On Page SEO – 9 Actionable Techniques That Work

in this video I'm going to show you ninepowerful on-page SEO techniques these are the same techniques that I've usedto rank in Google for keywords like backlinks and SEO toolsI'm Brian Z and the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn forhigher rankings and more traffic and today you're going to learn the ninetactics that I use to optimize every page of my websitekeep watching I launched my first website way back in 2008 needless to sayon-page SEO was a lot different back then in those days keyword stuffing wasall the rage I mean people would actually argue on forums about what thebest keyword density was if my page has 879 words and my keyword appears 17times that's the keyword density of 1.

9% perfect today thanks to google updateslike hummingbird and rankbrain on-page SEO is much more complex but one thingthat hasn't changed is that there's a right and wrong way to optimize yourcontent and in this video you'll learn the right way so without further adolet's dive right in with technique number one which is to use super shortURL so I recently teamed up with a handful of SEO software companies toconduct the largest ranking factor study ever in total we analyzed 1 milliongoogle search results and we discovered that short urls tend to rank better thanlong URL fortunately it's super easy to use short URLs on your sitewhenever you publish a new page make the URL short and sweet for example in myguide about keyword research my URL is simply backlink accomforward slash keyword research speaking of URLs our next technique is to includeyour target keyword in your url again this is really simple and easy but itcan make a difference in your racking when you're creating your URLs just makesure to include your target keyword in that URL for example in this post I'mtargeting the keyword SEO tools so I made the URL short and it also includedmy target keyword in the URL ok so now it's time for our next technique whichis to use LSI keywords LSI keywords are words andphrases that search engines use to understand what your content is allabout for example let's say that you're writing an article about the Simpson howweird would it be if your content didn't include terms like Homer Springfield andmr.

Bern in the SEO world these closely related terms are called LSI keywordsand when you include these LSI keywords in your article it helps Googleunderstand your content topic so how do you know which LSI keywords to use asimple strategy that I use is to search for your target keyword in Google thenscroll to the bottom where Google shows you the searches related to section theterms in bold here usually make great LSI keywords to sprinkle into yourcontent with that it's time for our next tip which is to publish long contentremember that ranking factor study that I mentioned earlier well we foundsomething very interesting in that study something that goes against conventionalwisdom in the SEO and content marketing world and that discovery was that longercontent tends to outrank shorter content in fact we found the average result onGoogle's first page was 1890 words so why does longer content work better forone longer content tends to contain more of those LSI keywords that we talkedabout earlier when you write long in-depth content you naturally includemore LSI keywords which makes Google happy also Google may have an inherentpreference for longer content remember Google wants to show their user the bestresult for a given keyword and if your page provides someone with acomprehensive answer to what that person is looking for Google will want to rankyou high up on the first page in fact my highest ranking content also tends to bemy longest content for example this post about SEO techniques is a whopping 4, 000words and that's one of the reasons that it ranks in the top three for thekeyword SEO techniques okay let's dive right in with techniquenumber five which is optimizing your title tag for click-through rate now youprobably already know that you should include your target keyword in yourtitle that's on page SEO 101 but what you maynot know is that you should also optimize your title tag forclick-through rate why because it's a huge Google ranking factor right now infact a Google engineer recently gave a presentation where he confirmed thatthey used CTR as a ranking factor in other words if people search for akeyword and click on your result it sends a strong message to Google thatyou're a great result for that search and they'll likely give you a rankingsboost so how can you optimize your title tag for CTR here are two quick tips thatwork great first include numbers in your title there's a reason that your localmagazine rack flashes numbers on every single cover and that's because numbersgrab attention in fact a study by conductor found that headlines withnumbers get 36% more clicks than headlines without a number anothersimple way to boost your CTR is to add bracket and parentheses to your titlewhen HubSpot recently analyzed three million headlines they discovered thatbrackets and parentheses boosted CTR by an average of 38 percent so let's sayyou had a title that originally look like this by changing your title tag tothis you can significantly boost your pages click the rate this simple tacticworks so well that I tend to use brackets or parentheses in almost everysingle title okay we're making a ton of progress because they're already ontechnique number six which is to use external links the guys that rebootonline recently ran an interesting SEO study they made up a new keyword thathad zero search results in Google then they created ten different websites thatwere optimized around that fake keyword five of the websites linked out to otherwebsites and five of their websites had no external links what do you thinkhappened the five sites that contained external links out ranked a hundredpercent of the sites without external links so it's clear that Google usesexternal links as an on-page ranking factor the question is how can you usethem on your site it's simple include two to fiveabout links to authority resources in every single article for example atbacklinko I generous li link out to resources thathelp my readers out and these external links make a small but significantdifference in my rankings now that we've tackled external links it's time for meto show you how to use internal links this one is insanely easywhenever you publish a new piece of content make sure to link back to two tofive older pages on your site but not just any older pages pages that you wantto rank higher now this may sound like common sense but I'm always surprised atthe amount of people that add fifteen eternal links to random pages on theirsite sure any internal links are better than none at allbut if you want to get the maximum benefit from your internal links youneed to use them strategically which means only using two to five per pageand linking only to pages that need a boost that's all there is to it okay sowe only have two techniques left you ready let's do this our eighth tip is tomaximize site speed site speed is one of the few ranking factors that Google haspublicly confirmed and for my own testing I've found that a faster sitegives you a slight edge so how can you make your site load faster first investin premium hosting when it comes to your web host you get what you pay for backin the day I'd use cheap $5 a month hosting plans and needless to say mysite loaded slower than molasses today I use premium hosts like web synthesis inliquid web they're not cheap but the boost and speed that these high-endhosts provides make it well worth the investment the second way to improveyour site speed is to use a CDN CDN deliver your site's content closer towhere your user lives which makes your site load much faster with that it'stime for our last tip which is to include multimedia in your content ifyou read my stuff at backlinko you'll notice that it used a ton ofscreenshots videos and charts in my content all of this multimedia makes mycontent more valuable to my reader and make no mistake user experience issomething that Google directly measure for example if yourPaige has a high bounce rate and a low time on site Google will drop yourranking on the other hand if people stick to your content like supergluethey'll want to show your content to more people and in my experience usinglots of multimedia helps people stay on your site longer did you learn somethingnew from today's video if so make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel rightnow just click on the subscribe button right here also if you want exclusiveSEO and traffic techniques that I only share with subscribers head over tobacklinko comm and sign up for the newsletter it's free now I want to turnit over to you which on-page SEO tip from this video are you going to usefirst are you itching to try LSI keywords or maybe you want to startpublishing longer content either way let me know by leaving a comment below rightnow okay oh so what do you think sleeves rolled up or down 9 alright back to theserious stuff great time to vacuum I got to breathe before I do that one I feelweird saying that.