On-Page SEO
The most complete on-page SEO guide you are going to find out there follow every step and you are guaranteed to increase the traffic of your site..
Topics cover in this guide:
Backup and Website Information
We gather all the basic information needed to start with our work and then we back up our entire website including the results in search engines .
Indexation Optimization
We deindex and remove pages or posts that we don’t need manually doing it one by one or by groups, for doing this we go all over most settings on Yoast .
-Total indexed pages
-Posts indexation
-Pages indexation
-Projects indexation
-Authors indexation
-Dates indexation
-Tags indexation
-Category indexation
-Media attachment indexation
-Other deindexed pages
-Site Title
-Tagline
On Page Optimization
On Page Optimization.
Website Information
One of the first things to do when working on SEO is to get an idea on the project we are getting into, identifying the most basic concepts the platform and keeping in mind the main target keyword(s) we are going after to have a clear understanding what we are dealing with.
Let’s get into it…
Always take a look at the website and the dashboard and get familiar with it visit the “About page” and get to know more about the site, what is the main goal of the site? who’s audience is the website targeting? if you own the site you are doing SEO you still have to ask those questions and respond to them accordingly.
Domain name
Taking a look at the domain seems quite simple and it is, but sometimes the domain may be a crappy domain ended in a weird extension (.xyz .happyextension , .thebiggestextenstionever ) or the branding is not well suited with the domain name so we want to pay attention to this so we may either change it or make corrections if needed.
CMS
Content management system is another feature I like to pay attention to, this gives you a first look at what to do or what not to do:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Weebly
- and others.
It really depends on what you are working on to give you a more precise answer since I’m quite technical I like to most of the time use WordPress but I hear from so many people who just don’t have the time or just one a well-designed website that they understand and they can work and don’t want to spend the time or just don’t have a team or don’t want to be bothering the developer all the time so they go with Wix or Squarespace, frankly I think this is absurd just hire me 🙂 and your problems are gone.
Hosting
Let’s now pay attention to the hosting, hosting is one of the main important features of any site and yet people don’t pay too much attention to. Getting a good hosting improves a lot the user experience and also ranking results, Google does pay attention to how fast a website loads and uses this for ranking.
Getting to know more about your business
Getting to know more about your business or the site you are working on is the key to move forward, we will be able to understand more about the market and see where we are heading to aim the goal required.
Category
Identifying the right category or niche in which we are working will give us some orientation about the business: Restaurant,Plumbing,Rentals,Forex, etc.
Main Keyword(s)
Identifying our main keyword also gives us an idea about the work we are going to do. We are going to get into more details once we start working on keyword optimization and keyword research.
Backing up everything
Before messing with anything please make sure to backup the entire website (I screw it up a couple of times working on some projects. Not having a backup will give you – and gave me – a lot of headaches), plus most of this takes up to 10 minutes to do. We also want to backup anything that could be a superficial or outside part of the site like taking screenshots of the UX or Google’s indexation or the speed of the site; we will use this data later to compare and see the progress of our work.
Website Backup
There are different ways to backup your site and having different CMS will require different tutorials for each in this tutorial we will be backing up our site using WordPress, I may write another article for different CMS, there are some of them that don’t have a similar option so you may have to contact customer support in most of these cases and they may achieve something similar you may link then to this article or explain them what you want to accomplish, they’ll help you out 🙂 in most cases.
UpdraftPlus Backup
We are going to be downloading and installing this plugin to our WordPress and once we are there just follow this steps below:
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Please always make sure to download and backup also all this data to your PC or to the Cloud, click on each button (database, plugin, themes ,etc. ) and you will be given options to download each of them.
We are going to backup the site structure using screaming frog
Keep in mind please that this backup is only for the site on-page structure, this will give us every detail on the site that needs to be fixed. You can get screaming frog from this link.
Speed Scan
We are going to scan our sites’s speed to see where exactly is at the moment before working on it we want to see later as we work on if we made any progress at all.
Google Website Speed Test
We are going to be using to websites that I love for scanning our site and seeing what is the speed of our site, this website is owned by google and usually the data is more precise https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Desktop Speed Test: Often times speed tests from desktop machines will load much faster than mobile as you can see when you compare both images.
Mobile Speed Test: There are many more errors to correct when it comes to the website loading on mobile, we are going to do it when we get into every single detail.
GTMETRIX
I also love this site for scanning my site, I think you can save the scan if you create one account but I would suggest you to take a screenshot and save it otherwise just create an account and save the link. Oh BTW, keep in mind that gtmetrix is only for desktop no mobile.
In any case, there are other speed scanning tools that I love, when I do advance on-page SEO, but for beginners, these two tools are enough.
Indexation Optimization
In this section, we are going to go all over pages or posts or anything on our site that should be either removed, indexed or deindexed from search engines, obviously we are going to be working with the king Google but all of these will be applied automatically to other search engines like duckduckgo, too. The 3 key points to keep in mind when working here:
- Duplicate Content.
- Low-Quality Content.
- No content at all.
Criteria for Deindexation or Removal
We must follow some criteria when deciding which content should stay and which content should go:
Duplicate content
The duplicate content could be internal or external, so take it down or deindexed if you find such content within your site.
Low quality content
Any content that noone reads or very little content where people don’t engage .
No content
Sometimes we developers create some dummy pages for test so make sure to full remove these pages not deindex them but take them down.
Manual Deindexation
Often times especially if we are running our site for many years we may have written or posted at some point content that is low in quality that has no views at all (this can be seen on Google Analytics), content with no engagement at all, this is the kind of content we want to deindex.
This is the line of code that has to be placed at the top of your page in the “header” section, this code works for any site with this you tell search engines to not index your specific page, this is the universal way to do it.
| <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow“/> |
Bots will also crawl your site, you have to add “nofollow” if you don’t want links that are on the page to be followed.
| <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow“/> |
Yoast
Yoast is a WordPress plugin that will allow us to make the process of deindexation as painless as possible, we are going to be playing with this tool thought the entire indexation process so go get it https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ (we don’t need the pro version though ). I’m also going to be setting up an additional and universal way to do this. You can use the code written above for every page.
Once we have installed Yoast we are going to see the plugin in every page and post . If you go to the bottom of any page you’ll find it:
As you can see in the image above, there are two options.
-The first one is to deindex the specific page
-The second one is if you want the links that are within the content to be indexed.
Group Deindexation
The fun begins when we want to deindex complete sections on our site that we don’t want to show, to do this process manually will be very painful and there is were tools like Yoast come in handy, If you want to deindex by group in other platforms that are not WordPress you have to contact support. But frankly, in most cases it already comes deindexed for example on “Squarespace” I think the tag section is already deindexed as well as other spammy or non relevant pages.
POSTS
Set this option to “No” if you want to deindex all posts on your site .
PAGES
Set this option to “No” if you want to deindex all pages on your site .
MEDIA AND ATTACHMENT URL
Media and attachment URL is more redirection to the original source, so this is what happens when you upload any media on WordPress mainly (other platforms don’t have this problem at all, so you don’t have to worry, just skip this part) .
Whether it be an image or video it creates a page which is kind of redundant with the image so one will be the direct link to the image and the other will be the page containing that image, google sometimes indexes this low-quality page with one image. Keep this setting at “yes” to make it auto-redirect to the original source.
CATEGORIES
Set this option to “No” if you want to deindex all categories on your site .
TAGS
The “tag” section should be set to “NO”(noindex) in most cases this offers no values to search engines it could still produce value to users who may want to search or filter something by “Tags” and this option will not affect that process because the “tags” pages will still be alive but deindexed.
Getting to know more about your business
Getting to know more about your business.
Getting to know more about your business
What We Do
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SEO Consulting
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Data Analysis
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SEO Strategy
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