On Page SEO - 9 Actionable Techniques That Work

in this video I'm going to show you nine powerful on-page SEO techniques these are the same techniques that I've used to rank in Google for keywords like backlinks and SEO tools I'm Brian Z and the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and today you're going to learn the nine tactics that I use to optimize every page of my website keep watching I launched my first website way back in 2008 needless to say on-page SEO was a lot different back then in those days keyword stuffing was all the rage I mean people would actually argue on forums about what the best keyword density was if my page has 879 words and my keyword appears 17 times that's the keyword density of 1.9% perfect today thanks to google updates like hummingbird and rankbrain on-page SEO is much more complex but one thing that hasn't changed is that there's a right and wrong way to optimize your content and in this video you'll learn the right way so without further ado let's dive right in with technique number one which is to use super short URL so I recently teamed up with a handful of SEO software companies to conduct the largest ranking factor study ever in total we analyzed 1 million google search results and we discovered that short urls tend to rank better than long URL fortunately it's super easy to use short URLs on your site whenever you publish a new page make the URL short and sweet for example in my guide about keyword research my URL is simply backlink accom forward slash keyword research speaking of URLs our next technique is to include your target keyword in your url again this is really simple and easy but it can make a difference in your racking when you're creating your URLs just make sure to include your target keyword in that URL for example in this post I'm targeting the keyword SEO tools so I made the URL short and it also included my target keyword in the URL ok so now it's time for our next technique which is to use LSI keywords LSI keywords are words and phrases that search engines use to understand what your content is all about for example let's say that you're writing an article about the Simpson how weird would it be if your content didn't include terms like Homer Springfield and mr. Bern in the SEO world these closely related terms are called LSI keywords and when you include these LSI keywords in your article it helps Google understand your content topic so how do you know which LSI keywords to use a simple strategy that I use is to search for your target keyword in Google then scroll to the bottom where Google shows you the searches related to section the terms in bold here usually make great LSI keywords to sprinkle into your content with that it's time for our next tip which is to publish long content remember that ranking factor study that I mentioned earlier well we found something very interesting in that study something that goes against conventional wisdom in the SEO and content marketing world and that discovery was that longer content tends to outrank shorter content in fact we found the average result on Google's first page was 1890 words so why does longer content work better for one longer content tends to contain more of those LSI keywords that we talked about earlier when you write long in-depth content you naturally include more LSI keywords which makes Google happy also Google may have an inherent preference for longer content remember Google wants to show their user the best result for a given keyword and if your page provides someone with a comprehensive answer to what that person is looking for Google will want to rank you high up on the first page in fact my highest ranking content also tends to be my longest content for example this post about SEO techniques is a whopping 4,000 words and that's one of the reasons that it ranks in the top three for the keyword SEO techniques okay let's dive right in with technique number five which is optimizing your title tag for click-through rate now you probably already know that you should include your target keyword in your title that's on page SEO 101 but what you may not know is that you should also optimize your title tag for click-through rate why because it's a huge Google ranking factor right now in fact a Google engineer recently gave a presentation where he confirmed that they used CTR as a ranking factor in other words if people search for a keyword and click on your result it sends a strong message to Google that you're a great result for that search and they'll likely give you a rankings boost so how can you optimize your title tag for CTR here are two quick tips that work great first include numbers in your title there's a reason that your local magazine rack flashes numbers on every single cover and that's because numbers grab attention in fact a study by conductor found that headlines with numbers get 36% more clicks than headlines without a number another simple way to boost your CTR is to add bracket and parentheses to your title when HubSpot recently analyzed three million headlines they discovered that brackets and parentheses boosted CTR by an average of 38 percent so let's say you had a title that originally look like this by changing your title tag to this you can significantly boost your pages click the rate this simple tactic works so well that I tend to use brackets or parentheses in almost every single title okay we're making a ton of progress because they're already on technique number six which is to use external links the guys that reboot online recently ran an interesting SEO study they made up a new keyword that had zero search results in Google then they created ten different websites that were optimized around that fake keyword five of the websites linked out to other websites and five of their websites had no external links what do you think happened the five sites that contained external links out ranked a hundred percent of the sites without external links so it's clear that Google uses external links as an on-page ranking factor the question is how can you use them on your site it's simple include two to five about links to authority resources in every single article for example at backlinko I generous li link out to resources that help my readers out and these external links make a small but significant difference in my rankings now that we've tackled external links it's time for me to show you how to use internal links this one is insanely easy whenever you publish a new piece of content make sure to link back to two to five older pages on your site but not just any older pages pages that you want to rank higher now this may sound like common sense but I'm always surprised at the amount of people that add fifteen eternal links to random pages on their site sure any internal links are better than none at all but if you want to get the maximum benefit from your internal links you need to use them strategically which means only using two to five per page and linking only to pages that need a boost that's all there is to it okay so we only have two techniques left you ready let's do this our eighth tip is to maximize site speed site speed is one of the few ranking factors that Google has publicly confirmed and for my own testing I've found that a faster site gives you a slight edge so how can you make your site load faster first invest in premium hosting when it comes to your web host you get what you pay for back in the day I'd use cheap $5 a month hosting plans and needless to say my site loaded slower than molasses today I use premium hosts like web synthesis in liquid web they're not cheap but the boost and speed that these high-end hosts provides make it well worth the investment the second way to improve your site speed is to use a CDN CDN deliver your site's content closer to where your user lives which makes your site load much faster with that it's time for our last tip which is to include multimedia in your content if you read my stuff at backlinko you'll notice that it used a ton of screenshots videos and charts in my content all of this multimedia makes my content more valuable to my reader and make no mistake user experience is something that Google directly measure for example if your Paige has a high bounce rate and a low time on site Google will drop your ranking on the other hand if people stick to your content like superglue they'll want to show your content to more people and in my experience using lots of multimedia helps people stay on your site longer did you learn something new from today's video if so make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button right here also if you want exclusive SEO and traffic techniques that I only share with subscribers head over to backlinko comm and sign up for the newsletter it's free now I want to turn it over to you which on-page SEO tip from this video are you going to use first are you itching to try LSI keywords or maybe you want to start publishing longer content either way let me know by leaving a comment below right now okay oh so what do you think sleeves rolled up or down 9 alright back to the serious stuff great time to vacuum I got to breathe before I do that one I feel weird saying that

Channel: Brian Dean

Views: 251,156

Keywords: on page seo, SEO, keywords, optimizing content, on page optimization, search engine optimization

Id: EceSgY9bDnc

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017