On-Page SEO Tactics for 2012 and the Future

SEO

In last week’s post, Why SEO Will Never Die, we discussed the idea that SEO of today is unrecognizable when compared to the SEO of 10 years ago.  SEO will never totally die as a science, but 2012’s SEO will certainly again become unrecognizable –  we just don’t know when that will be.  In this post, I’ll talk about on-page SEO as it works in 2012, as well as tactics you can use to keep your on-page SEO relevant and beneficial for at least the near future.

Get the keyword in the title tag, but make the headline compelling.  In the past, you could just put the keyword in to rank highly and that was good enough.  Now, it’s still wise to put the keyword in the title, and that will help your SEO, but there’s more to it than that.  Your headline must be attractive to internet surfers, so they actually desire to click on it.

Let’s walk through an example so you can see what I mean.  Say your keyword is “Kid’s Toys.”  A good SEO headline would be:  “Buy Kid’s Toys at Our Store!”  But, that doesn’t make people want to click through.  They know you have kid’s toys, but they have no reason to go to your store instead of another.  An attractive headline that would get clicks, as well as good SEO, would be “Free Shipping on all Kid’s Toys Orders.”  Customers want something to be in it for them, and free shipping is a nice benefit they will appreciate.

Make sure the keyword is in the URL.  This goes particularly for WordPress and E-commerce sites.  If you change the title of your WordPress blog post after having saved it, the URL doesn’t change with it.  For an e-commerce site, sometimes your URLs can get quite messy and look something like this:  https://www.example.com/a/23345/245/123/ Make sure all URLs have the keyword in them, and for your visitor’s sake, make sure the URL is as simple as possible, something like this:  https://www.example.com/category/product-name/.

The SEO is great in the first place because the keyword is in the URL.  Additionally, because people will understand what’s on the page just by looking at the URL, they’re more likely to visit.  Even though traffic doesn’t play a huge role in your site’s rankings, more traffic means better rankings.

Page load-time.  Strangely enough, because of politics and powerful companies using their power to their advantage, the US’s broadband speeds are slower than many countries in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Asia.  As a result, in general, you want to make sure your pages don’t consume all that much bandwidth.  Make them as simple as possible, but still visually attractive.  Google emphasizes a good user experience in its search rankings, and part of a good user experience is a page that loads fast.  Make certain your pages all load in 3 seconds or less, and ideally less than 1.

You are Now Set-Up for Long-Term On-Page SEO Success

This guide highlights some of the main points of success for on-page SEO now and in the future.  There are certainly many more – be sure to stay tuned to our blog so you know what’s happening!

 

Last Updated on October 18, 2012 by Dan Stelter

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.