On Page SEO

I tend to split SEO into 2 main sections or areas of work: On-Page SEO and Off-Site SEO. Before you can work on the Off-Site SEO (Link building, Analytics etc.) you need to get your On-Page SEO as perfect as possible in order for the search engines to easily crawl and index your site, followed by making sure Google understands what your content is about so they know what keywords to rank you for. In plain English: you need to optimize your pages so that they are search engine friendly!

If you are new to SEO, the info below can get a bit overwhelming. If you don’t understand what I’m going on about, please leave a comment in the comments and I’ll try and clarify. Alternatively, if you want to learn more, do a search on Google. You’ll find many blogs and sites covering On-Page SEO, but I thought I’d share my personal experiences from the last 6 years I’ve been doing this.

When I’m working with On-Page SEO, I have one word in my mind: “Natural” - I recommend you keep this magic word in your mind when you do this too. A lot of SEO’s try to hard, which ultimately gives a poor user experience. There is a fine balance in giving the user a great experience (after all, they are the ones that pay you!) and trying to impress the search engines.

Here are the different considerations and my thoughts on the different areas of On-Page SEO:

• Keyword Research

I have spoke many times here before about the importance of understanding what you’re users type into the search box on the major search engines to find your site, product or service. There are many tools that give you stats such as the number of searches per day/week/month along with more detailed statistics such as the level of competition and the level of competitiveness (a formula based on number of searches to the number of pages targeting the keyword). I highly recommend Word Tracker. Word Tracker allows you to buy a one day ticket to use their service - based on previous experience they normally give you an extra 2 days for free. Select one or two related keywords per page of your site.

• Domain Name

If you are starting a new site, I recommend buying a domain name that has your primary keyword in it. Your primary keyword should be the most targeted keyword you aim to use on your home page, with less popular keywords on the sub pages. If you planned to create a site about Coffee, you would want coffee in the domain name, maybe: www.ilovecoffee.com

• URL Formatting

When adding URL’s to your domain name, include the keywords in the URL, separated by a dash. For example, if you wanted to create a sub page targeting the keyword “How to grind coffee”, your URL format should look similar to this: http://www.ilovecoffee.com/how-to-grind-coffee.html

• Keyword Placement

Once you have decided what keyword/phrases you plan to target for each page, it’s time to implement these onto the actual page and various different tags so that when the search engines crawl and index your page. The search engines will pick up the extra data and will have a better understanding what you’re site is about, and what keywords to rank you for in the search results.

• Title Tag

The title tag is probably the most important area where to add your keyword. From previous experiments, adding the keyword at the beginning works well. Another method that works well for me (You should do your own testing to see what works for your sites) is to start the title with your keyword, followed by adding the keyword in some variation later. For example, if we were targeting “Coffee”, you may want to test a title tag like this: “I love Coffee - a guide on brewing, roasting and drinking coffee”

It’s worth remembering that when someone does a search for your keyword in the search engines and browse through the search engine listings, the user will read the title tags first before deciding what site to select from the results. With this in mind, make your title relevant to your sites content and try to maker it as compelling as possible.

• Description Tag

Using a keyword based Description tag benefits the user more than getting your leg over with the search engines. If you don’t use a description tag, the search engines will take a snippet out of the page where the searched keyword is written in your copy content. I much prefer to write my own as this gives me an opportunity to be creative - making the description as compelling as possible. As with the Title Tag, you need to persuade the internet user that your site is the best choice for them out of the other sites on the search listing page. Remember, you now have many to compete with: The 10 organically placed searched results, the premium sites at the top and also the sites in the right nav bar. The user has a lot of choice, the only tools you have are your title and description tags - take them seriously and you’ll see an improvement with the click troughs.

• META Tags

Not many search engines use Meta tags these days, although some still do, including MSN from my own experience. Adding 1 to 5 targeted keywords in the keyword meta tags in a worth while exercise.

• Copy Text

Bald or italic? What percentage of keyword density is required? Does the font size make a difference? Keyword placement? These are commen On-Page SEO questions, all of which I’m tested, researched and played with for many hours on many sites. 6 years ago these methods were important, however with Algorithms becoming more advanced, these variables don’t make much difference any more. This is one area of on-page SEO where I urge you to use our magic word “Natural”

Saying that, I do still do a copy of tweaks to the body text, while keeping in mind that I want the tweaks seem as natural as possible. The first is adding the keyword at the beginning of the copy, like in the first sentence. The second is making sure the copy does include your keywords a few times, when I say a few, I mean add them where it’s necessary for the user, not the search engines. The third is adding the title in headers. As for making the keyword bald or italic, I only recommend you do this when you can make the whole sentence bald, again - keep it natural.

• Image File Names

This doesn’t help your organic search engines that much, but adding your keywords into the image file names does help generate traffic via Image Search Engines, like Google Images. In my view, any small tweaks that will generate extra traffic is worth while taking seriously. For example, instead of calling your logo logo.gif, why not use coffee-logo.gif? Continuing with the coffee site, be descriptive with the image file names - If you had an image of freshly brewed coffee, do a quick keyword search and find out what keyword you could use - maybe something like hot-brewd-coffe.jpg

• ALT Text Tags

Have you ever visited a site on a slow net connection and the images haven’t loaded? You may have noticed text where the images should have loaded, this is called ALT text. Search Engines look at ALT text so it’s worth while writing a description of each image on your site in an ALT tag using your keywords. Take the logo, you should have the file name coffee-logo.gif, make sure you add an ALT tag that also says “Coffee Logo” - When the image doesn’t load, users will see the text “Coffee Logo” and know what that image is about! - Just be careful to not over stuff your keywords: Use the magic word here: “Natural”

• Internal Links

Dealing with Internal, external and in-bound links deserve a separate post as this can really go into depth. Although it’s worth mentioning here that if a) you link to pages within your site using the URL and b) use your keywords in the anchor text, you will effectively pass the page rank juice around to the targeted pages which will slightly improve your search engine positions.

Here’s an example: You have 2 pages, one if your home page and your keyword is “Coffee”, you also have a sub page that targets “Blue Mountain coffee” When linking to your home page from the sub page, have your link structure like this: Coffee instead of using Home Page

• External Links

This is a biggie - make sure that you only link to relevant, trusted and established sites. A simple method to determine if you can rank a site or not is to check the site is listed in Google. Simply enter the domain name in the search box, is the site comes up, the it’s safe to link to it. Google, and I’m sure the other search engines, will ban sites that link to sites Google has banned.

• H1, H2, H3 Tags

I recommend adding these tags that separate to importance of your one page content. Make sure you have your keyword in the H1 tag, you may just want to use a header or something at the top of the page. Use the H2 tag for the following paragraph and so on. The trouble with implementing the H tags is that it will change the text, normally very big and ugly… not fitting in with the rest of your design. You can overcome this by using CSS (style sheets).

• Page Size

Try and keep your pages under 60k, which is plenty for the average web site. If your page is over 60k, just split the page up into 2.

• Up-dating your pages frequently

Searches engines love to rank well looked after pages, pages are are kept up to date… therefore, make a habit of going over the pages content

• HTML Validation

When I have completed the above, I always run my pages through this HTML Validation tool. This tool highlights snippets of code that need amending… simply do as the tool suggests and you will have extremely tidy code, perfect for the search engines to come along and crawl/index your pages easily.

Following the above advice is a sure way to improve search engine rankings. As I mentioned in the first sentence, this part is only half the SEO process. I’ll continue with the other half, Off-Site SEO later in the week.