On-Page Optimization

SEO On-Page Optimization Explained

The search engines read the information on your website and will try to establish what your site is all about.
They are called search engine bots and they spider millions of pages each and every day. It all sounds very futuristic doesn’t it?

They also look at the other websites that link to your site and check them for relevance. The more relevant and reputable that the site linking to you is judged to be, the more value that the search engines will put on your site.

So, if your website is about TV remote controls and the sites linking to you are about tv remote controls you will get a higher rating and subsequent ranking than if the link was from a website about furniture or any other unrelated subject.

If your website is too general then you will find it virtually impossible to rank for anything at all as the search engines will not be able to work out what it is your site is all about.

On page optimisation is the very first step of any website when working on improving your search engine rankings and is something that every web site owner should look into it.

It should take no more than a few hours to implement most of the basic strategies and methods that can make a real big difference.

Another reason that on page optimization is so important in the beginning is that once you have the structure in place you do not want to keep changing it.

Adding more and more content is good but changing, deleting or moving it has the opposite affect and can damage your SEO rankings.

Making the site readable and easy to navigate for your visitors, is paramount and should also be part of the optimisation process.

The following list is a summary of the on-page techniques that you should consider carrying out if you want to improve rankings, make it easier for the search engine bots to spider your site and increase the overall visitor experience which, in turn, will help encourage them to stay on your site for longer and ultimately increase your business.

To check the following go to the top of your browser and click on “view” then find “view source”. A new page will open displaying the source code of the website. You can do the same for each page on the site.

URL Structure

If you have your main keywords in the domain name you will have much easier job of ranking for even really competitive keyword phrases.

You cannot change the name of the index or home page but you can benefit from using the relevant keywords in the file name of the other folders and pages www.domainname.com/tv-remote-control.html or www.domainname.com/tv_remote_control/hitachi-tv-remote-control.html

Using Tags

Each page of your website should have unique tags.

Title Tags

“<title>Replacement Remote Controls for all TV, Television, Satellite systems. Most brands.</title>”

Your websites title tag is the first thing that you need to check. This is the line of text that appears on the top of your browser window when you are on a website.

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A title tag needs to be short, a maximum of 40 characters and descriptive enough to let your visitors understand what your business is about.

The title tag is the first thing that is indexed and shown by the search engines. It is the top line seen in the search engine results. It is important for the search engine to be able to establish what your site is about and should also be attention grabbing for the person who is searching for your business.

People will scan the top results so make sure your page title is appealing enough for them to click on the link to find out more information. Of course the title also has to be valuable and descriptive enough for the search engines to rate and rank your page higher than the rest.

The search engines will index more of your pages if they are unique. This means that every page on your site should have a unique title tag.

The first thing in the page title tag should be the main keyword related to that page. If it is the home or index page then it might want to be your company or business name.

Meta Tags

Some people believe that the meta tags are not as important as they used to be. This is not the case in my opinion.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are for the main keywords related to each of the pages. You do not want to have more than 10 to 15 keyword phrases. Use the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. These should be the same as the keywords found on the rest of the page.

There are two trains of thought here, some say that by using a keyword multiple times you will be penalised for duplicate content, therefore they use single keywords related to the site.
Personally, I recommend keyword phrases and have never had a problem with duplicate content.

Meta Description

The meta description for example is what appears in the search engine results pages (or SERPS) and you should take care and time over getting this right. You can make it as long as you want but only the first 150 characters will be shown on the results page.

Again this needs to be descriptive and grab the attention of the person doing the search but also have enough information for the search engine to understand what it is your site and that particular page is about.

Use your keywords and include your unique selling point (USP) in the meta description. A well written description can make a massive difference to the number of visitors to your site. Think of it as an advert.

A unique description for each page is also a good strategy. The search engines are more likely to index a unique page than a page with duplicate page title and meta tags.

HTML Tags

This get a little more technical but most website design software and html editors make this relatively easy to do. You can of course, ask your local webs designer to do this for you.

The important html tags are

[h1] Header 1
[h2] Header 2
[h3] Header 3
[h4] Header 4
[strong] [/strong] Bold text
[em] [/em] Italics
Quotes ” “

Using header tags ( h1,2,3 and 4 to show the level of importance. The h1 tags are normally used for the most important parts or headings and then sub headings in h2 and so on.
Using headers to separate each section of your page is good practice. It make is easier to read and understand the content on your site.
Putting keywords in bold and emphasising other words by using italics and quote marks will also ensure the search engines get an understanding of your website.

Important Pages

You need to have some of the following pages on your site:-

Privacy policy (all sites)
Terms of use (non e-commerce)
Terms and conditions (e-commerce site)
Disclaimer (all sites)
Trademarks (certain sites)

Keyword Research and Optimisation

Research is paramount if you are going to get your web site ranking for your chosen keyword phrases. If you get this right in the first place then you will make your job so much easier as time goes on.
Keyword research is a massive subject in itself and is beyond the scope of this article and will be covered in more depth later.
The key, if you pardon the pun, is to find words that are themed to your main subject. You then include these themed words in your content.

If you are trying to rank for “tv remote control” then themed words would include brand names as well as words like television, replacement, LCD and plasma. This will leave no doubt about what the page is about.
Always make sure you make the content for the visitor not the search engine. Use short sentences and make it interesting and informative to read.

Linking Strategy & Ease of Use

Having a good linking structure is also a key factor to getting good rankings. Again, linking is a big subject and we will cover linking in more detail in another section of the education station.
Making sure that your site is easy to navigate and that they can find the buy button within 2 clicks will make a difference to your sales. Having a simple link structure is also important for the search engine spiders.
Anchor text is important when linking to other internal pages and external sites. Anchor text is the text used to describe a link in a page an example is <a href=”http://www.tvremotecontrolwebsite.com”>tv remote control< /a> What you see is “tv remote control” usually in blue or purple if you have clicked on and visited the link before.

No Follow Tags

The search engine spiders will follow all the links on your site over time.
Add, nofollow tags to contact us, privacy page, terms and conditions, trademarks and disclaimer page. You do not want these pages indexed by google or the other search engines.

Photos and Image Optimisation

This is probably one of the most overlooked parts of on-page optimization.
File Name - Make sure you rename the photo image to something meaningful or keyword related. Don’t use spaces in the file name. change D103-43434.jpg to hitachi-tv-remote-control.jpg

Alt Text - This was used more in the early days of the internet when it took 3 days to download an mp3 single. Users could turn off the images and the alt text was shown in its place. The search engines scan this as they have no other way of knowing what the picture is about. Use the same or similar text as the file name but keep it reasonably short unless it is a big image.

Image Title – This is to provide additional information when the visitor mouses over the image. This can be a few words or even a short paragraph. Again it is scanned by the search engines but try and use different keywords to re-arrange them. example “The replacement Remote Controls for your Hitachi”
Image Hyperlink - If you are going to link the image to another page, use the keywords in the link text.
Content
The next thing is to ensure that the content is relevant to the subject of the page. You should always plan and research each page carefully. As I already mentioned, you do not want to be continually editing the content on the website.

Unique Content

You must ensure that the content on your website is unique. Do not duplicate your content on other pages on your site and definitely do not post any of your content on other site like article directories or blogs.

Keyword Density

Check that the keyword density is not too high. You need to aim for about 3% and a maximum of 5%. That means that you should not have your keyword, or keyword phrase, appear more than 3 to 5 times in every hundred.
The exception to the rule is with e-commerce sites. I have never had a problem with keyword density or lost rankings because of too many keywords on a page.
If you had an e-commerce site selling tv remote controls for example and you stock them for 25 different manufacturers, then you would need to use the words remote control at least 25 times.

Site Map

Make sure that your site has a site map. This is a file that sits on your server that details the structure of all of the pages of your website.

Search Engine Stratagems