On page SEO

If you have read my post The only way to win at SEO, you will see that I don’t regard on page SEO as a particularly sophisticated SEO strategy. Not to say it’s not important, it’s extremely important but it’s generally no longer going to be enough to get you onto the front page for a high traffic keyword.

In this post I will go through the basics of what we do for on-page optimisation. Note I haven’t included general coding techniques in here but it’s worth mentioning that Google likes well coded web pages and doesn’t particularly love old school coding like loads of tables and Flash.

First off – Google Analytics

The first step here is to look at what keywords are bringing you traffic at the moment. Google Analytics is what we use for this so hopefully it’s installed but if it’s not, install it now and use your current stats package to look at the keyword data (AWStats is often installed on hosting accounts by default).

The last thing we want to do is have our on page SEO changes reduce traffic that is coming from Google already so if there are keywords that are currently bringing you traffic then you have to make sure you don’t undo any onsite work that has been done for these.

General on-page optimisation steps

Here are a range of steps that are a good idea to perform on your site. Note none of these are black and white and it depends on the site and it’s competitors as to what exact steps to take and results you might expect.

1. Make sure the homepage page title matches your keyword but also makes sense. Note the title is not the heading you can see on the actual page, it’s displayed in the top bar or tab of the browser. This is a very important element for on page SEO. For example if my business name was Web Circle and I was targetting Web Design I would generally make the title tag “Web Design – Web Circle” (note for WordPress sites you can do this with YOAST see below). Don’t put too many words in the title but if you are optimising for a few keywords, it’s ok to include a few keywords in there just remember that humans read it in the search engine results and at the top of the browser so don’t spam it with junk.
2. Ensure the page addresses (URLs) are search engine friendly (in WordPress you can turn on custom permalinks for this – see below). If your page address is something like www.domain.com?pageid=5 then you need some help from your web developer to install an SEO friendly URL plugin.
3. Make sure the homepage has at least 400-500 words of content. Having only a sentence or two on the homepage is a bad idea but you don’t need pages and pages of stuff, particularly if you are just chasing one keyword. Make sure your content mentions your keyword (see below) ideally up towards the start.
4. Modify the following site elements to reflect the keywords you are targeting (these are roughly in order of importance):

• Title (as discussed above)
• H1 (this is the main visible heading on the page, it needs to be within the HTML tag H1 and needs to be up the top)
• H2 (these are secondary level headings. It’s also commonly accepted that H3 and H4 tags include keywords but often pages don’t go down to that many levels)
• First hundred words of the main body text
• Bold or Italicise the main keywords for emphasis but not to the point that it becomes ugly to humans
• All image alt and title tags (usually use “keyword – image name”)
• Meta description – Try to keep it 12 – 20 words and generally only mention the keyword once. This is often displayed in the results in Google so keep this as a well written piece of text for humans)
• Keywords meta tag – This isn’t used a whole lot but it’s not a bad idea to include the keywords in here that you are optimising for – even just to remind yourself!

Footer changes – you might want to add keywords to the footer and if you are optimising the homepage for your main keyword then you might link back to the homepage via a keyword link in the footer. This really depends on the structure of the site.

There is also a school of thought that suggests that having the odd external link (say to Wikipedia) is not a bad idea to prove to Google that you aren’t afraid to link to valuable resources off-page (which good content sites will do).

Keyword density isn’t hugely important these days but it’s not a bad idea to use a tool like http://www.keyworddensity.com to check to see how often you are using a keyword. Generally a density of 2-5% is considered ok, but don’t overdue it.

A word about content quality

Google is getting better and better at determining the quality of the content on your site (and it considers in ranking your site). Creating great content needs more attention than I can give it in this post but as a general rule, while looking at on-page optimisation you need to make sure the site is filled with good quality, well written content (no spelling mistakes, grammatical errors etc). Using multi-media (images, video) well is another indicator of high quality website content so all of this is important and must be considered as part of on page SEO.

Specific steps for running WordPress

There are also a few specific things we do for clients running WordPress that relate to on page SEO. These are:

1. Install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and set the main page title to the Keyword – business name. For example “Website Design – A Website Designer”. YOAST will deal with a lot of the above including titles, meta tags, sitemap etc.
2. In Settings / Permalinks select ‘Custom’ and put in a custom structure for the URLs. I generally use /%category%/%postname%/ which will put the category of your post if there is one as the first ‘folder’ in your URL and the name for the second. See the URL in the address bar up the top of this post so you can see this in action.

 Not running WordPress?

If you aren’t running WordPress but you are running some sort of content management system (CMS) like Joomla! it’s a good idea to do the following.

1. Add a sitemap extension that automatically generates a sitemap.
2. Add an extension that enables search engine friendly URLs.
3. Ensure sub-pages have titles (remember up the top of the window) that are derived from the actual content on the page – it’s a very bad idea to have the same page title for every page in your site.

Hopefully these things will give you a start towards on-page optimisation. With great systems like WordPress freely available these days, doing this once is generally enough as each new post you add will automatically be optimised (i.e. the title will be set automatically, as will the URL, meta tags, H1 etc).

So I usually think of on page SEO as something you do once for a main keyword for the homepage and something you set up to allow the website to do itself as content is added down the track.