This week, we’ll be pooling all of our best On-Page SEO advice, the actual tricks that work best for us, on how to get your pages to appear in the top-most search results.
We’ll be sharing our own on page SEO checklist, including:
✔︎ Image optimization
✔︎ Adding social sharing buttons
✔︎ Featured snippets
✔︎ and many more tips…
are you doing the best you can in terms
of SEO from link building to keyword
research when it comes to SEO there are
many facets to consider and our hope is
to eventually cover them all focusing on
one key aspect at a time and beginning
this week by examining on-page SEO most
professionals building websites want to
improve their SEO skills and while the
Internet is probably saturated with tips
on things like keywords and headings a
great deal of them are long winded and
redundant we wanted to distill all those
great ideas to get the practical advice
most relevant to our subscribers those
of you who follow our magazine know that
we published about 6 articles every week
on design marketing and we needed to
streamline our SEO process for our
content to effectively reach our users
and relevant readers in this tutorial
we’re going to focus on one of the most
fundamental areas of SEO on-page SEO
search engine optimization which we all
know as the abbreviation SEO is the
process we use to optimize our digital
assets whether they be blog posts
landing pages or YouTube videos to help
them rank better on search engines
on-page SEO
refers to the technical steps that you
make to optimize your pages and posts so
they rank better for the keywords you
have chosen and just to be clear
keywords are not the only things that
affect SEO you may recall an earlier
video where we covered how visual
elements affect your blog content – so
let’s move ahead and run through your
checklist so that you can start SEO
optimizing your own websites in order to
show you the on-page SEO workflow that
we use we’ll be using an actual article
that we’ve published on our elements or
blog so by now we’ve finished writing
our new article and we’ve pasted it into
the layout we’ve built in Elementor
while we’re here we want to make sure
that we include the right social sharing
buttons which are important for on-page
SEO the obvious reason for that is that
it increases the likelihood of visitors
sharing your content for the generating
social media traffic which will improve
on our page SEO another reason is that
search engines use social signals as
ranking factors beyond that users seeing
your content shared on social media may
link it on their own sites adding
further to your traffic and ranking
elementals theme builder also lets you
create a single post template for your
social sharing buttons which you can
then always edit to change or add a
social share button all without worrying
about code or using additional plugins
that could add weight to your post and
slow it down which brings us to the next
part of our on-page SEO workflow
performance optimization performance and
page load speed are both crucial for
on-page SEO and if you’re using
Elementor you’re lucky because it’s
designed so that you don’t need plugins
for such things like forms and pop-ups
and this cuts down on a lot of the
superfluous weight that of
loading time remember less plugins
equals faster load time hosting has a
huge impact on your site speed as well
we recommend choosing a reliable host
like kin ster WP engine or SiteGround
according of course to your budget
another factor that will affect your
posts overall speed is your choice of
theme now we recommend using elementals
hello theme not just because it’s ours
you see there’s probably a reason that
it’s currently ranked third most popular
theme even though it was only released
just over a month ago it’s so
minimalistic it’s practically blank and
it allows you to lay anything on it
without adding conflicting or redundant
data and when using it with Elementor
you get the full advantages of the theme
builder which is an added bonus
speaking of speed and performance let’s
talk about images images should be as
lean as possible make sure they are less
than one megabyte by using tools like
tiny PNG optimal smush and Kraken to
shrink image size without losing quality
once I upload the image to tiny PNG you
can see it cut down the size to a
fraction of what it was now if you’ve
already seen our masterclass on how to
create an epic blog post you’ll know
that images can play a major part in the
layout well they also have a part to
play in on-page SEO as a rule of thumb
always give your images a relevant file
name alt tag and title and if possible a
caption now with our performance
optimized we can move on to the next
part of our on-page SEO workflow snippet
optimization we’re going to go back to
the wordpress dashboard where i’ve
already installed and activated the free
Yoast SEO plugin which we find very
useful to use it we’ve opened our post
in the regular WordPress editor in the
bottom half of the edit window we can
see the Yoast SEO plug-in and this here
is our snippet and now we’re going to
quickly review some of the basics that
haven’t really changed since
dawn of SEO over a decade ago to do so I
am in the content optimization tab of
the plugin I enter the snippet preview
and click Edit snippet the snippet is
the part that is shown in the search
results and it includes the title the
slug line and the meta description let’s
begin with optimizing our title now even
though it’s not the easiest thing to do
we recommend testing twenty-five
variations of your title before settling
on the one you’ll use this is known as
the upworthy method if we’re honest
there is no winning formula that can
guarantee anyone a perfect title but
what the upworthy method does is it
helps us to think outside the box
ranking hi is one thing but the real
skill is finding ways to stand out of
the crowd if everyone is using titles
like secret Instagram plugins or best
plug-in hacks you want something
different analyze current search results
think of a title that will really grab
your users and make them want to click
on your snippet first then try the
titles and see which of those gets the
best result I’ll paste my title here and
the green bar that I get indicates that
it’s the right length and it’s a good
title if I do say so myself moving on to
the slug that’s the additional text that
we add to the URL to help the search
engine as well as human users we
definitely think that you shouldn’t use
your full title which can be a bit long
like in this case just keep the slug
concise and coherent for example instead
of using our full title we’ll use best
Instagram plugins WordPress
now the Meta Description or the abstract
it should be captivating and a good way
to do that is to give the reader the
main takeaway of the article include a
clear call-to-action and keep it short
and sweet as you can see our Meta
Description
is also the right length so we’ll move
on now let’s get back to the elements or
editor as part of my SEO process before
I publish
I always revisit the content and layout
of the page and further fine-tune it and
get the quality as best as I can these
factors play a big role in terms of the
pages SEO if you want to read more about
the importance of layout and how to get
it right then please visit our earlier
masterclass which we did on using visual
elements in long-form content if you
haven’t seen it yet we encourage you to
check it out and hope you get the right
insight and inspiration that we try to
put into everything we do when it comes
to the content itself we suggest that
you use the Hemingway editor to get even
more suggestions for improving your
content it’s one of those things that
began as a novelty but it very quickly
proved to be useful when you want to
make sure that complex sentences don’t
get too convoluted as you can see here
we also suggest sending your article to
friends and colleagues and getting their
feedback and don’t forget that search
engines like content that uses synonyms
they also like latent semantic indexing
or LSI keywords these form a system that
search engines use to analyze the
various words people use when discussing
a certain topic we use tools like href
to figure out what questions we should
be asking and what LSI keywords to use
all this information is gathered on a
Google sheet which you can use to expand
the text of your current content we also
suggest reviewing your subheadings to
make sure that they have a logical and
coherent flow this way you can be sure
that visitors skimming your page will
understand what you wanted to say before
committing to reading the entire
page links both inbound and outbound
play an important role in SEO
specifically with on-page SEO they are
important to three areas
outbound linking we want to be sure that
the external links we are using are
connected to reliable trustworthy
sources you can see examples of this in
our previous masterclass article when we
created a link to Robert McKee’s website
second internal linking we need to make
sure that there are links in our new
content to our older related material
from our own site again this is easily
done in Elementor you just select the
text you want to link in the text editor
and it automatically suggests the
relevant content to link to and third we
want to create this same form of linking
but this time we want to make sure that
the other content in our site is linked
back to our new content like an internal
backlinking a quick way to find relevant
content on your site to link to your new
content is by running a quick search on
google while you’re in Elementor you’ll
want to make sure that your article is
tablet and mobile responsive and if
you’re asking yourselves what this has
to do with on-page SEO well it’s because
when your pages don’t look load or work
the way you intended them to it affects
the user experience which effects among
other things your ranking on search
engines again this is a subject that
deserves a full masterclass devoted to
it but luckily for you you won’t have to
wait long because our next Monday
masterclass will be dedicated to the
subject of mobile responsive ‘ti and
what to do to ensure it meanwhile a
simple way to test your post for a
mobile device is by using the responsive
mode in the elements or editor panel
finally we wanted to give you a bit of a
bonus with two extra pro tips to get
your on-page SEO to hop on up to the
next level
the first tip will help our posts become
a featured snippet
these are the snippets of results that
Google features at the top of their
result list because Google feels that
they will answer the users needs more
efficiently featured snippets also show
a much higher click-through rate or CTR
on xxx stats again 8 refs
is a great tool that can help you figure
out which of our articles have featured
snippets the best way to get your own
featured snippet is to keep your text
clear and concise especially in the
first part of your page or at least for
the first paragraph
think of your snippet as being the
answer to a question so it should be
short around 45 to 80 words including an
image next to this answer is another
good idea just be sure to follow the
same image guidelines we mentioned
earlier sometimes having a step-by-step
structure can also help you get featured
snippets on results for how-to questions
the second bonus pro tip is for Rich
Snippets these are regular Google search
results that are made richer when
displayed with additional info or data
that Google gets from structured data in
the pages HTML the kind of content that
usually generates Rich Snippets
include reviews recipes and events if
you want to know what kind of
information Google looks for to enrich
these snippets check out the
documentation on Google regarding Rich
Snippets
and structured markup Google does have
tools for testing structured markup and
Rich Snippets if you’re already using
Elementor you can use the star rating
widget which comes with built-in Rich
Snippets and Google structured markup
capability you can also combine a CF and
elemental steam builder to create
advanced pages that comply with Rich
Snippets like recipe sites SEO is a
fascinating yet vast a never-ending
process nevertheless if you do nothing
more than follow the checklist we’ve
shown you in this video your websites
will better meet search engine criteria
and requirements and as a result they
will
significantly higher perseverance and
persistence is the name of the game the
more you follow these guidelines the
more your workflow becomes easier and
quicker and the process becomes more
intuitive we hope you enjoyed this
masterclass and we hope this advice
makes a big difference in your website’s
SEO results we’ll be back next Monday
but till then as always we’d appreciate
any comments insight and any criticism
that you may have and obviously any
helpful tips that could help other users
make sure that you never miss an episode
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