On-Page SEO

https://moz.com/blog/on-page-seo-8-principles-whiteboard-friday

On-Page SEO in 2016: The 8 Principles for Success

By Rand Fishkin

On-page SEO is no longer a simple matter of checking things off a list. There's more complexity to this process in 2016 than ever before, and the idea of "optimization" both includes and builds upon traditional page elements. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the eight principles you'll need for on-page SEO success going forward.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about on-page SEO, keyword targeting but beyond keyword targeting into all the realms of the things that we need to optimize on an individual URL in order to have the best chance of success in the search engines in 2016.

So what does that involve? Well look, we could spend a tremendous amount of time on any one of these, but I'm going to share eight principles that are behind all of the tactical work that you would put into optimizing that page for that keyword term, phrase, or set of phrases. Most likely, in 2016, it is a set of phrases that you're targeting rather than just a single keyword term.

Piece of the whiteboard: illustration of a SERPs page

1. Fulfill the searcher's goal and satisfy their intent

What we are trying to do is fulfill the searcher's goal and satisfy their intent. So there's an intent behind every search query. I'm seeking some information. I'm seeking to accomplish a task. Oftentimes, that initial intent is different from the final goal that someone might have.

I'll give you an example. When someone searches for types of wedding formal wear, we might infer from that query that, right now, their specific intent behind this search is they want to see different kinds of potential formalwear that they could wear to a wedding, maybe as a guest or as a bride or a groom. But their ultimate goal is probably going to be to decide on one of those specific things and then potentially purchase that item or take something from their wardrobe and add it in there.

But this means that we need to try and serve both intents. It's actually going to be really tough if we're an ecommerce player to say, "Hey, you know what, I want a rank for types of wedding formal wear, and I want to rank for it with a page that tells people to buy this particular tuxedo."

That's tough for a bunch of reasons. You don't know whether that formalwear is going to be necessarily black tie in the United States, which is tuxedo. You don't know whether that person is a male or a female when they're performing the search. A woman, well, they might buy a tuxedo but probably not, at least statistically speaking, they're probably not going to. They're probably going to buy a dress. You might have much more success with a piece of content like 20 suits and tuxes men look great in at a wedding. Especially if I'm targeting men or if this is types of men's wedding formalwear, that's probably going to be the piece of content that has a great chance of serving the searcher's intent and fulfilling their goals, especially if we then take that content and link off to the places where you can buy or accessorize all those different pieces. So we're trying to do both of these items in number one.

Piece of the whiteboard: A negatively-trending graph with User Satisfaction on the Y axis and Page Load Time on the X axis.

2. Speed, speed, & more speed

This is very simplistic, but the idea is really easy here. We know that user satisfaction is a signal that Google interprets in some ways directly and in many, many ways indirectly. We also know that abandonment rates are very high, even higher on mobile for longer-loading pages. We know that pages that have fast load times earn more links and amplification. We know that pages that earn more links earn more engagement on them. We know that all of these things including speed itself is positively correlated with rankings, and we know that Google has made page load speed a small, albeit small, but a ranking sig