A lot of new website owners struggle to come up with the right formula to improve Search Engine Rankings.
Between external and internal factors, it could become a little tricky, and sometimes even out of control.
It is, indeed, highly recommended for these new admins to optimize their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices, as well as their overall SEO strategy, both On-Site (anything related to the activities, internal links, keywords, Meta tags and pages within the website in question) and Off-Site (anything that has to do with external links, backlinks, popularity, etc.)
On that note, we have a little treat for you; Rand Fishkin, the “Wizard of Moz” himself and one of the most qualified SEO experts in the industry, has agreed to an exclusive interview to provide more insights to On-Site SEO for beginners !
Simply follow these SEO basics to improve your strategy:
Rand Fishkin Q&A:
1. With Google’s various updates that are meant to optimize the user experience, does on-site SEO matter as much as it used to?
Absolutely. In fact, I’d say we’re seeing a resurgence in on-page SEO, though today I’d consider the practice much broader than keywords and crawlability. User experience is, in fact, a big part of on-page optimization, as I noted in my recent post on the subject.
2. When it comes to keyword targeting, is it better to have two or three main focus keywords to be replicated throughout all pages, or have various keywords depending on the page? (For instance, is it better to rank strongly for one or two keywords or rank less strongly for multiple keywords)
Neither. I’d think about keyword targeting based on intent, not specific permutations of terms and phrases. For example, a search for “bird watching Portland” and “birding PDX” have the same intent. I wouldn’t recommend creating two separate pages to target them, but rather, create one great page about the topic.
Creating a site that tries to focus on the same keywords on page after page is a recipe for spamminess, poor user experience, and losing your search traffic fast.
3. How about long-tail vs. short-tail keywords: which are more useful for on-site SEO content?
Totally depends on who your audience is and what you’re aiming to achieve by reaching them. In my experience, it’s almost always a mix of fat head vs. long tail of the demand curve that works best, but you may have a site with different motivations or different content that focuses more heavily on one or the other.
4. Meta Keywords are not as relevant as other Meta tags, but are they taken into account in any way by Google?
They are not. Bing, however, has said that they may use the meta keywords tag as a spam signal, so I’d avoid it if possible. Even in the best case – where the engines ignore meta keywords entirely – your competitors can still get valuable data you’d likely prefer to keep private if you’re employing the tag.
5. How about the rel=”canonical” tag? We know that it is used to tell Google not to index a particular page in order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content. However, can you explain what the difference between that and the 301 Redirect, which also tells Google to follow the redirect link and disregard the old one? Which one can be used for best practice?
First off, there’s not really a “penalty” per se for duplicate content. You may fall into trouble if you have tremendously large numbers of thin/similar content pages on your site that appear to be trying to manipulate the engines, but duplicate content is, in most cases, simply holding you back from ranking as well as you potentially could.
In terms of the rel=canonical tag vs. a 301 redirect, the short story is to use a 301 when you want to direct both visitors and engines to a different URL and to use rel=canonical when you only want to redirect engines, but let humans view either (as in the case of things like “print-only” versions of pages). For the longer, more in-depth answer, check out this post.
6. Is there a cap on how many (relevant) internal links can be included in a blog article?
No. If the links are useful to humans, there’s no limit. That said, if you find yourself in the many hundreds of links, I’d question whether you’re applying the best judgement with regards to user experience and relevance.
7. Can you provide some insights regarding Schema.org integrations for beginners? How beneficial can it be? Is it worth it to have rich snippets in Google’s eyes?
Schema markup can be very helpful for providing a boost in click-through-rate in the search results, and for serving Google specific kinds of parseable data in a format they can easily consume and display. It’s certainly worthwhile in many cases, but you should analyze the situation with care as sometimes, Google may take the data you markup and include it in certain ways you’d prefer they didn’t (e.g. some sites would prefer not to provide answer boxes or prices or other kinds of info directly).
8. What should be the plan for SEOs in 2015? What should they lookout for? What should they be careful with?
That’s a big question! I think I can best answer by nudging folks to check out this presentation I recently gave on Why SEO that Used to Work, Fails. It shows off a lot of what’s changed in the last 4-5 years and why some strategies and tactics that SEO professionals previously employed may let you down today.
9. Should we expect any new tools from Moz this year after the Spam Score?
Most definitely. I’m working on some stuff around keyword research with one of the engineering teams here, and several other teams are hard at work on their own projects.
10. This interview would not be complete if I don’t ask that one question that I’m sure a lot of our audience members are wondering: Did you happen to come across another pair of yellow Pumas?
Sadly, while I’ve come across plenty of other yellow Pumas, I haven’t been able to find the pair I really like – the same ones I used to wear to conferences all the time. I’ll keep looking for them, though!
About Rand Fishkin:
Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He’s founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+,Facebook, LinkedIn, and a shared Instagram account. In his miniscule spare time, he likes to galavant around the world with Geraldine and then read about it on her superbly enjoyable travel blog.
Source: - business2community
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