During my SEO class at Colorado Mountain College (CMC) last week we focused on On-site SEO. Â On-site SEO (as opposed to Off-site SEO) is all the things you can do to your website to help it perform better in search engines. Off-site SEO are the things you do out and about on the Internet (like link-building or social media). Â I broke on-site SEO into two categories:
- Keyword SEO is composed of all the things you can to add keywords to your website. Â We discussed creating a keyword “vector” for each page on the website using the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keyword (not), H1, Content, URL, Anchor text and Latent Semantics (LSI).
- Keyword Agnostic SEO is composed of the elements that can help your website rank better but do not revolve around keywords. Â We discussed:
- Load time/speed of pages
- Age of domain and the idea of a sandbox
- Broken Links (as a negative factor)
- Freshness
- Interior linking, linking schemes and content silos
- Length of Content
- Originality of Content
- Click-Thu-Rates and Dwell Time
- XML Sitemaps
- How website works in Mobile device
Here is the list of resources and online tools:
Moz’s Search Ranking Factors : A great resource to learn more about what factors may correlate to high rankings and what search engine experts believe cause high rankings.
UberSuggest : A tool to find keyword phrases. Â Also Try Wordstream and Google has a good tool in its Adwords Resource Center.
Xenu Link Sleuth to find broken links on your website. Â It only works on a PC though.
Pingdom Website Speed Tools test the load time of a page.
Hubspot Device Lab Mobile Emulator to see how your website works in different mobile devices.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is used to extract a list of all the pages on the website and their on-page keyword usage elements. Â A great way to find 404 errors too.
Google Webmaster Tools is my favorite SEO tool for on-site analysis.
Our previous classes in the series covered Analytics, Online Branding and WordPress. Â Next week our final SEO class will concentrate on off-site SEO elements like link building, press releases and social media.