Every year, like clockwork, internet marketing “experts” like to declare the end of SEO. Everything from Rankbrain to Google’s expansion of Google Ads (formerly Adwords) was supposed to be the final nail in the
SEO has certainly changed from the early days of search. From the mid-90s through the early 2000s, webmasters could artificially raise their search ranking simply by stuffing any and all related keywords at the bottom of a page, in 4pt white font. Once Google cracked down on keyword stuffing, these spammers were out of a job and started the first “SEO Is Dead” blog posts. And who could forget the infamous “miserable failure” Google bomb during George W. Bush’s presidency? Over the past 20 years, Google has continually refined their algorithm to give their customers, searchers, the best product possible.
With the frequent and seemingly arbitrary changes in the search algorithm, “black hat”
The latest boogeyman is “Rankbrain”. Search engine professionals have said that, with the advent of A.I., traditional
This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
On the surface, for all the reasons previously mentioned, it does seem like the entire
However, when you take a deeper look in the search results, you can see nothing much has changed. Kyle Roof, of High Voltage
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be big news. After all, this happens literally hundreds of times every day.
What makes this special is he did it with a website populated almost completely with Lorum Ipsum text, and with no backlinks.
Not only did he rank on the first page, but he also got into the map pack for a nonexistent business.
So how did he do this? Did he get hundreds or thousands of backlinks? Did he do some tricky HTML or CSS coding? Bribe a Google employee?
No, he simply used old school on-page
On-page
By using only on-page
No guest posts, no link pyramids, no syndication networks needed. Just good, solid, old school
What Kyle did was analyze the on-page SEO for sites that were already ranking on the first page of Google, and emulated what they did while also improving on the other site’s shortcomings.
His word count on the page (roughly 1400) was the average for sites on the front page, while keyword density (.14%) was slightly above average. This part is key because so many writers and web designers think they have to blow the competition out of the water with keyword density. For most niches, a keyword density of under 3% is actually the best.
He also used pictures with relevant keywords in the alt tags and liberally used H2, H3, and H4 tags with related keywords. He didn’t try to stuff his keywords into the H tags, instead, he used semantically related ones.
He also made sure to include relevant JSON schema and had seven 5 star ratings, where the average for a site on the front page was 8.
These are all things that should be
Why is that?
Backlinks.
On-page
Backlinking, for those who may not know, is the process of getting relevant links from other sites to yours. In Google’s eyes, relevant backlinks from good quality websites act as a sort of vote of confidence for your site, showing Google that you can be trusted and could be ranked higher.
Backlinking has become so revered, that some digital marketing agencies have even started to refer to their
Backlinking is the sexy side of
On-page
Hopefully, this experiment will help SEOs and web designers to remember the importance of on-page
