Entry level SEO Step #2 – On-page optimization

As an example I used the page WordPress services on Build Your Website as an example. I’ve just created that page now and will complete it as I write each aspect of this series. So for our example, imagine you are a company offering WordPress services and customisation and want to draw people in Auckland and anywhere in New Zealand who may be interested in that. Today is the 4th of August 2012 and as I just created that page, it’ll take a while to get up in the search results. I’ll update on it’s progress as we continue.

{I use Market Samurai to track results,  ”Wordpress services Auckland” for my business,  it is ranking between #1 and #3 for the last few months (Oct to Dec 2012). All that was necessary was to use on page optimisation because the competition for this keyword phrase is low. I am not ranking well for “wordpress website design auckland ”. If I wanted to rank well for that I might write another page on this topic or use some other strategies to rank for that key word phrase} Below is some more details about on page optimization.

This post is part of a short series entitled Entry Level SEO to show small business owners a few basic steps they can do to improve their rankings on the search engines.

By now we have already done our keyword research and decided that we want to optimize for “WordPress services Auckland”, “WordPress services nz”, “WordPress customisation Auckland” and “WordPress customisation nz”.

On-page optimization is the first step in telling Google what the page is about. Why do we want to tell Google anything? Because if someone searches on Google for a specific topic that we deal with on that page, then we want Google to show our page as one of the options (search results) that the searcher can visit to find the information they need.

Here I’ll cover some of the most important aspects of on-page optimization. I won’t be going into how you apply each of these points into a page at this stage, but if you used Yoast’s SEO plugin you will find it is not too hard to do.

The title tag

The title tag is most probably the most important on-page optimization factor. Google places a lot of emphasis on the title tag, so it is important to get it right.

• Describe your page content – Google does not like it if the title and actual content on the page don’t match
• Place your key phrase as far left as possible in the title
• Don’t make it too long – aim for less than 60 characters
• Choose a unique Title for every page on your site.
• You DON’T have to fit all your key phrases into the title tag, choose the most important one or maybe two
• If you’re a local business, do consider mentioning your city or country in the title tag.
• Make sense to humans. Don’t just stuff keywords in there. The title tag appears in search engines and if someone links to your page (from their blog, Twitter or Facebook page) they will most probably link using the same title that you used, but they also don’t want to spam their readers with a bunch of keywords.

In our example I’ve chosen “WordPress services in nz offering customisation and support”. It’s a bit verbose, but we’ve got a few of our keywords in there, WordPress services and “nz” to the left so it has high importance and it makes sense for the human reader.

The page’s URL

The URL is also a relatively important part of the on-page optimization factors.

• Choose the most important key phrase as part of your page URL.
• Similar to the title tag, don’t spam the search engines or your visitors with excessively long URLs.
• Where possible, avoid using dynamic URLs and use static URLs instead

A dynamic URL will be something like this

http://www.yourdomain.com?pageid=1

Instead, a static URL will be

http://www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/wordpress-services-nz/

META Description

The meta description, as the name suggests, is a description of your page. Again, this is visible to human readers (on many search engines it is displayed as a short paragraph below you page’s title in search results), so use full, meaningful sentences and try to use some of your key phrases within those sentences.

<meta name=”description” content=”WordPress services in Auckland, NZ. We offer WordPress customisation services and support.” />

Our description is a bit short and you could place a little more in there if you wish.

 Images

At least one image on your page is important to make good use of on-page optimization techniques. Google looks at both the alt tag of the image and the filename of the image uses those to further determine the keywords of a page.

As a secondary point, Google uses images slightly differently to the rest of the page. If they’re indexed properly, your images may show up in Google’s image search results, which could be an completely seperate source of traffic to your site.

So the image on our example page has some keywords in the filename (the src=”" portion) as well as in the alt tag (alt=”" portion).

<img src=”wordpress-customisation-services-nz.png” alt=”Wordpress Customisation Services” />

Keyword usage

The last optimization technique we’ll look at is keyword usage across the page.There’s been various opinions about keyword density (the number of times your keyword/phrase appears on the site as a percentage of the total words on the page). Please don’t get caught up in that! Aim to repeat your key phrase two to three times for a short to medium length page and more for a longer page (up to 5-6 times).
In general, write what you want to say to your customers in plain English and don’t worry about how many times you repeat the key phrase. Once you’re finished, count how many times you have used the phrase. If it is less than twice , then try to change your wording slightly to use the key phrase that you’re optimising for once or twice more. If you’ve used the phrase more than 4 times, then consider how long the page is and maybe try to use different words to convey the same message.

When counting the keyword usage, don’t count the H1-H6 heading tags or image alt=”" tags. Only count the use of the key phrases in your plain paragraphs on the page.

Split up and alternate your key phrases

Finally, you should aim to use individual words of your key phrase in other places in your text. So for example, our example page is optimised for “WordPress services Auckland” and “WordPress customisation NZ”, so I will try to use the individual words in those phrases in different places in my text.  For example, the sentence “Whether you want to start a new WordPress site or blog or need some customisation of an existing site, we can help.” uses both WordPress and customisation, but not directly after each other.

Summary

That’s it, if you’ve done the above steps, then your page should be pretty well optimised for the search engines. Let’s summarise the places to use key phrases:

• Page Title
• Page URL
• Meta Description
• H1 header tag
• Image alt tags
• Image file name
• Bold and italic text
• In plain text throughout your page

Let us do it for you:

This stuff is pretty straight forward, but it takes time to do. If you want a website with on-page optimisation already built into the pages, consider using our custom website package or contact us to discuss.