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
