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A Beginner's Guide To On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is comprised of several facets, and new facets are being added often as the search algorithms get more advanced and smarter. As new layers of complexity get added to these algoritms, the older factets often get forgotten or talked about less because they are not the hot topics any more. But the fact is that often those older facets are still important to the core strategy, and a newcomer entering the web arena who discounts them may have a harder time succeeding. The facets of Search Engine Optimization right now are:

• On-page optimization: was most important in the early days of search (along with meta-tags) but has waned in importance over the years as other factors for ranking have been introduced. However, on-page optimization is still central to any SEO strategy, especially for long-tail searches (the abundance of lower competition search phrases and their frequency of searches based on power laws), as noted here.


• Link Building: Google made the link the currency of the web by factoring it so heavily into their pagerank algorithm. After link buying became widespread via link brokers, paid reviews and paid directories, Google has steadily reduced the importance of links alone. Links are still an indication of authority, however, and quality and diversity of links and link text are still important trust/authority indicators, moreso than just total number of backlinks.


• Trust/Authority Ranking?: Factors to validate a site's authority, such as who links to them, age of the domain, and temporal analysis of content creation and link building are thought to be weighed more heavily now, making social marketing a very effective marketing and SEO strategy currently.

Start with the basics and make sure you're doing things right for on-page optimization. On-page optimization alone will not earn you great rankings for any competitive keywords, but doing it properly means that you're not handicapping yourself down the road, and it can get you ranked for some low-competition long-tail phrases that accumulate over time to become a significant source of traffic. On-page optimization also cascades over to your link building campaign, since poorly crafted titles or headings can sabotage your efforts to build quality links from social media and other bloggers. On-page optimization is often overlooked these days, as it is not the controlling factor to get ranked on the search engines, but it is, in fact, an important foundation that should not be overlooked or neglected. On-page optimization should not drive content creation to the detriment of making content interesting for human consumption, but should be applied in an intelligent manner to make content work best for both humans and search engines.

On-Page Optimization Basics:

1. Domain name*. It's debatable, and may also depend on the type of site or service you are planning. Some will say a brandable domain name is more important than a keyword-filled name, but if you can get both at once, it will help your SEO campaign a lot in the long run, and can give it a definite boost in the early days of the site as well.
2. Title. The page's title is probably the single most important on-page factor to ranking well for search terms. Here are some tips on how to optimize your page titles:
   • Home page: Domain Name + tagline (designed to contain more relevant keywords) - E.g. "Sitename.com - your tagline here"
   • Content/Article Pages: Short Title + Site Name (if branding is desired or relevant keywords in site name) - E.g. "This is the article title (Sitename.com)"
   • If your site URL contains multiple words without dashes, separate them with a space for display. This lets them be recognized as separate words by the search engines.
3. Tagline. Place a well crafted tagline just under your site logo. Even if the tagline is plain text (not a heading, strong, emphasized, etc.), it seems to carry much weight in the proximity of your H1 tag and so high in the page's source. This tagline should also be used in the title of the home page. I have seen interesting search results where sites rank for various combinations of high-competition keyword phrases over time just because the tagline included a couple of important keywords that were not usually included verbatim in much of my other content.
4. Heading Tags
   • H1 may be your site name if it includes relevant keywords (then use H2 for the full article title)
   • H1 may be used for your main article title if the site name is not of significant SEO value.
   • Use subheadings (h2,h3,h4) for secondary groupings and to break up long articles into readable chunks. These heading tags all carry some additional SEO value over plain text or faux headings marked up with bold or strong tags or CSS alone.
5. Use CSS and image replacement techniques for design/page template elements to allow for proper structural (SEO friendly) markup of text, rather than using images directly in your HTML. E.g. The difference between using an H1 tag for your site logo vs an IMG tag could be significant.
6. Use a long headline and short headline/title for articles throughout your site. Small variations make the site look less search engine optimized, while creating slight variations in keywords used and targeted. In looking less intentionally optimized, having a differing title tag and article heading (h1 or h2, as the case may be) is the most important. The SEO value of a page title is high, but only up to around 160 characters. Using a separate, longer article headline allows you to fit some more important details in there while also making it differ from the exact title (short headline). Furthermore, you can vary where these two headlines are used as links: Use the full headline in RSS feeds, which often are auto-linked when displayed on other sites and feed readers. Use the short headline throughout your site to inter-link content via the main blog page and lists of popular and related articles. The short headline is also idea for creating URL slugs for search engine safe URLs.
7. Site architecture and friendly (Search Engine Safe) URLs. Naming subdirectories and pages using useful terminology (keywords) and SES URLs can have some impact on search rankings, as the URL is seen as a factor as well. Using SES URLs may not make or break an established site in search rankings, but can help an startup get more content indexed, as it has been said that Google's limits to how much dynamic content it will spider scale with the site's PageRank.
8. Meta-Description. Create a Meta-description tag for each page. For articles, this can be done by using the long headline or another field such as a summary. The Meta-description arguably may play little to no role in actual search rankings, but is often what is shown in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and then can make the difference between a click through to your site.
9. Inter-link related content. This helps people as well as search engines. Links from your own site are not worth as much in the eyes of the search engines as links from external sources, but linking related content on your own site can help the search engines makes sense of it (using both the link text and subject matter of the page linking to the content) as well as help search engines find your site's early content that may not have been indexed properly when the site was younger. A related articles list may be sufficient, but editorial/in-content links are typically seen as the best location for links, and this may be true for same-site links as well.
10. Diversify. Building and getting links that are diverse looks more natural and may help you more in the long run that a tightly controlled effort to target one or two phrases over and over. Diversifying the places where your content or keywords live may also help to some degree. Having a phrase as the alt-tag of an image may be helpful, as well as emphasised, strong or link text (but don't try to do them all, all the time or you'll ). After these points, you enter the realm of diminishing returns.
11. Further optimization may not be useful beyond these items above. The importance of keyword density has largely been dismissed in recent years and spending too much time on on-page optimization beyond these points or on the later points should probably be spent on content creation or other marketing efforts.

A good CMS will be able to accommodate many of these points out of the box. Some do not and many may require some customizing to get it right, however, which is why on-site optimization is important to get right from the start.

Keyword Research

On-Page Optimization does not happen in a void. Keyword research in essential for naming your site and creating a tagline, targeted content, headlines, links campaigns, etc. Content creation should not revolve around SEO, but keeping in mind your target keywords you're trying to rank for can help your rankings and getting targetted traffic instead of making the mistake of targetting less effective terms.

Content Creation For People

Let's not forget in all this talk of SEO and keywords that content creation should be done for people first. Writing attention grabbing headlines and titles is essential for enticing users to click through on your article from the SERPs, a feed reader or aggregator, your site's home page, or anywhere else your article may be linked using the title text. It is also a direct factor in how successful linking campaigns and social networking campaigns work for any given article. So while on-page optimization is an important baseline to work on, in the end, the content you're trying to get found should be written for people, and the social aspect of the web can take your SEO campaign to the next level. That requires great content and presentation.

Conclusion

On-page optimization is often overlooked in SEO circles' discussion because there are so many more cutting-edge SEO topics to discuss. On-page optimization has been discussed since the early days and has changed relatively little in search algorithms in recent years when compared to other aspects of those algorithms. However, on-page optimization and content creation itself are the very core of any SEO campaign and cascade down to other areas of your SEO campaign such as link building and leveraging social networking (which itself helps with link building).

Further Reading

• Google's SEO Starter Guide
• The Long Tail
• Anatomy of the Long Tail
• The Long Tail Demonstration
• Building SEO Momentum by Using A Consistent Site Structure
• SEOBook.com - I've been reading about SEO for many years, but Aaron's blog and (now discontinued) ebook have been an invaluable source of SEO information. Since changing focus, his blog has been regularly producing in-depth articles on various SEO, SEM, and web publishing topics.

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