Module 1 - Lesson 4

Lesson 4
On Page Optimization
On Page Optimization, also known as On-page SEO, refers to any optimization that you control
and include on your website. With on-page optimizations, you aim to make your website more
usable and valuable to users to improve your rankings or visibility in search results on Google,
Bing, and other search engines.
Website Analysis
Website analysis is a process which comes under On Page Optimization. It is a tool through which
the professionals analyze entire website and find out how well it is working or performing on
search engine. The professionals need to go through this process to find out the weakness and
status of the website which certainly helps the SEO professionals to set the strategy accordingly.
It helps the optimizers to primarily focus on the weaker areas of the website that becomes barrier
in obtaining the optimum profit and success from the website.
Websites can be found in an unlimited variety, which includes educational websites, news
sites, websites, forums, social media websites as well as e -commerce websites, and many
more. The pages on the website usually comprise made up of text and other forms of media.
There are no guidelines that define the style of a web page.
One could design an entire website that is comprised of photographs in black and white of
roses, or even the phrase "cat" linked to another Web page that contains "mouse." But, most
websites follow the same pattern of the homepage, which links off to different categories
and other content on the website.
The homepage (or just "home") represents the primary page of the website itself. In many
cases, the homepage functions as an e-commerce "hub" from which all other pages are
accessible. A web page that is internal with a variety of different pages are linked to in an
organized pattern (such as a particular group of subjects) is referred to as "a parent page."
What are the best tools used for site analysis?
It depends on your budget and the type of analytic data you are looking to grab. There are
several options available in the market based on that:
• Google Analytics - https://analytics.google.com/

• Mixpanel - https://mixpanel.com
• Keen - https://keen.io
• Kissmetrics - https://kissmetrics.com
Meta Tags
Meta tags are invisible tags that provide data about your page to search engines and website
visitors. These are snippets of code that tell search engines important information about your
web page, such as how they should display it in search results. They also tell web browsers
how to display it to visitors.
Meta tags are placed in the <head> section of a HTML document, and so they need to be
coded in your CMS. This can be easier or harder depending on the platform that powers your
website: an “out of the box” solution like WordPress will have a dedicated section for meta
tags like canonical links or meta descriptions.
Why do meta tags matter?
As previously mentioned, meta tags offer more details about your site to search engines and
website visitors who encounter your site in the SERP. They can be optimized to highlight the
most important elements of your content and make your website stand out in search results.
Search engines increasingly value a good user experience, and that includes making sure that
your site satisfies a user’s query as best as it possibly can. Meta tags help with this by making
sure that the information searchers need to know about your site is displayed upfront in a
concise and useful fashion.
Some types of meta tag relate to page structure and will ensure that your site is easy to
navigate, while others tell search engines which parts of your page are important and which
to overlook.
There are numerous different types of meta tags which fulfill different roles, and not all of
them are relevant to SEO.
Six meta tags to improve the optimization of your site
1. Title tag
The title tag is one of the first things that users notice in the SERPs. It’s the title of your page
that offers a preview of what your content is about.
It’s important as it shows up in the search results, but it’s also pulled out to show up as anchor
text and a title in social shares.
This means that your title tag should be clear, descriptive and usually not more than 55
characters. If you can include a keyword in these 55 characters, you can enhance your SEO,
but what’s even more important is to remember to add value. A title that has the
right keyword without being clear won’t necessarily lead to improved results.
Your title tag is not just for your visitors, but also the search engines that discover your
content. Thus, you need to blend clarity with context to ensure that your title makes sense to
everyone.
Another way to add the title tag is through the site’s HTML, which should look something
like this example:
<head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>
2. Meta description
The meta description is of equal importance to the title tag. If the title tag is the title that
appears at the top of a search result, the meta description is the snippet that displays
underneath.
The meta description should provide an accurate description of the content of your page. It
is usually the element that determines whether users will click on your page, which makes it
important to spend time on its optimization.
Previously, the optimum length for meta descriptions was 150-165 characters, but a recent
update to the way Google displays search results has resulted in longer snippets being shown
on occasion.
As with title tags, you can add a meta description via a plugin like Yoast SEO, or code it
manually in your website’s HTML, as in this example:
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Here is a precise description of my awesome
webpage.">
</head>
3. Robots meta tag
The robots meta tag informs search engines which pages on your site should be indexed. This
meta tag serves a similar purpose to robots.txt; it is generally used to prevent a search
engine from indexing individual pages, while robots.txt will prevent it from indexing a whole
site or section of a site.
A robots meta tag which instructs the search engine crawler not to index a page, or follow
any links on it, would be written like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
However, if you want to tell the crawler to index and also follow your page, you would replace
the robots tag with this:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
The robots meta tag is placed in the <head> section of your page, and the result might
look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
(…)
</head>
<body>(…)</body>
</html>
If you don’t add a robots meta tag, the default for crawlers is to index and follow your page.
Why would you need to use this meta tag? It might be that you have some pages on your
site which are necessary, but quite thin content-wise. You don’t necessarily want them to be
indexed in search, but they’re still important to the site, so you can use a noindex tag to
prevent them from appearing in the SERPs.
Google also requires links to be nofollowed under certain circumstances. For example, in
2016, it issued a directive to bloggers to nofollow any links that they included as part of a
product review, as “these links don’t come about organically”. If you want to nofollow an
individual link, you can achieve this by adding rel=”nofollow” to the link HTML.
However, if you wanted to simply nofollow all links on a particular page, you can achieve this
with the robots meta tag.
4. Alt text
Image optimization has become a very important element

of modern SEO, as it offers an additional opportunity to rank
in the search results, this time with your visual content.
Your images should be accessible to both search engines

and people. Alt text can ensure both of these things:
it provides a text alternative to images which will be
displayed if the image doesn’t load, or will be read out by a
screenreader; it also tells search engines what that image is
meant to represent.
You can include keywords in your image alt text, but only if
it makes sense to do so – don’t keyword-stuff this tag, as it
will only end up harming the user experience for your
visitors with accessibility needs.
5. Canonical tag
If you have pages on your site that are almost identical, then you may need to inform search
engines which one to prioritize. Or you might have syndicated content on your site which
was republished elsewhere. You can do both of these things without incurring a duplicate
content penalty – as long as you use a canonical tag.
Instead of confusing Google and missing your ranking on the SERPs, you are guiding the
crawlers as to which URL counts as the “main” one. This places the emphasis on the right URL
and prevents the others from cannibalizing your SEO.
A canonical tag can look like this in HTML:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />

6. Header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
Header tags are part of your content; in short, they are the headings that you use to structure
your page. As well as improving user experience and ease of reading, header tags can also
help search engines in understanding what your content is about.
The order of your header tags (from h1 to h6) highlights the importance of each section. A
h1 tag typically denotes the page title or article headline, while h2 and below serve as
subheadings to break up your content.
As important as header tags are, you shouldn’t overuse them – think quality, not quantity.
Having five different types of heading on your page won’t help your SEO. Instead, use them
tactically to break up your content and introduce the main point of each section.
Here’s an example of how header tags can be arranged:
<h1>A quick and easy guide to meta tags in SEO</h1>
<p>Paragraph of content</p>
<p>Another paragraph of content</p>
<h2>Why do meta tags matter?<h2>
<p>Paragraph of content</p>
<h2>Six meta tags to improve the optimization of your site<h2>
<h3>1. Title tag</h3>
It’s usually suggested to use only one h1, while you can use more than one h2 or h3.
Creating Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your
site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your
site more efficiently. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your
site, and also provides valuable information about these files. For example, when the page was
last updated and any alternate language versions of the page.
You can use a sitemap to provide information about specific types of content on your pages,
including video, image, and news content. For example:
• A sitemap video entry can specify the video running time, category, and age-
appropriateness rating.
• A sitemap image entry can include the image subject matter, type, and license.
• A sitemap news entry can include the article title and publication date.
You might need a sitemap if:
• Your site is really large. As a result, it's more likely Google web crawlers might overlook
crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or not well linked to
each other. If your site pages don't naturally reference each other, you can list them in a
sitemap to ensure that Google doesn't overlook some of your pages.
• Your site is new and has few external links to it. Googlebot and other web crawlers
crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not
discover your pages if no other sites link to them.
• Your site has a lot of rich media content (video, images) or is shown in Google
News. If provided, Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for
search, where appropriate.
You might not need a sitemap if:
• Your site is "small". By small, we mean about 500 pages or fewer on your site. (Only
pages that you think need to be in search results count toward this total.)
• Your site is comprehensively linked internally. This means that Google can find all the
important pages on your site by following links starting from the homepage.
• You don't have many media files (video, image) or news pages that you want to show
in search results. Sitemaps can help Google find and understand video and image files, or
news articles, on your site. If you don't need these results to appear in image, video, or
news results, you might not need a sitemap.
Hyperlinks Optimization
A link or hyperlink is a clickable object on a webpage that leads from one page to
another. Links may visibly appear as text, images, or buttons. We can classify links based
on the destination of the link, whether it leads users to another page on the same site or
a different website.
Internal links are links between the pages within your own website.
Search engines determine this by looking at the domain name; if the links on a page link
to other pages within the same domain, they are considered internal links.
If for some reason, your website was built to have more than one domain, search engines
will view this as an external link.
Inbound links are links that come from other websites or a different domain name.
Outbound links are those links on your website that link out to websites with a different
domain name.
Broken Links Checking
Broken links are links that send a message to its visitors that the webpage no longer exists,
triggering a 404 error page.
There are 2 types of broken links on your website:
1. Internal Links
The internal links refer to links that go from one page on your website to another.
These links are the ones that you have the most control on your website. For example, here’s
an internal link that will guide you to read the 9 benefits of internal linking our team has written.
Clicking on these internal links will direct users to the same website, but a different page.
So, whenever you update or make any changes to your website, you should always check your
internal links and make sure that the links are working.
2. External Links
External links or outbound links refer to the links that are pointing to another website.
The thing about external links is that you need to spend more time checking them because you
wouldn’t know when will the link changes as you are not in control. So, you’d have to check it from
time to time to see if the link is still working. Yes, manually…
Let’s say I have linked to a particular website, but a few months later, the website owner took the
link off their website. So, when Google Spiders crawl the site and follow that link to the other
website, Google Spiders will read it as a dead end. When Google Spiders detected too many
404 error pages, your website’s value will decrease from the search engines’ perspective.
If you think that having broken links on your website wouldn’t damage your site, you are wrong.
Not only search engines might give you a lower rank, but there are also a few things that you
should notice as well.
How To Check for Broken Links on Your Site?
If you don’t have a large site and external links, you will only need to check your site each time
you update or make changes to your site. But if you have just a few external links on your site, you
should check for broken links at least once a month.
If you run a large site, then you should be checking the entire site at least once a week.
Because when you have a large site, there is a higher possibility that your site will create a larger
number of broken links, especially if you neglect keeping them healthy and functioning.
The best way to keep an eye on these problems is to monitor your website. Whenever you
notice changes in the conversion rates, bounce rates or your traffic, it might indicate a problem. In
most cases, these problems are usually related to broken links on your site.
On the other hand, there are commercial and freeware applications that can be used to check
broken links.
Search Engine Indexing
Indexing is the process by which search engines organize information before a search to enable
super-fast responses to queries. Searching through individual pages for keywords and topics
would be a very slow process for search engines to identify relevant information. Instead, search
engines (including Google) use an inverted index, also known as a reverse index.
What is an inverted index?
An inverted index is a system wherein a database of text elements is compiled along with pointers
to the documents which contain those elements. Then, search engines use a process called
tokenization to reduce words to their core meaning, thus reducing the amount of resources
needed to store and retrieve data. This is a much faster approach than listing all known documents
against all relevant keywords and characters.
An example of inverted indexing
Below is a very basic example which illustrates the concept of inverted indexing. In the example
you can see that each keyword (or token) is associated with a row of documents in which that
element was identified.
Keyword Document Path 1 Document Path 2 Document Path 3

SEO example.com/seo-tips moz.com …
HTTPS deepcrawl.co.uk/https-speed example.com/https-future …
This example uses URLs but these might be document IDs instead depending on how the search
engine is structured.
The cached version of a page
In addition to indexing pages, search engines may also store a highly compressed text-only
version of a document including all HTML and metadata.
The cached document is the latest snapshot of the page that the search engine has seen.
The cached version of a page can be accessed (in Google) by clicking the little green arrow next
to each search result’s URL and selecting the cached option. Alternatively, you can use the ‘cache:’
Google search operator to view the cached version of the page.
Bing offers the same facility to view the cached version of a page via a green down arrow next to
each search result but doesn’t currently support the ‘cache:’ search operator.
Google Sandbox Effect
Google Sandbox is a filter that is assumed to have been inserted on new websites. With Google
Sandbox being placed on a website, the site’s rankings will start to get affected. The most
important keywords and keyword phrases will start experiencing a fall in their rankings. Regardless
of whether your site has numerous incoming links, highest ranks on Google or excellent content;
there are possibilities that it can be impacted by the Sandbox effect. The main objective of
Sandbox is to prevent spam sites from emerging or the process getting repeated.

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Lesson 4

What are the best tools used for site analysis?

• Google Analytics - https://analytics.google.com/

Why do meta tags matter?

Six meta tags to improve the optimization of your site

3. Robots meta tag

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

Image optimization has become a very important element

Your images should be accessible to both search engines

A canonical tag can look like this in HTML:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />

Here’s an example of how header tags can be arranged:

<h1>A quick and easy guide to meta tags in SEO</h1>

<p>Another paragraph of content</p>

<h2>Why do meta tags matter?<h2>

<h2>Six meta tags to improve the optimization of your site<h2>

<h3>1. Title tag</h3>

You might need a sitemap if:

You might not need a sitemap if:

Broken Links Checking

There are 2 types of broken links on your website:

How To Check for Broken Links on Your Site?

Search Engine Indexing

What is an inverted index?

An example of inverted indexing

Keyword Document Path 1 Document Path 2 Document Path 3

The cached version of a page

Google Sandbox Effect

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