Even the best advice is useless if you can't practice it. As a consultant by profession, I always consider the effects and costs of implementing any changes I recommend. Don’t get me wrong – although it will be painful, some difficult changes will have to be made. Although there are often some easy winning ways that won't cost development time and thousands of dollars to implement. I will provide you with 8 ways to solve on-page SEO challenges.
"Easy" is not always easy
Agile disclaimer: What's "easy" for one person or platform may not be easy for another. Whole-site changes (such as titles) require caution, but are usually easier than a complete revamp or switching to a new platform. One area I won't mention on this list is optimizing your URLs. While that's a very effective strategy, I've seen many people make minor changes to URLs for SEO purposes. Whole-site URL changes are dangerous and often difficult to perform correctly—it's not worth going from "good" to "slightly better". The changes I suggest here are generally low-risk.
1. Canonicalize internal duplication
While there may not be a duplicate content penalty (with a capital P), flooding indexed pages can have serious consequences, especially in the post-Panda world. Google doesn’t do a good job of selecting the correct version of a page, and low-authority sites can dilute your site’s index and crowd out deeper, more important pages (such as product pages).
There are three common internal duplications I've experienced here:
1. Duplication caused by session variables and tracking parameters
2. Duplication caused by search sorts and filters
3. Duplication caused by interleaved URL paths pointing to the same page
If search engine spiders see a new URL for the same content (whether that URL is static or dynamic), they will treat it as a new page. It is important to regulate these pages. When the duplicates are exactly the same, using canonical tags or 301 redirects is usually the best approach. In some cases, such as searching for categories or page numbers, the situation is more complicated.
2. Write a unique Title tag
The title tag remains a powerful ranking factor while being frequently abused and ignored. The pages you want to rank for need unique, descriptive, targeted keyword title tags that are clear and simple. You can easily track duplicate page titles with SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, including historical data:
Duplicate Titles in PRO App
This data applies to many locators, including the Campaign Dashboard and the “Crawl Diagnostics” tab. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to track exact duplicate pages. You can find it under Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions.
The solution here is simple: write a unique title tag. If you have a large website, there are many ways to systematically populate the title tag from data. Solving this problem is worth writing some appropriate code.
3. Write unique META Descriptions
Although the recent META Description tag has little or no direct impact on rankings, it does have two important indirect effects:
1. It (usually) determines your search snippet and affects click-through rate (CTR)
2. It is another element of uniqueness that makes a web page look more valuable.
There are many ways to generate META descriptions from data, including using snippets of product descriptions. Try to make the description meaningful and attractive to visitors rather than using keywords to pretend to be sentences.
4. Shorten your title tag
Long title tags tend to weaken the SEO impact of any keyword and can also reduce search visitors (who are more likely to skim the results). The most common mistake I see is someone adding their home page title to all other pages. Let’s take a look at your homepage title:
"The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob's Bacon Barn"
Then, for each product page, you have the following:
“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”
<It may not seem redundant, but you are diluting the keywords of the first (and most important) pages, and you are making all pages of your site needlessly compete with your homepage. It's okay to use your company's name (or a shorter version, like "Bob's Bacon") after all your title tags, but don't repeat core keywords wholesale. I've seen these taken to the extreme where you incorporate long product names, categories, and sub-categories.
5. Rewrite your title tag
On large e-commerce websites, it is normal to list category and subcategory information in the title tag. This is fine, but I often see structures like this:
"Bob's Bacon | Bulk Products | Bacon Sacks | 50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon"
Not only do all the title tags on the site look very similar, but the most important and unique keywords on the page are pushed to the back. This is also a search usability issue, and research has proven that the first few keywords in the title or headline are the most decisive (at least the first two). If your structure looks like the one above, replace:
"50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | Bacon Sacks | Bulk Products | Bob's Bacon"
This is a relatively simple change, putting the most important keywords first. This will increase your search CTR as much as possible.
6. Add direct product links
On a website with more than 100 or 1,000 pages, a "flat" structure is not reasonable or satisfactory. So, you naturally end up using a layered approach where the product is 3+ levels deep. I guess that's okay if the paths are clear to crawlers and visitors, but that leaves key pages with very little ranking weight. One solution is to put your top sales items on the homepage and link directly to them - this effectively flattens the site structure and flows more link-juice where it's needed. Don’t go overboard, but a “Featured Products” or “Top 10 Sellers” list on the homepage can really help promote important and deeper pages.
7. Rewrite internal anchor text
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen internal links, even navigational links, with unclear labels. If you're trying to rank for "kid's clothing" category pages, don't mark the button "Apparel (K-12)" - this is a bad sign to search engines, and it probably won't mean much to visitors. Your internal anchor text should reflect your keyword strategy, and your keyword strategy should reflect general conventions. Use markup that people understand and don't be careful about specializations.
8. Remove 10 low-quality links
There's an old adage in copywriting - say what you need to say in as few Words as possible, and then, when you're done, try to say it in half that many words. I guess the same applies to internal links. If the majority of your incoming links point to the home page, then your site structure is the single largest element that flows link-juice to deeper pages. It's natural to want to link to all pages, but if you prioritize everything, you're not effectively prioritizing anything. Select 10 links on your homepage that are low search priority or that visitors never click on, and remove them. Focusing on the remaining link-juice is an easy way to boost your most important pages.
I'd love to hear any tips you have for simple on-page optimization. I also recommend Rand’s article on building a perfectly optimized page. Link building is critical, and focus-on-page issues are often simple and have immediate results, so it's important not to neglect the front-end of your SEO struggles.
The original article was first published by SEMwatch editor Long Jun www.ecmoment.com
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