On-Page Otimization
On page optimization is very important and once you’ve done your keyword research it should be the next step in SEO. There is no magic formula, and there is a lot of information out on the internet that is just plain wrong.
These are basic guidelines to follow and if you have to stray from them a bit to make your site more readable or user-friendly that’s fine. Your site making sense to human visitors comes first.
Title Tags
Title tags are the most important element of on page optimization. Including your keyword phrases in the title will help the search engines determine that your page is relevant to that phrase.
- Your title tag should contain your primary keyword phrase(s) for that page.
- Title tags should be kept to 65 characters or less.
- Think of your title tag like an ad headline.
- Every page on your site should have different Titles.
The image below is a screenshot from a search for Los Angeles real estate. Notice the words that were included in my search term are bold. When your title includes the searched phrase it will appear bold in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), this is important to draw attention to your listing and improve click through.
Meta Description Tags
Meta description tags are more important for click through than they are for rankings. If you look at the image above the black text displayed is from the meta description tag. If you don’t have a meta description tag on the page the search engines will generally grab a snippet of text from the page.
- Think of your description tag as a selling point to get a searcher to click through to your site.
- Include your target keywords where it makes sense.
- Description tags will only display about the first 150-165 characters in the SERPs.
Heading Tags & Text Styles
The bigger bold words above on this page are using heading tags. The html code for a heading tags are as follows:
Heading 1 - <h1> text of choice </h1>
Heading 2 - <h2> text of choice </h2>
Heading 3 - <h3> text of choice </h3>
Heading tags carry a little weight in the search engines but if this is a little to complicated dont’ worry and just skip it. If your using a visual editor you may not be able to create these tags. There may be an option to switch to the html editor where you can add html tags or there may be an option in your visual editor.
- You should have only one h1 tag and it should be reserved for your high priority keyword phrase.
- You can have as many h2 and below tags as you want.
- Don’t sacrifice usability to get your h-tags on the page.
- Use h-tags to draw attention to an area on your page.
Text styles such as bold, underline and italic can also give the words you use them on more weight but honestly it’s not going to make that much of a difference. Again your sites usability is much more important than getting an extra keyword on the page.
Page Content – Copy
When writing your page copy you need to be writing for human visitors. Fit keyword phrases in where it makes sense. You should have at least one occurrence of your primary keyword phrase on the page and if possible, in a heading tag. There may be a slight benefit of getting your keyword phrase toward the top of the page but don’t sacrifice readability.
- Fit your keywords in the copy where they make sense.
- Make sure it makes sense to human visitors.
Internal Link Optimization
You can optimize your internal links by using good anchor text. Anchor text or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.
You probably don’t want to link to your competitors website but linking to other websites that can benefit your users should not hurt you. And, you should try to keep these outbound links off your homepage. You don’t want to send people away before they find what they want.
- Use your keyword phrases in your link text.
- Don’t be afraid to link to other websites.