“On page SEO”
refers to a set of web page optimization best practices that you can
apply to the pages of your website in order to improve their ranking in
search engine results.
The majority of on page SEO advice that can be seen around the web revolves around using the exact match keyword that you want to rank for in a few “strategic” places of your page: Title, H1, meta description, content etc.
But this kind of advice is actually outdated, because in 2016 Google is sophisticated enough to understand synonyms (and overall relevance of the page), meaning you no longer have to obsess about exact match keyword usage.
When people who are fairly new to SEO are picking a keyword to rank for, they might look at the SERP and see that none of the top10 pages has a “perfect” on page SEO for this exact keyword:
Isn’t this a great opportunity to rank with their own “perfectly optimized” page?
I’m afraid it’s not.
The fact that these pages don’t have your exact match keyword in a bunch of “strategic” places, doesn’t mean that they are not relevant to the search query.
According to our data, the usage of exact match keyword in Title, URL, H1 or even within the actual content of the page doesn’t have a significant correlation with Google rankings.
If we were to study “partial match” keyword usage, synonyms and “LSI keywords” (which we’re about to) — the results would most likely be different.
But “on page SEO” doesn’t end with using the keyword you want to rank for in the content of your page, right?
It also implies quite a few “general” optimizations that should make your page better in the eyes of search engines (and searchers), such as:
The majority of on page SEO advice that can be seen around the web revolves around using the exact match keyword that you want to rank for in a few “strategic” places of your page: Title, H1, meta description, content etc.
But this kind of advice is actually outdated, because in 2016 Google is sophisticated enough to understand synonyms (and overall relevance of the page), meaning you no longer have to obsess about exact match keyword usage.
When people who are fairly new to SEO are picking a keyword to rank for, they might look at the SERP and see that none of the top10 pages has a “perfect” on page SEO for this exact keyword:
Isn’t this a great opportunity to rank with their own “perfectly optimized” page?
I’m afraid it’s not.
The fact that these pages don’t have your exact match keyword in a bunch of “strategic” places, doesn’t mean that they are not relevant to the search query.
According to our data, the usage of exact match keyword in Title, URL, H1 or even within the actual content of the page doesn’t have a significant correlation with Google rankings.
If we were to study “partial match” keyword usage, synonyms and “LSI keywords” (which we’re about to) — the results would most likely be different.
But “on page SEO” doesn’t end with using the keyword you want to rank for in the content of your page, right?
It also implies quite a few “general” optimizations that should make your page better in the eyes of search engines (and searchers), such as:
- page load speed;
- usage of https;
- length of your content;
- outgoing links to quality sites;
- etc.
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