What Is on Page SEO ? A Guide to Create SEO Based Content for an Article
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It is the process of getting traffic from the search results on the search engines. So I won’t give you this bookish definition, rather, show it to you through an example. So if you go to “google.co.in” and search for the keyword “list of free job posting sites in India”. The first result is an article on my website: “eakhabaar.com/free-job-posting-sites-in-india” So if you click on this result and come on my website then you will become part of organic traffic to my website.
So now let’s talk about why SEO is even important and why you should even consider doing it for your website. Personally, I love SEO. Why? Because it is free evergreen traffic. This is the reason why I love SEO. Whenever we talk about SEO we primarily focus on Google, because Google owns the majority of the market shares in the search engine space. So as you can see in the data here that Google owns around 75% of the search engine market and Yahoo comes in second place at 8%. So whenever we’ll be talking about SEO, we’ll be focusing entirely on Google. I should also mention that SEO is for organic search results, and SCM is for search engine marketing. That is for paid search results. So the goal in SEO is to get into the top 3 ranking positions of Google search results. So let’s say you are searching for the keyword “best places in India”. Then your target is to rank your website on the first result here. Where the “travel triangle” is ranking currently. Why? Because it’s a human tendency to click on the first couple of results and not go down on the search results page. Also going through the stats here you can see that the position one is getting almost 20% of clicks for the target keyword. It goes down from there for position two around 13%. Position four around 8%. And for position ten you are only getting 8% of the clicks. So the ultimate goal is to rank your website for the first position.
Now there are two ways to get ranked in the first position. Either you can pay money and buy those keywords, or you can go the SEO route. So how the hell even Google rank websites, right? So already there are 200+ factors that Google considers while ranking a webpage on their search results. But the primary ones are the backlinks, content, user experience, and site structure. One of the key metrics that Google considers while ranking a webpage is the number of backlinks. So backlinks are all about how many different other websites are linked into your webpage that you are trying to rank on Google search results. So let’s say if you write an article on “best credit cards in India”. And it’s get mentioned on 30 different websites, with the link back to your article, then that means you have 30 different backlinks to your article. We’ll be talking about backlinks in the next video of this video course. Now let’s talk about content. Content is king when we talk about SEO. The content should be comprehensive, it should answer all the questions that a person has while searching for the keyword. Let’s say if I’m searching for “best credit card in India” and I click on the first result. If that article can give me all the details, the best great car comparison, table, recommendation, pros, and cons, then obviously that’s a high-quality article. I’ll be spending more time on the website.
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SEO Writing Guide for SEO Content Writers
Let me give you another example. So if you search for “best places in India” and you click on the first result, you’ll go to this article of Travel Triangle. As you can see this article is highly comprehensive. It is covering all the places while adding images, and it’s also giving bullet points, how to reach, the best time to travel, attractions… So you get all the information in one article itself. So you’re more likely to share the article, you’re more likely to spend time on this article. So that’s the kind of article that you have to write in order to get yourself ranked in the first place of Google search results. When we talk about site structure then this affects us like the speed of your website, the responsiveness of your website, is it loading properly on a mobile phone or not? So these are the various factors that affect the ranking of your website. So now let’s talk about types of SEO. There are primarily 2 types of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. We’ll be covering the off-page SEO in the next video, today we’ll be focusing entirely on on-page SEO. Although all of them are equally important. So what is on-page SEO? So these are all the measures, all the tactics that you can use directly within your website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. So there are various factors that affect the on-page SEO. So we’ll go through them, one-by-one. So the most important metric is the keyword. The keyword in the context of search engine optimization is a particular word or a phrase that describes the content of a webpage. So this phrase here “list of free posting sites in India” is a keyword. As you can see here, Google is also recommending some extra keywords here. Like people who are searching for this keyword would also be searching for these keywords. My job will be to optimize my article for all these keywords because the intent is the same. And then you have to find all the keywords, which have a similar intent. So here the person is looking for free job posting sites. So you’ll have to find all the keywords where the intent is to find free job posting sites. Similarly for here like best places in India. So Travel Triangle is here ranking for best places in India.
How to Write SEO Articles with Keywords
We do comprehensive keyword research through various paid tools, one that I personally use and prefer is “ahrefs”. So I have already added the URL is of the Travel Triangle, and as you can see this article is ranking for almost 2, 652 keywords. Look at the keywords here. They all have similar intents. Best places to visit in India, places to visit in India, tourist places in India. So why are keywords even important? Keywords are actually the foundation of your website content. Before starting an article, I spend 30 to 50 minutes finding the right keywords. Also, you have to understand that Google is a machine. They have crawlers to understand the content of your website. There’s no human eye looking at your content. So the only way they can understand the content of your website is through keywords. So the better optimized your article is for these various keywords, the better ranking you will get in the search results. I’ve even seen websites drive almost a million-plus visitors to their site, without doing anything else apart from keyword research because the competition is very low in some of the niches.
Whenever we are talking about unpaid SEO it starts with keyword research. So now I hope that you might have understood that keywords are extremely important for your website. So where the hell do you even find these keywords, right? Although there are many free tools also available out there in the market, which can be used to do the keyword research. But if you are really serious about SEO, if you are really serious about driving the free organic traffic through Google search results then you should definitely invest in a paid tool. The one that I personally use and prefer is “ahrefs”. So I have a portfolio of almost 13+ websites right now and all my SEO efforts are done through “ahrefs”. Ahrefs is not only used for keyword research but much more than that. So let me show you the process that I used to do the keyword research. This might be different from what the experts say, but this has been the most profitable one for me. So let’s say if I have to write an article for the best credit cards in India. What I’ll do is the first search for the main keywords, the natural-looking keywords. The best credit cards in India, then I’ll copy the URL of the first article that is ranking. Open site explorer of ahrefs, enter the URL here, select “prefix” and press search. Apart from ahrefs you can also use other tools like “semrush” it is also very popular in the market. It also has a very comprehensive database for the keywords and the backlinks. You can also use “Moz”, it’s one of the biggest websites when we talk about internet marketing online. They also have SEO software. Apart from that, you can also use this free tool “keyword finder”. Their keyword difficulty metric is really preferable in all the internet. So 26 out of 100 means that this keyword will be fairly difficult to rank but not too difficult. Also, it gives you a list of related keywords like “tourist places in India”, “best tourist places in India” along with the search value and the CPC. But the keyword difficulty metric here is extremely important.
So what are the things you should remember while doing the on-page SEO? The most important metric is the niche. Your niche should not be too competitive. It should be easy to rank. So whenever you are writing an article make sure you do comprehensive research. Research is very important before writing any article. So make sure you research your article, make a list of the important, relevant topics related to the niche of your article. And then do the keyword research. The more keywords you have, the more keywords you are targeting in your article, the better ranking you will get, the more traffic you will get in the future. So let’s say you are writing an article on the best credit cards in India. So other related search term is “how to apply for credit card”, “credit card steps”… So these are all related search terms which also have comparable search volume. So you should be incorporating all these keywords in your article. You also have long-tail keywords like “which credit card is best in India”. So this is a long-tail keyword. And then you should just follow my technique of putting in the URL of the top-ranking articles into ahrefs and then downloading the excel sheet on the various keywords. So let’s say if you entered 3 different URLs and downloaded 3 different excel sheets. So make a combined master file and remove the duplicates. The various keyword metrics that you have to look at is the search volume, how many people are actually searching for this keyword in a particular month. Then you have to look at the number of clicks. All these data are available in ahrefs. So let’s say you’re searching for “best credit cards in India” then someone might be bidding for the keywords for the paid ads on Google. So if someone is bidding for the keywords, then the number of clicks on your article, even if you are ranking in the first position, will be competitively less. Traffic potential is the accumulated traffic you can drive to your article for your target keyword. So if someone is searching for “best credit card in India” another person might be searching for “top credit cards in India”. Both of them have the same intent, so you’ll be combining all this traffic to get your traffic potential for your article. If you are ranking number one for all these keywords. And the fourth and most important metric is keyword difficulty. So writing the article is not yet a job done, you also have to do a lot of things after you write the article. But yes on-page SEO will make a difference in your rankings, so you have to optimize your article on all the areas on on-page SEO and on off-page SEO as well in order to rank in the number one position. I have already shown you ahrefs and how to use it in finding the right keywords, apart from that I’ve already shown you SEMrush and KWFinder. These are the two different tools apart from ahrefs that you can use to do your keyword research. Finally, I will give you a list of all the other metrics that are equally important for your on-page SEO. First is the website speed. A fast loading website is highly preferred by Google, so make sure that you do all the optimization, to increase the loading speed of your website. So how do you even find the loading speed? So let me give you an example. So open this page “Pingdom website speed test”. And I have taken our website “eakhabaar”. Why? Because we have already optimized this website for speed. So as you can see their website loads at 708 milliseconds. This is exceptionally good results. Even my websites are taking almost 2.5 seconds to load. This is another tool that you can use to check the speed of your website. Apart from Pingdom, GTmetrix is also highly considered by online marketing experts. Here you can see again that the website takes a 100% score in page speed score and 97% in a yslow score. And again here it is only loading in 0.8 seconds. Right now I am even feeling jealous because I want my websites to load as fast as these guys. And here the best part is all of these tools will give you recommendations on how and where you can improve to increase the speed of your website. So all you have to do is click on this arrow and they’ll give you all the URLs that might be causing the issues and all the various metrics, various scoring, and your score as well. Now let’s talk about dwell time. Dwell time is the time that a person on average spends time on your article after coming from the Google search results.
Let’s say the same example of best places in India, if you’ll go to travelarticle.com article, the article is well-formatted, it has bold, italics, it has all the information for all these places, it has multimedia elements. And it has bullet points, key attraction, so this is answering almost all of my questions. And the best part is you can even book the place here. So I am more likely to spend more time here because I am getting all the information that I am looking for. So let’s say I am spending more than 7 minutes on this article. And only 3 minutes in the next article. Then Google will understand that the first result is the relevant one because the user metric is the best kind of metric. Because if I am loving the article, then definitely other people will be loving the article. Let’s take another scenario here. If the majority of people who are searching for the best credit cards in India, go to this third result and spend more time on this third result, compared to the first and second results then Google will think, “okay, the third result, might be more relevant.” Why? Because people are clicking more on the third result and also spending more time on the article. Hence, Google might promote this article to the first position. That is not the only metric, but yes it will help in getting the first ranking in the Google search results. I still remember one of my own examples, there was this article in which I ranked from number 5 to number 1 position just by increasing the length of my article, by adding more multimedia content, by making use of simple language. And just because of that, the on article time on an average was increased and hence, Google promoted my website to the number one position. Now let’s talk about internal links. So let’s say you’re writing an article about the best credit cards in India. You already have an article about how to improve your credit card score, putting a link to this new article in this already existing article will also help increase the ranking of your website. So if you have purchased a theme online then responsive design is something that you don’t have to worry about. Because the majority of the new themes are responsive in nature. So your website should be customized for a tablet, for a mobile phone, for a laptop, etc. So if you’re buying a theme online, this problem will already be covered. Meta description, so this is another metric that you have to take care of. So what do we mean by meta title and meta description? Here in this line “11 Best Credit Cards in India 2018 Review” is the meta title. And here this extra text, below along with the date is the meta description. So all of these are available in the backend while you’re writing the article from WordPress. From there you can customize it, but the ultimate goal of meta title and description is it should have the target keyword. As you can see, the first result which is ranking has the target keyword “best credit cards in India”. So Google is more likely to rank it because Google understands that this article is relevant to the person who is searching for the query. Also as you can see here, that the URL also has the main keyword. “eakhabaar.in/best-credit-cards-in-India…” So having the main keyword in your URL also helps in the search engine ranking.