Optimizing content requires both understanding how to determine what content to write in the first place as well as how to ensure it's been written well from an SEO standpoint after the fact.

Google has hundreds of ranking signals they use to understand content and they are all weighted slighlty differently. Google doesn't tell anyone what those exact signals are or how they rank them, but over the years, SEOs have run data-driven tests that show pages moving up or down after changes were made, helping us reverse engineer the algorithm.

Ranking signals can be both under and over-optimized. Let's take a simple one like keywords. Too few keywords and the page won't rank, but "stuff" the page with keywords and Google will determine you're trying to hack the algorithm, so that won't work either.

Google's algorithm is actually quite sophisticated these days. It doesn't have overall signals it goes by, but has industry-specific signals. Another ranking signal is "link velocity." Link velocity is how fast back links are built on a site. Google knows that a brand new site in the addiction treatment space may get one or two links a month. So if that site suddenly starts getting 200 links a month because they're paying an SEO agency to build links, Google will recognize this and intentionally NOT rank the site.

Good SEOs know what a natural rate of link building or page building is. This is why you can't pay an SEO agency a million dollars and have them build thousands of pages and back links in a single month. SEO has to be worked on over time so as to follow normative patterns for the industry. Time on the web is also another strong ranking factor with Google, so some SEO simply won't work on a new site until it's been "live" long enough.

To see all 200 currently known ranking factors, check out this nice article from Hubspot here.

This below video will give you a quick walkthrough on how to determine what content to write and how to optimize it. We use a tool called Ahrefs, but other tools such as SEM Rush or Majestic work just as well.

A very important ranking factor nowadays for On-Page SEO is E-A-T, which stands for Expertise - Authority - Trustworthiness.

All on-page really boils down to a couple simple principles:

#1 - Does the page help the user in their search? Google's entire business model is built around users finding what they want. So the only thing that matters for great SEO is doing just that. Your content needs to answer a question, solve a problem, or provide desired information.
Does Google trust the page? This could be determined by the quality of the content, the author (yes, Google cross references authors across the web and is more likely to rank something written by an authoritative source), or the amount of related quality websites linking to that page.

If you'd like to go further down the rabbit whole on E-A-T, you can read Google's entire 168-page document for Quality Rating Guidelines. Or you could read a nice 5-page summary here (we recommend the summary).

Headings

Headings guide readers through an article or page. They should express what a section or a paragraph is about. Readers like to scan content. They do this to get an idea of what the text is about and to decide which sections of the text they’re going to read.

Heading structure is important for accessibility as well. Especially for people who can’t easily read from a screen. Because headings are in HTML, a screen reader can understand the article structure and read them out loud.

We want to maintain inclusivity with everything that we build so its important to always keep accessibility of users with unique circumstances in mind. Also, using headings creates texts of higher quality that are also easier to read.

If visitors don't quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll probably leave and look for another answer to their question. This is why text structure and heading use also impact SEO.

We want to ensure that our piece of content covers all aspects by using a proper outline. When we do this, we also want to ensure that we are nesting our headings correctly, just as we would when writing a paper. The following video shows how we build a proper outline using Writerzen as well as how we make decisions on what belongs within a given article and what does not.

SEO Titles

If you look at the source of a page, you find a title in the head section. It looks like this:

This is an example page title - Example.com

This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the page title or SEO title. When you look something up in a search engine, you get a list of results that appear as snippets. The SEO title is part of the snippet together. The snippet also features at least, a URL and a meta description.

The purpose of an SEO title is to make people click on it, come to the client website and read the post or in some cases buy the client's product. So, there are two goals that a good title must consider:

rank for a keyword
encourage page click throughs

URL's (AKA Page Slugs)

A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a website in an easy to read form. In other words, it’s the part of the URL that explains the page’s content.

Writing a good slug for a page or post can positively affect your SEO. It allows us to do the following things:

include keywords in the URL
create user friendly URLs

A well optimized slug will have certain characteristics. These characteristics include:

a focus keyword
minimum amount of function words (ex: "the", "a", "an", etc.)
specific focus (filtered out unnecessary words while keeping the purpose of the page clear)
clear and concise
exclusive lower case letters

Other things to remember about slugs is that no page can have the same slug as another page and that its critical to get them set correctly the first time. If we decide to change a slug later, it is important to remember to set up correct redirects to prevent 404 errors.

Image Optimization

Adding images to our articles is a necessity. We do this to cultivate a well-written and engaging piece. Images can also back up client messages and get good ranking in image search results.

In general, our creative teams will select and brand the highest quality images or even creating in-depth infographics to enhance the purpose of the piece. As an SEO team member, you must always remember to give the images good alt attributes.

Alt text strengthens articles with search engine crawlers and improves the accessibility of client websites.

This is a complete HTML image tag:

“image

Each image should have an alt text. Not just for our SEO purposes, but also because blind and visually impaired people won’t otherwise know what the image is about. Remember, accessibility is an integral part of helping people find care.

Google has this to say when it comes to image optimization:

„

When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

Internal Links

An internal link is any link from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Users and search engines alike use links to find content on websites.

Users click links to navigate through a site. It's how they find the content they want to read or learn more about.

Search engines also use links to navigate the site and it can be impossible for them to effectively find a page if there are no links to it.

With the right internal links, we can essentially guide site visitors and Google to the most important pages on the site. Google crawls websites by following links using a bot. This bot arrives at the homepage of a website, starts to render the page and follows the first link. By following links Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts and other content.

Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the greatest link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value or link juice will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.

By adding the right internal links you make sure Google and all its bots understand and recognize:

the relevance of pages
the relationship between pages
and the value of pages

External Links

Every website consists of internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your own website and external links connect your pages to other websites.

In the coding language HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:

Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

The first part contains the URL you’re linking to.

Link building refers to the marketing efforts to get links from other websites to your website as well as cultivating meaningful external links on a page. It’s seen as one of the most powerful tools to achieve higher rankings for your site in search engines. If a lot of high-quality links lead to a certain page, search engines will consider it a popular or meaningful article, which leads to them ranking it higher.

On Page Optimization