On-Page SEO: Easy Steps To A Perfectly Optimized Page

ON PAGE SEO
Optimise & dominate.

David: Hi, guys, David Jenyns here from Melbourne SEO services. In this video presentation,
I want to take you through how to do excellent on-page SEO. A lot of people when they
first get introduced to search engine optimization, I think end up focusing on the wrong
things to their detriment, rather than just getting out there, following the rules of thumb
and putting out more great content. So I’m going to take you through what it is you need
to be focusing on.

Get your priorities right
I think first and foremost, the most important thing
you need to think about is getting your priorities
right. Rather than focusing on keyword density or
making sure that you’ve perfectly optimized a web
page for SEO purposes and for the search engines,
you need to make sure you get your priorities right.
When push comes to shove, the Google spider isn’t
going to pull out its wallet and purchase your products, it is the client, the user who
searches the website who is the one who is going to purchase your product.
Accordingly you need to put usability first. You should always put the user before the
search engines. I can show you some good rules of thumb to follow but if they end up
inhibiting the user’s ability to navigate to what it is that they want or maybe if it muddies
the water as to how clear it is for the user as to what action needs to be taken next, you
always want to err on the side of the client, the end user, thinking about usability.
We’re not just putting up websites and trying to get blogs and pages ranked just for the
sake of getting ranked. We’re doing it to sell a product, we’re optimizing for an outcome.
Typically that outcome could be a variety of different things. It might be getting a sale, it
could be an opt-in, it might be getting someone to watch a video. Whatever it is, make
sure you identify what that outcome is first. Then you can make sure that your page
achieves that and then SEO becomes secondary.

www.theSEOmethod2.com

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No magic formula
Another thing I want to talk about is that fact that
there is no magic formula. I’m going to give you the
good standard rules of thumb, best practices that
you can apply when you’re optimizing a web page.
Google doesn’t go out there and announce its
algorithm. It doesn’t tell you, here is exactly what
you need to be doing to rank number 1. Moreover,
the line in the sand moves all the time. Google is constantly updating its search engine
algorithms and rankings are changing. So there is no magic formula that you can follow,
just these rules of thumb that I’m going to give you.
Another idea that I want you to get early is that Google ranks pages, it doesn’t rank
websites. I’ve seen a lot of people think that, once they’re website has been approved by
Google, or once they start to rank really well, their entire site ranks really well. Google
doesn’t rank websites, it ranks pages, so each page needs to be optimized accordingly. We
need to do both on page and off page optimization for every page. Really what every page
is, is another ticket in the search engine lottery and the more tickets we have in the search
engine lottery, the greater chance we’ve got of winning that lottery. So we want to create
more pages that are optimized correctly.
Ultimately, you just really want to give Google what it wants. If you think about it, what’s
Google’s objective here? Google talks about wanting to serve up the most relevant and
interesting content to its end user. The reason Google wants to do that is because it knows
that if it achieves that goal, the user will constantly come back to Google and use Google’s
search engine. Once they have the user coming back, it’s like they’ve won the eyeballs of
the user. Now they look to ways to monetize that. Google knows it’s that attention that is
important and that they can sell that attention to its advertisers.
They do that through a whole host of means but the primary one is through the AdWords
program. They’re then selling that attention that they’ve got because they’ve served up
good relevant content to the user once they’ve got that attention and then they can sell
those eyeballs on. What do we want to do? We want to give Google what it wants. We
want to give it good quality, original content. I want to give you a good example of one of
my sites. This is one of the ones that I’ve made public to give you an idea of what I’m
talking about with good original content.


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So we’ll just head over to freetradingsystems.org.
Now this is a website that I developed, it was
originally an e book called The Ultimate Trading
Systems. We wrote it and rewrote it multiple times
and basically constantly kept on taking feedback
from users and incorporating it into the book. That’s
a fantastic way to get started if you’re new to trading
the stock market or any market for that matter. What I’ve done on this website, I’ve tried to
make it as simple and clean as possible. There are some navigations along the left here
which will take the person through each of the different chapters. There are different
videos at the top of the page and then there is content beneath the page. Then there is
also an ability for people to start commenting underneath.
The reason I show you this is just to show you this is good quality content. I’m not just
putting up a bunch of spam pages. We’ve had these videos professionally recorded, the
content has been edited and re edited. As a result, this website does really well in the
search engines. So give Google what it wants and you’re going to be much better off in the
long run.

Solid advice
Let me give you some solid advice on how to do
your on page optimization. Again, these are just the
rules of thumb, no magic formula. Take what I’m
going to give you here, apply it to your own
websites and don’t get too caught up in the details.
The first thing you need to know and we’ll go into
keyword selection in more detail in another presentation, you need to understand that for
each page, each page should only be optimized for one keyword, maybe two keywords.
A lot of people what they’ll do is, and I’ve seen it time and time again, they’ll try and have
one page go after ten different phrases. What ultimately ends up happening there is you
confuse Google as to what that page is about, especially if they’re on a variety of topics. If
we’re talking golf balls, gold clubs, golf swing, if you tried to optimize one page for each of
those three keywords it would be difficult for Google to know, what is this page about? Is it
about golf balls or is it about golf swing or whatever. So you want to make sure that you
choose one keyword and optimize one keyword per page.


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You can do variations of that keyword and it’s what I suggest. You might do something
like, let’s say if you were going after trading systems, for example, because that’s what I’ve
done for the freetradingsystems.org, you might have trading systems as your primary
keyword and the variations of that which I’ll call the secondary keywords could be things
like trading system or trading plans possibly because there is some slight correlation there.
That’s me knowing the market, but you don’t want to go too far away from what it is that
original primary keyword is trying to optimize for.
Once you’ve picked your keyword, you need to make sure that keyword occurs in the
correct places throughout your website. You want to make sure it appears in your title,
your meta descriptions, your meta keywords, a few times in the content on the website. I’ll
also talk about some html tags, the H1 tag and bold and italics and things like that. Also try
and have the keyword in the URL if possible.
Let’s jump over to the website here and I’m going to
talk you through the optimization for this page. Let’s
just perhaps choose one of the pages here. Ok, so
this particular page, the keyword that we’re trying to
optimize for is trading goals. Let’s go view page
source and you can do this in any browser. We can
have a look at a little bit of the back end code and
then we’ll jump back to the front end because I don’t want to give you too much
gobbledygook. If you’re not too sure about this, pass it on to your web designer and show
him this part of the video and he’ll understand.
Firstly the title tag is important. I think Google says
you can have about sixty-four characters long.
Typically for the title tag I like to have probably
around five or six words. I don’t really like to go
much more than that. I like to weight the keyword
towards the front of the title where possible. In this
example I’ve got trading goals up near the front. It
doesn’t really matter and this is that idea of as long as you have that keyword in that title
tag, you’re going to be right. You don’t want a formula that you copy every time. So maybe
you put it at the front sometimes, maybe you put it in the middle sometimes, sometimes
you put it at the end. You can mix it up a little bit but I’ve got: Trading Goals, Make Them
to Make Money.


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You want to incorporate in some good copywriting as well, thinking in terms of what will
appeal to a user. The title tag is what ultimately ends up in the search engines when you
type a particular keyword. I’ll show you that in a moment. You want to make sure you have
the keyword in the title.
The next area you want to focus on are these two here. We’ve got the meta description
and the meta keywords. Now the meta description, again, you want to have the keyword
in there. You should at least have it once, twice is ok, three times is ok. Any more than
three and I’d probably say you’re starting to spam it. You get about 160 characters or
thereabouts to work with, so it’s a couple of sentences long. Again, this appears in the
search engine results, so it’s important to make sure that you make it as attractive as
possible from a copywriting point of view to increase your conversion rate.
Then we’ve got the keywords. You can see the primary keyword I’m going after here is
trading goals. Now I talked about those secondary keywords, the variations on that
primary. We’ve got here trade goal and trade goals. They’re slight variations on that
primary word and that’s what I was talking about. We’re very specifically targeting a
keyword for Google and we’re not confusing it by throwing in a whole host of other
keywords. Each page should optimize for one and a couple of variations. So those are some
thing you need to take note of there.
The next thing you want to have a look at is on the actual page itself. I suggest you have at
least a minimum of 300 words content on a page. Any less than that and you’re probably
not giving Google enough to sink their teeth into. You also want to put the keyword if you
can into an H1 tag. Again that’s probably something you want to pass over to your web
guy if you’re not sure.
This is an H1 tag. It’s just a heading tag and it
basically draws Google to this particular line of text
and says, hey, this is more important, it’s a heading.
So when you have your keyword in there, it’s like
you’re saying to Google, the keyword is more
important because I’ve put it in an H1 tag. Similarly
there are some other things you can do as well, like
making sure that you bold the keyword on the page, you can italicize it. You don’t want to
do it every time. You might do it every now and then. It’s just a matter of making it look
natural and keeping things mixed up, so sometimes you might use it, sometimes you
might not.

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In this example, I don’t think I have. If I scroll down
the page, it’s in an H1 tag. Actually I’ll show you this.
I’ve got a cool little plug in here for Firefox. You
might want to get it, it’s called Search Status. I’ll just
highlight the keyword and hopefully it gives me the
opportunity to enter that keyword. It’s trading goals,
so I entered that in there. It’s highlighted it
throughout the page. We’ve got it here in an H1 tag like I talked about. It’s early in the
content as well. I’ll keep scrolling through, there it is again and it’s also down the bottom.
The rules or thumb when it comes to optimization for keywords within the content on the
page are: have it early and often. I like to have it at least in the first paragraph or close to. I
like to have it at least in the middle of the content and also near the end of well. A lot of
people get caught up in this idea of keyword density. What keyword density is, let’s say
we’ve got 100 words on a page. If you have the keyword displayed once in that 100 words,
that would be a keyword density of 1%.
This is going back a few years, people used to talk about, what is the perfect keyword
density? I shied away from that. I think you just want to write what is natural. You want to
work the keyword in a little bit. I have given you in the presentation a slight rule of thumb
which you can follow which I’ve got here. If you want, you can have the keyword maybe
about three times per 500 words. That’s a minimum. You might have a few more, you
might have a few less depending on if it’s a fewer number of words. It just really depends,
mix it up and don’t always do exactly the same thing. Make sure that you’ve got it
sometimes on the page.
If you can use an H1 tag every now and again, use a bold tag, italics and image tags as well.
This is again one of those minor things. It will depend more so in some niches than others.
In the stock market niche it doesn’t really apply so much because people aren’t using the
Google image search to try and find images related to the stock market.
As I talk about later, I’ll talk about another example site, my planet13.com.au website
which is a rock and roll clothing store. We use a lot of images on that website and we like
to make sure we’ve got those images appropriately tagged. Someone might be searching
in Google Images and they might search for Metallica logo and it’s a good idea if our
images are coming up. So it’s more important for us to optimize those images than we do
for the stock market material.


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Again there are some of the things you can think about. Really when push comes to shove,
the main things you need to do are make sure that you have a unique title. I didn’t go into
that in detail but I see this. This is a big problem with people optimizing their websites.
Every page on your website should really have a unique title. That is, every page should
have its own custom title, you don’t want to have it exactly the same. Google doesn’t like
that. So the title is important, make sure, I’ve got there sixty-four. It’s around sixty-four
characters long that you can work with, otherwise it’s just going to go … and not finish
that sentence. I’ll jump over to Google and show you that in a moment.
The meta description, make sure you’ve got the keyword in there. The meta keywords,
make sure you’ve it in there and then just make sure you’ve got it on the page a few times.
If you can also incorporate the keyword into the URL as well, that’s a good idea. So it might
be something like freetradingsystems.org/tradinggoals.html. That’s just an extra way to
say, yes, Google, this page is about what it is I’m talking about.
I’m just going to head over here and I just want to
search, let’s say trading system, continuing with this
example of the freetradingsystems.org. I’ve just
searched this here and I want to talk you through the
title and description just so you know how important
they are. The title of the page will appear here. You
can see it actually bolds the keyword so it’s important
to make sure you have that keyword in there. It’s important to write an attractive title so
that someone wants to click it. If someone’s typing trading system, I’ve basically said,
download your free trading system here. Tell me that’s not going to get their attention.
Then I go into the description here which is the meta description, another important thing.
You want to make sure, I’ve got here, there are three … so that means I’ve probably
written more than the 160 characters, so always keep that in mind. I’ve written: Looking for
free trading systems? Of course they’re looking for free trading systems because they typed
into the search engine, so I’m really talking to the individual and I’m encouraging them,
you can download our free … What’s this free thing I can download? That’s another reason
why title tags and meta descriptions are important because they display in the search
results as well.


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Keywords tips & tricks
So let’s have a look. A couple of little extra keyword tips and tricks. Firstly keywords get
bolded in the SERPs. Now SERPs stand for Search Engine Results Page and I just showed
you that a moment ago. You saw how, we’ve typed in trading system and see how trading
system is bolded there and it’s bolded in the description as well. Use that to your
advantage and use it to grab someone’s attention because things that are bolded just
make them stand out. So use that to your advantage. I just noticed down here another one
of our websites, systems trading blog, that’s another one that we’re looking to optimize
and we’re on the first page, that’s good, ok. I digress.
Another tip here, for keyword stuffing. Keyword
stuffing is bad. What is keyword stuffing? If you have
a look over here, this is keyword stuffing where
someone writes ‘White is a word on a white web
page that is white because the background is white.
White is a colour, white is not black’ and so it goes
on. That’s an example of what keyword stuffing is. If
you’ve chosen a keyword, you don’t want to optimize that page for the keyword. You just
want to make sure that you have the keyword put in those places. Just follow the rules of
thumb that I mentioned and you will be well on your way.
The next thing I want to talk about is latent semantic indexing. This is something where I
think a lot of people have got unnecessarily caught up. Google goes out there and
registers a whole bunch of patents on a whole lot of different things and I think they do it
just to protect themselves just in case they want to incorporate it into the search engine
algorithm at a later point in time.
Latent semantic indexing is this idea that when you write a piece of content, lets say we’re
optimizing for the keyword trading systems. Google registered this patent basically saying,
if someone is writing around the keyword ‘trading systems’ then they would also reference
some of these other keywords. So if I’m talking about trading systems, some other terms
related to that, they’re not variations but they’re related, things like how to enter, how to
exit, how much money should I put into a stock, the trailing stop, an initial stop. These
keywords are typically surrounded whenever someone is talking about trading systems.


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The idea is that you want to have these, these keywords, these semantic keywords within
your text. I don’t tend to worry about it too much because I’m out there putting good
content and that’s ultimately what I’m doing, so I know those keywords are going to work
their way in anyway. I don’t need to focus in on making sure that I’ve stuffed enough of
these latent semantic keywords in there because it just happens naturally. If you write
good content, then latent semantic indexing is going to happen naturally. So don’t stress
yourself too much about that.
Just the important thing, don’t follow an exact formula, follow those rules of thumb that I
talked about for the basics of on page optimization. Rather than focusing on getting a
page perfectly optimized because there is no perfectly optimized page, focus on building
more pages. I’ll talk a little bit more about internal linking structure and why that’s so
important. Rest assured you’re going to have better bang for your buck, you’re going to
have better return on your investment for your time if you focus on building more pages,
as opposed to tweaking and making the pages that you’ve already got exactly right.

Pagerank sculpting
Similarly, here’s another thing that I think people
spend a little bit too much time focusing in on. Matt
Cutts has recently come out and talked about page
rank and the way page rank sculpting works and
how it’s not nearly as effective as it used to be. Now
I’m not going to go into too much detail about page
rank here and we’ll talk about it in another
presentation. But since we’re talking about on page optimization I think it’s important that
I do talk about it a little bit. Matt Cutts, who is one of the Google engineers, or he’s
someone who works over at Google, who’s pretty much part of their media department
and he announces and makes videos and posts a whole lot of content about the way that
Google is working and changes in their algorithm. If you have time, I think it’s a blog worth
checking out. Just Google Matt Cutts and you can find out more about his blog.


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The idea of page rank, page rank is just an explanation or a way for Google to determine
the authority of a particular page. It’s just a ranking scale, a scale between zero and ten.
The closer to ten you get, the more important or the more authoritative that website is
seen to be in Google’s eyes. That said though, it’s not something you should get caught up
on too much because I’ve had plenty of websites that rank really well on Google and
they’ve got a very low page rank. As you build a page over time and you we do build links
to it, your page rank will start to grow.
We’ll have a look at the way page rank is distributed. As I mentioned, it’s a ranking
between one and ten where the higher the number, the more authoritative the website is.
Having a look here, this is a standard linking structure. You can see this is a web page here.
If you just imagine that is one of your web pages. Imagine you’re linking out to three other
pages from your web page. So you’ve got a page that links to three other pages here.
Sometimes people talk about page rank as link juice, so that’s just what I’m referencing
here, it’s a synonymous term. The way that linking works is that if you have some
outbound links, links pointing to other pages, it’s talked about the idea the link juice is
equally dispersed among those outbound links.
Let’s say this page rank here is a page rank 3 or it has link juice value of 3. When we link
out to these three separate pages, we’re sending an equal amount of that link juice to each
one of these pages. We’ll go into this in more detail when we do talk about off page
optimization. Link juice is important because it helps your website to come up in the
search engines. In this example, you can see it’s equally distributed between these three
outbound links.
What happened here, something called ‘no follow’ was introduced. Quite a few years back
now, when blogs started to become all the rage, when someone creates a blog, there is the
option to be able to comment on those blogs. What people were doing, by commenting
on those blogs, they were given the option to link back to their website. It was a way to
increase their page rank because they’d be funneling or stealing some of the link juice
from the website where they commented from.
When people figured this out, they started spamming as many different blogs and
websites as they could to get as many of these inbound links back to their website. To try
and combat that spamming, Google introduced a thing called no follow. The idea was that
the no follow tag was a special tag that you put into every link on your website that you
didn’t want to pass this link juice to.

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Here’s an example of using the no follow. This website still has a page rank of 3, but using
this special attribute, we’ve put a no follow tag which means don’t pass any link juice to
this website here. Now the link juice is being funneled between these two pages here. So
our page rank of 3 is split in half and we’ve got now link juice value of 1.5 and a link juice
value of 1.5. The link where we used this special html tag now gets zero.
Now this was working all well and good in the land of Google for a little while, until people
started to do a thing called page rank sculpting. What they would do is, they would have
their site and they would start to use a series of no follow tags to try and funnel that page
rank back to specific pages that they wanted to have ranked. Through using an intricate
internal linking structure and also off site linking structure, they were able to channel all of
this page rank to specific pages and cause some websites to rank a lot better than they
probably should.
Google realized that and the game changed again. Just recently Matt Cutts has come out
and said, hey, we’ve changed the way no follow works. It kind of goes back to what we
were doing when we were doing the standard linking structure, only when you use the no
follow tag, no link juice is displayed. The first thing that Google will do currently, this is the
way that Matt Cutts has explained it, is that when you’ve got a page and it links out to
three different pages, the link juice is divided between those three outbound links, just as
the example here, example A shows you.
When we introduce the no follow links, so now imagine we use the no follow tag attribute,
the link juice value for this web page just disappears. It’s not distributed to these other
ones. Instead this is not turned into 1.5 and this 1.5, it just disappears. You no follow it, it
disappears into the ether of the website or the ether of the internet.
So now the whole idea of page rank sculpting doesn’t work nearly as well as it used to
because you can’t funnel that page rank. If a link is on that page, it is going to get
distributed there, whether or not it gets passed on. It will get divided into the three
outbound links but the actual value of that link won’t get passed on.
I know that was a little bit lengthy and might have gone over the head of some people.
The reason I wanted to talk about that is just so you don’t get caught up in page rank
sculpting and you focus more about just making sure you’re building good quality pages.
Dan Thies and a few other great SEO people talk about the idea, it’s just better to let the
link juice flow and not try and page rank sculpt it.


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Pagerank what?
The only time you might consider using page rank is
when you’re really trying to optimize to get the
absolute most out of your site. Maybe if you optimize
for internal reputation. What I’m talking about there
is when you’re linking within your website and you’re
linking to a page. Most people link to their homepage
with the anchor text ‘home.’ I’m going to head over
to Planet 13 and that’s a good example.
This is another website that I’ve helped build and manage. Having a look here, you can see
we’ve got a home link up the top here. Now when we talk about off page optimization,
we’ll be talking about using anchor text and the importance of making sure the
appropriate text is used when linking to a page. It educates Google as to what that page is
about.
Now obviously we’re not trying to rank for the
keyword ‘home’, so I don’t want to link to my
homepage with the keyword home when, if I have a
look up the top here, I know I’m actually optimizing
for the keyword ‘band merchandise’. I’m not looking
to optimize for the keyword home. So that is an
instance where I use the no follow tags.
I’m just going to use highlight no follow tags using that search status tool again, a plug-in
definitely worth getting. You can see here it’s highlighted all of the tags that I’ve no
followed. I don’t want to try and rank for home. I don’t want to try and rank for store
locations, I don’t want to rank for customer support. I use other methods and other ways to
send links to the pages with the anchor text for which I’m trying to rank.


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Really that’s the only point in time where I might use
no follow, just for the internal reputation, to make
sure that I’m telling Google, hey, this page is about
band merchandise or whatever, then I’ll link to that
page with the right anchor text. If I’m going to link to
it with something outside of a keyword that I’m trying
to rank for, then I’ll use the no follow tag. Actually I
should probably just show you, I’ll jump in and go view page source and just show you
what that no follow tag looks like. Again, just pass this onto your web guy, he’ll know what
it is all about.
Having a look here, you can see, there’s our link there. Go on to planet13.com.au and we’ve
got here rel = no follow, so that right there is our no follow tag. You pop that in whenever
you don’t want to pass any of that Google page juice or you don’t want to have Google
read that link. I don’t want it to think, hey, this page is about home when I’m trying to
optimize for another keyword. So that’s about the only time I would use it. The best thing
that you can do when it comes to page rank is just to send links to the pages you want to
rank to. Find out what your high converting pages are, your money pages, and send more
links to those pages.
If we head over to Planet 13 again, this is a good
example. I’ll scroll down the page here, I’ve still got
that no follow tag on, highlighting the no follow tags
and you can see down the bottom here. Here are all
the keywords I’m trying to rank for, ones that I
consider more important. You can see here band tshirts and band stickers and band buttons and band
patches. These are some of the keywords I’m trying to rank for, so I’m sending some link
love to those pages and I’m making sure that I’m doing it with the appropriate anchor text
as well. So just send more links to the pages that you would like to rank for.


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I want to give you another example as well. Let’s check out maybe this Blink 182 patch.
Something else that I do, on some of my pages you want to get your internal linking
structure right. So it’s a good idea on a page to link to other pages with the keywords that
you’re trying to rank for. This is a page about Blink 182, and if you have a look down the
bottom, I’m sending links to Blink stickers, I’m sending links to Blink 182 video, Blink 182
discography because they are keywords that I’m trying to rank for. So I’m going to make
sure I have that on the page and then I’m using my internal l inking structure to help
increase my page ranking when it comes to the results in Google.
So that’s the best way to do it, send links to those high converting pages. I’ve got here
more pages equals more sites. I actually made a booboo there, it actually should be more
pages equals more links. When you’ve got more pages, there are more linking
opportunities, more opportunities for you to link back to yourself with pages that you want
to rank for. Again, this is something you don’t want to over optimize and don’t spam.
You’re not going to have on every page, links to every single page on your website. That’s
not really going to help you.
Pick out those high converting pages and link to those. Ultimately that’s why big sites win
because big sites have more linking opportunities. They’ve got more pages, therefore
they’ve got more opportunity to send links to those pages which ultimately help them rank
better in the search engines.

A picture is worth…
Ok, so a picture is worth a thousand words and I
think this will help explain a little bit more the way
this linking structure works and the way that you
should structure your website. If you imagine this
bucket as your homepage and we’ve got our SEO
juice in the top here. That’s our page rank. Now
these pages down here or these buckets are our sub
pages and you can see here we are linking, these little lines here represent links from our
homepage through to these sub pages. So you can see here we’re linking through to some
pages that might be important just for navigation and help the user to get around the
website.


14

Also we’ve got pages here, you want to link to those important pages that I talked about,
those higher converting pages. You want to make sure that you link to those. That’s what
I’ve done here with these green links. Those green links represent pages that I want to
have ranked that are outside of the normal navigation. I’m linking through from the
homepage to those pages and you want to make sure that you do it with the right anchor
text. You want to make sure that you do it with the right text explaining to Google what
that page is about. That’s the way to funnel the page rank or funnel that link juice to the
pages that you want to have ranked.
Then you’ve got these more internal pages here, these other buckets and these other
buckets are still linked too but you want to link to them from your sub pages. Because this
page here for me isn’t as important to get ranked, maybe it doesn’t convert as highly,
maybe it’s an information based page, whatever the reason is, I don’t want to have it
funneling all of my good SEO juice, It will get down there at some point. I want to make
sure it is indexed but I don’t want to send this valuable link juice trying to get this page
ranked when these ones are more important. They’re the ones that are going to equal
money for me.
You also want to have a look at some of these other pages here I haven’t linked to. You
really should be linking to all of your pages on your site. You’d just be linking through from
your sub pages and not having a direct link from your homepage.
Another thing you might look at doing, and this is part of that internal linking structure, an
area I think most SEO people overlook, is the idea that you should really be linking to these
pages, these pages where I’ve got these green links here. You could link to them from
these other internal pages. These sub pages could be linking through to those pages that
you want ranked. That is a good practice. Hopefully that gives you a little bit more of a
visual representation on what’s going on as far as this link juice.


15

Dave's hot tips
I wanted to give you a few bits and pieces now, just I
suppose blow away some of the myths that I’ve
heard around SEO and a whole variety of topics.
We’ll start off with duplicate content. Now when it
comes to writing duplicate content, Google really
doesn’t like it if you’re doing duplicate content on
your own website. What I’m talking about there, you
want to make sure that every page is unique. Don’t take the same bit of text and copy and
paste it or have multiple versions of the same page on your own site. Google doesn’t like it,
it will de index certain pages and may even de index your website. So make sure that every
page is unique.
When it comes to off page, I think this is where some people go wrong. They’re trying to
build links to their website and they’re really focusing in on making sure that they’re
sending links from only unique websites, only unique bits of content. I don’t really think
this is as important as people make it out to be. I’ve heard people talk about the idea even
that Google will apply a penalty if you’ve got so many links to your website from exactly
the same sources with exactly the same content. I personally haven’t found that to be the
case.
Rarely does Google actually apply a penalty for anything that happens off site. Think about
it this way. If Google did apply penalties for things that happened off site, then what could
happen is you could just go to your competitor, do a whole lot of these things that could
‘introduce penalties.’ You might link to their website with a whole lot of duplicate content,
you might link to their website with all the same anchor text, you might do a whole lot of
things, to apparently in Google’s eyes, try and be gaming the search engines. If that was
the case, Google would then de index the site and you could potentially de index your
competitors.
At very worst, I think Google may not apply or count those links. So if you do something
where maybe there is some sort of duplicate filter clause, I think it’s more that those links
won’t count, it’s not that it will end up harming you. I’ll give you a good example of that. I
think duplicate content off page is something that happens naturally. It happens in nature
and that’s ultimately what we’re doing when we’re trying to do our SEO. We try and
replicate what happens in nature.


16

Getting links from a lot of sources that are using the same content happens in nature and
I’ll give you an example. Press releases are a fantastic example. Just recently we’ve done a
press release and I’ll hit ‘back’ a few times because I searched for it before. We wrote this
press release in PRWeb, distributed it out to try and get some inbound links and get some
coverage for a survey that we did just about Google versus Yellow Pages and how Google
is pretty much people’s choice when they’re looking for everyday products and they’re
steering away from Yellow Pages.
PR here I guess, not to get confused with page rank, this is press release we’re talking
about here. This is a distribution service that takes our press release and distributes it over
hundreds and hundreds of websites around the internet. I’ve gone ahead and taken the
title from my article here and I’ve posted it into Google. You can see Google has come
back, I’ve used it in quotes, so I’m looking for an exact occurrence of this which is going to
be my press release.
You can see here we’ve got an occurrence of 958
times. So Google has found and indexed 958
different occurrences of exactly the same content.
There might be slight variations on the way the page
is laid out, but the content, for all intents and
purposes, is exactly the same. So clearly Google is
indexing it and clearly it happens naturally. So don’t
stress so much about making sure that all of your links are one hundred percent unique. As
long as you’re building links from a variety of different sources, having a lot of the same
links is ok because it happens in nature.
The next thing I want to talk about is using XML Sitemaps. Sitemaps are just a list of all of
the different pages within your website. If you haven’t heard of the terminology before,
just pass it on to your web guy.
Ask him for a Sitemap to be created for your website and then just head over to the
Google Webmaster Tools. This is a free service provided by Google where they allow you
to submit your Sitemap. It makes it easier for Google to know what pages you have on
your website. Rather than it having to crawl it, you basically say, here are the pages that I
want indexed within Google. It’s a great way to make sure you’re getting recognition for all
of the pages that you do have, especially if you haven’t got your internal linking structure
set up correctly and Google is not able to spider your website.


17

The next thing I want to talk about is double indented
listings and how you get them on Google. So I’ll just
head over to Google here and I’m just going to search
Green Day merch. Here’s a keyword that I’m trying to
optimize for, for my Planet 13 website. We’ve got an
indented listing here where you’ve got one listing
where Google says, yes, this is relevant. Then they find
another page on your website that is also relevant.
The way that you go about creating these pages is to first go after one keyword. Some
people when they’re trying to do these dual listings, which are great listings, I mean
they’ve been proven to convert a lot higher, when people visit a listing and they see that
it’s indented, it just grabs your attention. You want to click it, it appears more authoritative.
They are well worthwhile going after. But the way that you go about it is making sure that
you first rank for the keyword. Try and get a number one listing for one page.
Once you do that, then you might start to optimize for a second page. So just as I talked
about all that on page optimization work, you want to do it again for a second page and
start to build links to that page. Then, over time, Google will recognize that you have two
pages that are relevant for that result and then serve it up accordingly. That’s how you go
about and get it. Is it the holy grail? Probably not the holy grail but it’s definitely an
excellent way to increase your click through rates when looking at the organic search
results.
Similarly another thing like that is called Sitelinks.
Google awards Sitelinks to trusted sites. We’ll just
come over here. I’m going to search Planet 13 and
we’ll show you a Sitelink here. These are the links
underneath. A normal listing down here doesn’t have
any links but once Google recognizes that this an
authoritative link, and how do you make it
authoritative? You build links to your website, you do good on page SEO, you follow
everything that I’m going to be going through in this and my other presentations and then
your website can become authoritative.


18

All you want to do is make sure you’ve got pages within your site that you are sending
links to and you’re optimizing for particular keywords. Google will analyze your website
and determine, hey, this is an important link that we need to add to the Sitelinks in those
result pages. It’s excellent if you can get it because it does make your website stand out as
an authoritative website. It can take months to do and really it’s just about building those
inbound targeted links. I gave you an example there, Planet 13. Another one as well, you
can check out my freetradingsystems.org. Just search trading systems and you’ll see it
come up there.

Danger zone
The tail end of this presentation, I wanted to talk about some of the things that you should
be avoiding. This is the highway to the danger zone. If you’ve seen Top Gun you can
probably have that song playing in your head right now. These are some of the things you
should avoid doing.
Firstly we’ve got cloaking. Now cloaking is where you
display one thing to the search engine and another
thing to the end user. So when the search engines
visit your page, they might be served up a very
highly optimized page that is going to do well
because you’ve keyword loaded it and made it all
really well optimized for the search engines. When the user actually visits it, they’re
displayed something else. That’s what cloaking is and it is something that you should
avoid.
All of these things that I’m about to go through now, look, sometimes when I don’t have
much to do and I feel like reading up on what Google is doing, I download things like the
Google Guidelines and different reports that they put out which outline what it is that
they’re looking for. I’m just taking all of this research and giving it straight to you. Google
says these things are bad. Cloaking is one.
Selling links is another one. You don’t want to have any inbound links on your websites
from websites that are selling links, advertising that they’re selling links and you don’t want
to be selling links yourself. Google doesn’t like the idea of users trying to game the search
engines, doing things to get their website to come up when really it is a bad website and it
probably shouldn’t be coming up anyway.


19

Selling links is one of those things that probably a few years ago, people when they
realized that ok, having inbound links is important, therefore I can sell that opportunity to
other people and I can get a monthly fee for sending a link to them. Really it’s a way of
gaming the search engines.
Google realized it was a bad thing so they said, look, anytime that we know it is a paid link,
we’re going to discredit it. Now that is one of those things that you can get penalized for
because it is something that you have to actively go about and do. So just go ahead and
avoid those. You also want to avoid doing hidden text and hidden links. This was all the
rage six years ago or more like ten years ago.
Very late nineties people were doing things like taking keywords and putting white text on
a white background so the user couldn’t see it but the engines could obviously read it. It
was a way to do more keyword stuffing. Google doesn’t like it, don’t do it. Same with
hidden links, along the same lines. You can use some different attributes to make it so that
links are hidden to the user. You just change the colour – you want to avoid doing that.
It’s the same with JavaScript redirects and any sort of sneaky redirects for that matter.
Google doesn’t like it. A JavaScript redirect is something where, let’s say you’re searching
for Britney Spears photos. A search engine result comes up and you click that and you’re
expecting to see some Britney Spears photos and then you’re redirected to a page that is
completely unrelated. It might be something to do with mortgages or credit cards or porn
or whatever the case may be. Those redirects Google doesn’t like, don’t do it.
Then we’ve got hundred percent frames as well. By using frames, this is probably
something that your website webmaster might know about. You can tell them just to
make sure they avoid it and make sure that they don’t do it. You don’t want to be using
frames on your website. Frames are a way to pull data and website content from other
websites. So you’re pulling content into a frame and it typically means that it is not
viewable or not seen by the search engines. It’s a way of hiding and masking content. It’s
something that you should avoid.


20

All of these things really come down to, you know if you’re being sneaky. Look, I’ve tried so
many things online over the years and I keep coming back to the idea that if you provide
real benefit to the end user, you’re going to do so much better in the long run. There is no
point in going for these little tactics and these little techniques to try and game the search
engines. They’ve got some really smart people over at Google, engineers that are highly
paid that sit there just looking for ways to spot how it is that you’re trying to game the
search engine. Just don’t do it. Provide material that adds value to people’s lives and there
is a real benefit to the end user.

80/20 rule
I just wanted to finish up I suppose by talking about
some of the things that you should focus on. That
was a pretty long presentation and I covered lots of
different things. It really comes down to these
fundamentals and if you focus on these you’re going
to get the 80% of the results just by focusing in on
these 20%. Really don’t get caught up. Sometimes
people try and get that perfect optimized web page. Just follow the rules of thumb that I
gave you and you’ll be well on your way. Don’t be sneaky and try to do anything that
Google doesn’t like.
Ultimately big sites win, so the best thing you can do is just keep building more pages and
making sure that you do your internal linking structure correctly. Link to the pages that you
want to rank, and just let the link juice flow. Don’t worry so much about the no follow tags
and things like that.
I started with it and I suppose I should end with it, because ultimately it is the most
important thing, you want to make sure that you focus on usability. Usability is number
one. The end user is the person who is going to open their wallet up and buy your product
or they’re going to take the desired action. They’re going to opt in, they’re going to watch
your video, they’re going to do whatever. So make sure you put usability first, SEO comes
second. Follow those rules of thumb and trust me, you’ll be ahead of the pack and well on
your way to dominating the search engines.
If you have any questions or you’d like to see more presentations like this, make sure you
head over to melbourneseoservices.com and yes, I’ll look forward to seeing you in the next
presentations. Thanks guys.


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On-Page SEO: Easy Steps To A Perfectly Optimized Page

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