On-Page SEO Strategies

Optimization of a website’s content, text, tags, links and other elements. It is a process of optimizing a website in order to gain top positions on search engines for various keywords, and drive more traffic to the site.

Visibility Percentage is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum possible score that would be achieved if all of your keywords were ranked number 1 for all engines. In other words, if a site was perfectly ranked at number 1 for all keywords on all engines, your Visibility Percentage would be 100%. In contrast, if a site was not ranked in the top 30 for any keywords on any engines, then the Visibility Percentage would be zero.

On Page SEO - The Basics

On page SEO or search engine optimisation is making sure that your website is as search engine friendly as possible. If your website is not optimised then you have less chance of getting good results in the search engines, here is a quick guide towards good on page SEO:

• Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines - make sure that they all have at least one link from somewhere on your site.
• Make sure that you have unique content on every single page.
• Make sure that your meta-tags are arranged correctly - your page title tags and description tags should describe the content of your different web pages. The page title tags should be less then 68 characters and the description tags more detailed but less then 148 characters.
• Make sure you label the different headers on your web pages using H tags.
• Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly, use mod re-write for Linux and Apahche hosting or use IIS redirect for Windows.
• Make sure that the links within your site are complete
• Make sure that you use descriptive URLs for your images
• Make sure that you label all of your images with descriptive alt attributes.
• Make sure that you make good use of anchor text links within your content - if you have a page about blue widgets, use the phrase blue widgets in the text that links to it.
• Make sure that there is only one version of your site - 301 redirect all non www. URLs to the www. ones or vice versa.
• Make sure that there is only one version of your homepage - 301 redirect the index or default page back to domain.com.
• Don't waste PageRank on pages that you don't need to be in the search engines or that you don't think will bring you traffic, possibly your terms and conditions page or even your about and contact page. Use the rel="nofollow" tag in the links to these pages.
• Use the rel="nofollow" tag in the links to websites that you do not trust, you think maybe using spamming techniques or you do not want to help in the search engines.
• Make sure that your code is valid, in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your markup.

It’s essential that you focus your SEO efforts in such a way that the effects will cascade through your site. For example, come up with “recipes” for optimized titles for product pages, for category pages, for articles, etc.—yet allowing for those recipes to be overridden with a hand-crafted title tag when required. Getting the title tag right will make a big difference. For example, the website SlideShare.net has over 40,000 tag pages indexed in Google, but the titles are suboptimal. They all follow the recipe of “SlideShare » Slideshows tagged with [keyword].” A better choice would have been “[keyword] tagged PowerPoint slides, presentations and slideshows.” Such a change is usually easy to implement and is likely to pay big dividends in rankings and traffic improvements.

Don’t stop at the title tag; optimize the entire HTML template. Use SEO best practices: 1) separate out the content layer from the presentation layer; 2) make sure you’re using semantic markup; 3) employ heading tags (e.g. H1, H2) when appropriate; 4) cut the bloat out of the template; 5) make sure you’re not using the same meta description and meta keywords across the whole template. Make that template really hum.

Then move on to your URLs. Granted URLs are harder to optimize, but it’s usually worth the effort. Particularly if your URLs have more than a couple parameters (i.e. more than two equals signs). Google engineer Matt Cutts told the audience at WordCamp this past weekend that dynamic URLs and static URLs are treated the same by Google—with the caveat that as long as there aren’t more than 2 or 3 parameters in the URL. Nonetheless, I’d rewrite your URLs to remove the query string (i.e. question mark) altogether, using a server plugin like mod_rewrite or ISAPI_rewrite. If rewriting your URLs and otherwise deploying your optimizations are difficult/slow/expensive due to IT department bottlenecks or ecommerce platform/CMS limitations, there are proxy server based workarounds like GravityStream (which fellow Search Engine Land columnist Chris Smith recently described as “automatic SEO“). However, whenever feasible you want to fix your native site.

It’s been our experience that static URLs perform better in the engines. As a bonus, such URLs look nicer to users so they tend to garner more links too. Ideally you should go for keyword URLs. A URL like also announced at WordCamp that underscore characters are now going to be treated as word separators. So no need to worry about whether it’s an underscore or a hyphen you’re using to separate words—at least as far as Google is concerned. Oh, and make sure that your old URLs respond with a 301 permanent redirect to the page’s new, optimized URL.

I like to think of my collection of web pages indexed by the search engines as my virtual sales force. Each unique, indexed page at a unique URL is like a virtual “salesperson.” The more virtual salespeople working for you, the better. Unfortunately most of these salespeople are freeloaders, sitting around doing nothing for you—not attracting a single search engine visitor. Increase your indexed pages while at the same time decreasing your freeloaders. Employing spider-friendly URLs decreases the percentage of freeloaders.

Effective tactics for adding more pages to your virtual sales force include deploying faceted navigation (such as Endeca’s “Guided Navigation”), pulling in content through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, such as that provided by Flickr), and leveraging your visitors as content co-creators. Your visitors can be invaluable unpaid employees for you—populating your site with product reviews, discussion forums posts, blog posts, blog comments, wiki articles. The great thing about user-generated content is that it incorporates your consumers’ vocabulary into your site. So even if you’re wedded to an industry buzzword (e.g. “kitchen electrics”), you can rely on your visitors using the more popular synonym.

When your visitors won’t do your dirty work for you, turn to the “Mechanical Turk, ” Amazon’s scalable human-powered service that surprisingly few SEOs utilize. Imagine an army of humans paid in micropayments to do your bidding. Mechanical Turk can tag your products, tag your images, translate your English language content, transcribe your audio, and much more. Whatever you can’t scale algorithmically, you can probably scale through the Mechanical Turk.

Encourage people to syndicate your content (and links) by providing numerous RSS feeds powered by your data, sliced and diced in different ways (most popular, top rated, clearance, newest and latest, by category, etc.). This propagates deep links into your site from blogs, aggregators and aficionado websites (and yes, from splogs too…sigh!). Also prominently display and encourage visitors to use social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us throughout your site, in order to add your content to their bookmarks and tag them—again, for the deep inlinks.

Another thing that decreases your percentage of “freeloaders” is your internal linking structure. Your navigational hierarchy plays a key role in passing link gain deep into your site. Pages too far down the site tree won’t get enough “juice” to warrant high rankings. Optimize your linking structure by creating a rich web of interlinking within your site. Whenever appropriate, include links to related products, related articles, related searches, etc. While you’re at it, ensure the anchor text is optimal (i.e. wipe such phrases as “view related” and “click here” from your link text vocabulary). Tag clouds are one of my favorite methods of interlinking with keyword-rich text links, done in an attractive Web 2.0 way. Don’t just use the same tag cloud across your site; tailor the tag cloud to the page or category within the site.


On Page SEO

Link Building

Most people new to search engine optimization equate on page seo as everything in seo. Terms like meta tags and keyword density are often some of the first encountered by seo newbies. Many myths still revolve around on page seo and while for competitive keywords link building will be your path to success you can still rank very well for many keyword phrases with on page factors alone. In the previous two posts to this tutorial I talked about keywords and some of the things you could do while building your site to improve your overall optimization. Today as you have probably figured out I’ll be discussing what you can do on the page itself to gain a higher position in search results.

Let me begin with a reminder. Always write your web page content for your visitors first and search engines second. It will make no difference how much traffic you can get to a given page if there’s nothing useful there for anyone. Keeping search engines in mind while you write is fine and something you should be doing, but give search engines and seo in general a backseat to your visitors when writing. You’ll find that often the same things work well for both. Ok so not that I’ve given you that reminder what can you do on your pages to optimize them?
Title Tags

Probably the most important place to have keywords is in your page title. Search engines put a lot of importance on what a page is about based on the title of that page. If you’re not using keywords in your page title you’d better have a lot of links pointing to that page. When writing page titles place your keywords as close to the front of the title as you can. This isn’t about stuffing one keyword after another in your titles. They still need to be readable and convince someone to click on them since it’s your page title that shows as the link in all search results.

You should write unique page titles for every page of your site and use the keywords for which you are optimizing your pages. There’s no need to include red widgets in the title for your blue widgets page though of course you should use the word widget. It’s ok to use your keywords more than once in your title, but again don’t overdue it. Too many keywords won’t help. Use your keywords 2 or 3 times max. Keep your page titles short as well. After a certain number of characters all search engines stop displaying them.

It’s not necessary to include your company name in your page titles for seo reasons unless your company name also makes use of your keywords. You may still want to include your company name for branding, but place it at the end of your title. Your page on swiss watches on your site might have a page title like:

Meta Tags

When it comes to seo the only meta tags you should ever have on your page are the meta keyword and meta description tags and you don’t even need one of them. Ok you can also use meta tags for the character set and language of your page if you want, but none of the index=”follow” or “revisit” stuff. That won’t make the spiders come back any faster. You really don’t need to use the meta keyword tag anymore either. It suffered from spam abuse so much that the major engines don’t pay any attention to it anymore. Most seo experts aren’t using it and if they’re not why should you. You can use it if you want, but if you do make sure that any word you include in the keyword list also appears on the page. If not you may send off a red flag that you’re spamming.

Do use the meta description tag, not so much for seo, but to convince people to click on the link once it appears in search results. Not always, but often enough your meta description will be what appears beneath your link in the results pages and can help people decide whether or not to click on your link. Use your keywords in your description without overdoing it. There may be a minor seo benefit, but you’re really writing this tag for people.
Page Headings

Use page headings and include your keywords in your page headings. Once again it’s not about keyword stuffing. Mention your keywords once or twice and move on. Use headings the way they were meant to be used. As a way to structure your content. You should only have 1 <h1> tag on your page which can mimic your page title if it makes sense. You might have a couple or three <h2> tags and <h3> tags. you probably won’t get to <h4>. Don’t create heading tags just for the sake of seo. Use them as they were meant to be used, but when you do use them try to get a keyword in them.
Keyword Density

Is it important to mention your keywords on your page? Absolutely. Is there a perfect amount of times to use them on any given page? Absolutely not. Do not worry about your keyword density. Don’t over analyze your pages trying to find that perfect amount of keywords. You won’t find it. Is there a single perfect keyword density you should use? Highly doubtful. Most pages that rank well typically have keyword densities between 2% and 7% Please don’t hold me to that though. I really don’t know or care what keyword density I should use on a page and neither should you. Adding one more occurrence of your keyword in your content isn’t going to change your position in search results. In fact you can rank a page for very competitive keywords without ever mentioning those keywords on your page. The classic example is a search for ‘computer’ for which apple.com will likely be #1. Check the Apple site and see how many times you find the word computer on the page and then decide how important you think keyword density is.

Use your keywords a few times in your early paragraphs and also include them in your closing paragraphs. Every so often mention them near each other. Use them throughout your content when it makes sense to mention them. Don’t spend your time over analyzing it though. The truth is if you write a page that is focused on a givem topic then you’ve more than likely used your keywords the right amount of times. It’s also becoming a good idea of late to use words that are related to your keywords instead of just using your keywords. Search engines are getting better and determining the relevance of your page copy to a given set of keywords so using synonyms may work just as well if not better than using your keyword one more time.
Keyword Emphasis

Some people will tell you that you want to make all your keywords bold or place them in italics. There’s probably a minor effect in either of these at best, but it is ok to do as long as it’s not overdone. Having every one of your keywords in bold is going to look spammy to a search engine and even more to your page visitors. Feel free to do it a couple of times if it makes sense to emphasize your keywords in a certain part of the page, but as with everything on page don’t overdue it.

On Page Links

Link to other pages of your site within your content. The anchor text you use can have an impact on how well both pages rank for a given keyword phrase. Not too many links mind you, but if you have a page with related content link to it. It can be a boost to both pages. Use your keywords in the anchor text of the link. It’s also both ok and a good idea to have links to external pages in your content. Again make sure to use keywords in the anchor text of the links. Links are a very important part of seo, both on and off the page. The anchor text you use in your links is especially important when it comes to optimization.

When you link to external sites make sure the site is a quality site that your visitors will find useful. Make sure the site really adds something to what you’re saying. It’s possible that visitors will leave your site through the link, but if you always send them somewhere good they’ll come back to see what other sites you’ve found for them that they may like. Linking to quality sites can also help your Google TrustRank score.
Alt And Title Attributes

It’s a common misconception that alt and title attributes (they’re attribute and not tags) is the key to the search engine door. It’s unlikely they would have anything more than a very minor affect on your ranking. Both are meant to be used for accessibility and not seo and stuffing them with keywords not only won’t help you it’s likely to keep visually impaired visitors away from your site. Most of the time your alt attribute will be blank (alt=”") and your title attribute not even there. Use them only to provide addition information. If you have images that are also links you should mention the page the link goes to in the alt attribute. This is the best resource I’ve found for how to use The Alt And Title Attributes.

On Page SEO Summary

For competitive keywords on page seo will only help so much, though it can still help. If you’re targeting less competitive keywords then on page seo can be all you need to get a page 1 rank. Write good page titles above all else and use your keywords naturally throughout your content. Include page headings with your keywords in them. Do not spend too much time over analyzing things and do not over stuff your page with keywords. On page seo is no longer the end all and be all of search engine optimization. It still plays an important part in optimizing a page and you should keep it in mind as you write your pages. The more you do the easier you’ll find it is to write your pages when it comes to seo and the less time you’ll have to spend on them

We’re almost there with our basic seo tutorial. The only major thing left to talk about is link building. Of course as it so happens link building is what will ultimately prove to have the biggest impact in seo. It’s that important and it’s what today’s seo is all about. Next time I’ll pick up link building in Part V of this tutorial.