The Basics Of On-Page SEO [OSEO-12]

Hello, guys, this is Tim Solo from Ahrefs and my today's background is not really typical because our team is right now in Thailand, kind of work and travel stuff, but I'm going to record the video for you anyway. And the topic of today's video is the basics of on-page optimization. You're watching episode number 12 of the oversimplified SEO. On-page SEO optimization is not rocket science, actually. You have to remember three things. First, put your keyword into the title of your page. Second, put your keyword into the H1 tag. And third, don't forget to put your keyword a few times in the content of the page. But there are just a few more things that I want you to know. Let's take a look at the example. Okay, so I want to search Google for a pretty competitive keyword, health insurance. Let's see if the sites that rank for this keyword are perfectly optimized when it comes to on-page SEO. And for the sake of this tutorial, I've picked these two sites which look pretty similar. Healthinsurance.com and healthinsurance.org. One thing that I'm sure you have noticed about both domains is that they have the exact match keyword, health insurance, right in their domain name. One of them just ends with .com and the other with .org. Guys from Google have stated that they have diminished the value of exact match domains, but as you can see, these two are pretty much exact match and still they rank at the top of the search results. This is actually something I didn't mention in the intro to this video. Having exact match keyword right in your domain name or probably just in the URL, as you can see here in Wikipedia article, helps you to rank a lot. So let's start writing down the on-page SEO basics in Notepad. The first one would be keyword in URL or domain, depending on where your page resides. Next goes number two, the title of the page. Let's look at these two pages. The first one starts with the exact match keyword, health insurance. What about the other one? It also does have the health insurance keyword in it and it's exact match, but there's a word affordable in front of it. So here's a pro tip for you. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of the title of your page, the better. So healthinsurance.com wins here, because the keyword is right at the beginning of the title, while for the other side, there's one more word that goes before it. The next on-page ranking factor that we're going to check is the headline. We're basically going to look for h1 tag in the HTML code of the page. So let's open both pages and see what headlines do they have. And we're going to start from healthinsurance.com. Let's check if this page has a proper headline h1 tag. To do that, I need to see the source code of this page. So I just right-click my mouse and go to view page source option. What I'm looking for here is h1 tag. As you can see, they have the headline on this page, but I don't see the health insurance keyword in their headline tag. So this is obviously a missed opportunity for them. Okay, let's close it and check the other page. So I do the same. Right-click and view page source. Then I look for h1. And as you can see, they do have health insurance keyword in their headline tag, which is a small win for them. And the last ranking factor that I'm going to cover in this video is, of course, keyword in the content of the page. Let's close it and open the first site. Basically, what most SEOs will suggest you is to have your keyword somewhere in the top 100 or 300 words of your page. So let's click control F and search for health insurance keyword. As you can see, it pretty much everywhere on this page. And if you ask me, it looks a little bit over-optimized, which most SEOs will call keyword stuffing. But this doesn't prevent this site from ranking high for this keyword. So I guess as long as it's relevant and makes sense, you'll be fine. Now let's look at the other site. I click control F and search for health insurance. As you can see, they also do have this keyword in the first 100 words of their page. And if you ask me, the way they use this keyword on their page looks more natural than on this first site. So let's do a quick recap. If you want to optimize a certain page for a keyword, you should put this keyword into the URL of the page, into the title of the page, into the headline of the page, and of course use it a few times in your content. And now as you've learned all that, here's what I want you to do next. Open Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. Put your domain name there. I'll use my personal blog called BloggerJet. Go to the top pages report and then to the backlinks tab. You'll get a list of the top pages on your site in terms of backlinks they have. And what I want you to do is open each of your top pages one by one and see if it's perfectly optimized for some keyword that you wish to rank for. And once you do that to at least 20 or 30 top pages of your site, I'm sure you're going to see the increase of the traffic that you get from Google. So I strongly encourage you to act on everything that you've learned today. As you can see, this is not a rocket science and you can easily optimize the pages on your site and enjoy increase in your traffic. And that's it. I hope you learned something from today's episode and I hope you're going to subscribe to Ahrefs YouTube channel for more videos like that. See you in the next episode.