page File Names - In WordPress, this is handled automatically for youm based on the page title. When creating pages using an HTML editor, the file name will be used as the URL for the page. This can be the same as your page title, but doesn't have to be. In most cases it's probably best to save your page using your main keywords only, including hyphens:
1989-ford-truck.html
Anchor Text - Anchor text doesn't only affect the relevancy of the page linked to, it also affects the relevancy of the page the link is on. Google has always loved anchor text and stronly consider the anchor text on the page you're optimizing. The tendency now is to probably over-optimize anchor text. Don't. Just be sure to look at the words in the anchor text on your pages and consider the relvancy while avoiding over-optimization by including a few "non keyword" words in your anchor text.
And remember, you can link a page to "iteself" by using "anchor links" to skip to other parts of content on the same page. If you see a "Top of Page" link that takes you to the top of the same page, that's an anchor link. And anchor links use anchor text too.
Internal Linking - Of course, anchor text matters. So does structure. Every page has "some" authority in Google, or its banned. The homepage on any domain tends to have the most authority of any page on the site. This means a link to a page coming from the homepage/index page will likely push more link juice than other pages.
Your most important pages should be linked to from the home page, using contextual links, and should NEVER be more than two clicks away from the homepage. You can create content pages with their primary purpose to generate and push link juice to imporant pages. Often, a page on page 2 in Google can get a boost to page 1 with just a little internal focusing of links.
Keyword Prominence - This is how early and soon a keyword phrase is used. In page content, the usual advice is to use your main keyword in the first 100 words. I would try to work it in sooner. Prominence also applies to things like header tags and page titles. For example:
- Best ford trucks
- ford trucks that are best for women
The first example doesn't have "ford trucks" at the begining, while the second has it first so "ford trucks" has more prominence. However, the second example uses a longer modifier so it has more total words resulting in "ford trucks" having less keyword density (which could be good, bad or neutral). Don't worry about this too much for elements like page titles or header tags. Just be aware and mix it up to see what works for you.
LSI Keywords & Co-Occurance - I won't get too techinical here other than to say that "LSI" is often incorreclty by many SEO "experts". For our purposes, what both LSI and Co-Occurance mean to us is how the words OTHER THAN the main keyword help define the theme of a web page. What OTHER words you would expect to find on a page about "Apple" to help Google figure out what a page is really about.
For example, let's say our main keyword is "Apple.
Page 1 about "apple" also contains the words: iphone, apps, itunes, steve jobs, mac
Page 2 about "apple" also contains the words: pie, cider, cinnamon, bake, flour
Page 3 about "apple" also conatins the words: John, Ringo, Paul, records, Beatles, Liverpool
All three pages are about "apple" but the other words tell Gooogle that each page is about totally different things. Adding words Google expects to also find along with your main keyword with help increase relevancy for that main keyword.
Tip: ?Go to the Content Silo and look for a link at the top called [font]?TxtOptimizer [/font]. Go to TxtOptmizier and enter the URLs for some top ranking pages. This tool will find keywords it thinks those pages are missing. This is a good strategy for coming up with some good LSI/Co-Occurance keywords for content. Don't forget to also use the LSI keywords that ARE on these pages and use them too.
Boost Your Page Speed - The FASTEST pages by far are html pages using W3.CSS. W3CSS is faster and easier to use than Bootstrap. Both CSSW3 and Bootsstrap are much faster than content management systems like WordPress. WP has to access a database, even if all the speed optimization features are used. There are many other reasons to use WP, so be sure to make sure that you do everything you can to speed up the load time of your WP pages.
But, if you want the very fastest pages, the I recommend Bootstrap or even better, W3.CSS.
Now matter what you choose, try to eliminate the need to call third-party files like CSS files hosted on another server. If you can host them locally on your own domain it saves the browser the time it takes to notify other servers to give them the info they need. Your pages are only as fast as the slowest external CSS or Javascript file your pages need to load.
Unique Content - By “unique”, I’m not just talking about duplicate content with words and sentences rearranged. Create a page that has more content, includes different topics from the other ranking pages, includes your own opinions and experiences, etc.
Contact/TOS/About/Affiliate Discloure Pages - Trust is important and honest. Transparent businesses (and people) don't hide. Create the needed pages and link to them in the footers of every page.
Domain Name - There's been a debate about "exact match" dommains where the domain name is an exact match for a keyword. My guess is it probably helps a bit, it almost has to. However, any "exact match" can only exactly match one keyword phrase. And there's 100's of different extensions now like .club and .tv, so an exact match wouldn't seem to have an advantage over the other 100's of exact match domain names.
IMO, it doesn't have to be an "exact match". Having a domain name containing an important keyword is a good indication of what the site is about, both to Google and to real people. The price of domain names is also a "barrier to entry".
It's also possible to buy domain names with existing links that help boost your rankings. But this has more to do with off-page SEO and is best for another discussion.
Domain names may be banned from Google because of a bad/spammy link profile. Just because you bought a new domain today doesn't mean someone else hasn't used it before. Domains with existing links can be very beneficial...or very harmful.
I discuss potent domain name strategies in detail in the VIP forums:
Get Access to All Pheeds VIP Forums and Downloads
Structured data (Schema) - In the most simple terms, Schema is information about a web page to help tell the major search engines what the page is about. It's "structured" (formatted) in a certain way and uses particular definitions to make it as simple and easy for the search engines to understand.
Look to use schema for the following types of content, plus video, etc:
Articles
Events
Products
People
Organizations
Local Businesses
Reviews
Recipes
Medical conditions
Google and the other engines will use the schema info as the basis of "rich snippets" which appear on the search results pages. If you're using WordPress, any decent SEO plugin will give you access to schema.
If you design pages with HTML, you can use a schema generator to create the code then add it to the HTML of your pages.
Google SERP for ?schema generator SEO.
How to Boost Your SEO by Using Schema Markup
?https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-started-using-schema/
Totally One-of-a-Kind Search Querries - Decades ago in Google's early days, nearly 50% of all search querries where "one of a kind", meaning that eact phrase was only searched for a single time.
I've read reports that today the number of one of a kind searches is now 30%, as Google gets better and people are most search-savvy than bac k then. But...this is still almost 1 out of every 3 searches performed, Google doesn't have a clue what to rank. You can get a lot of traffic from these obscure keywords. The strategy is to use lots of combinations of keywords. Your goal should be to use as many reasonable keywords in as many reasonable ways as possible. Don't just "stuff" keywords. Instead, create content around a variety of keywords and modifiers you know people are looking for.
Mix Things Up and Don't Be Perfect - It's more important to be productive than perfect. Try page titles with only your main keywords. Try page titles mixing your main keywords and secondary keywords. Sometimes add a modifier to your titles and sometimes don't. Same with your header tags and all the other elements of your pages.
Use Good Spelling and Grammar - Get a good grammar and spell check plugin for your favorite browser and use it.
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The Pheeds Kings and Queens of Content VIP Club affiliate program.
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