An On-Page SEO Brainwave

Part 27: An On-Page SEO Brainwave

When designing web pages, we try to incorporate as many things that the search engines like as possible. This is called On-Page SEO. But the problem is that nobody knows for sure exactly what factors the search engines actually do like.

And they are not saying!

We can ‘reverse engineer’ the search engines to some extent – my own Keyword LSI Spy tool does a pretty good job of analyzing the top ranking pages for any given keyword or phrase, but there is only so far you can go because every page is different, and so many factors can come in to play.

What we need is a means of looking at pages where only a small amount of what is on page changes from one page to the next – effectively allowing us to reduce the variables and find out what the SEs really do with a small set of data. But how do you go about finding a whole lot of pages that you can compare against each other in Google (for example) where we know that only a limited number of things change between them?

It is something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, but this morning I had a brainwave.

Forgive me if this is blindingly obvious to you. It is to me NOW, but you, like me, may not have made this connection yet, so the technique I’m about to share may be very useful.

EzineArticles is an online article directory that has many hundreds of thousands (millions probably) of articles. And the great thing from our point of view is that each one is displayed in a standard template. So, effectively, the only things that change on the page from one article to the next are a couple of meta tags and the article body itself. All the other stuff on the page, particularly for articles aimed at the same keyword, remains virtually identical.

In Google we can search for pages within a website. So by using the search string: “acne treatment” site:ezinearticles.com (using whatever keyword phrase we like between the quotes) we are given a ranked list by Google of articles that they consider to match our keyword from the EzineArticles site. Because of the sheer size of EzineArticles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a niche that doesn’t return a good selection. My acne treatment example pulls up 16,500!

Now we can look at the articles that Google has selected for us and see what, if anything, makes the ones nearer the top of the pile stand out.

Here are a few suggestions for factors that you could check out:

* Meta Title tag
* Meta Description tag
* Meta Keyword tag
* Article word count
* Article keyword density
* Use of LSI words in the article
* Use of synonyms in the article
* Keyword density in the article title
* Keyword density in the first paragraph
* Keyword density in the last paragraph
* Keyword density in the middle paragraphs
* Average sentence length
* Average paragraph length
* Links and link anchor text
* Recency of article
* Style of article
* Use of subheadings

Unfortunately, EzineArticles have software in place to prevent automated scraping of their content, so it isn’t possible (by me anyway) to write a script to do this analysis in a php program, but with some patience you can easily get some good indications manually.

Try it out – and let me know if you find any surprising new insights!

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