5-Step On Page Optimization – The Must Know SEO Basics

Since internet is expanding the competition is higher by the minute, the only way to get something out of your online venture is to optimize your site for organic traffic and try to reap the benefits that come with SEO. On page optimization is just the first part of SEO, but the most important one, if your website is not optimized then all of your off page efforts might be in vain. We need more than just good content; although content is the most important thing, we all need some edge to get that good content to the top. You need to remember, on page SEO is the first and most important step in SEO implementation, it will ensure that your site has great usability and readability as well as give you a good base for your later SEO implementation.

The title tag of a website is one of the most important parts of optimizing a website, and in my book it should be the first thing to do when you tackle the on page optimization. Your title should be short, up to 55 characters; it should be descriptive as possible telling your visitors everything about your website. When you look at the listings from the SERP, the first thing that gets your attention is the title tag, so you can see how important it is. So, you have two tasks in front of you, making the title appealing for the users and making it appealing enough for the search engines, let’s see how to do that.

What should you include in the title of your website, the first and most important thing to include is the business name or the website’s name. If you have a brand that you want to promote this is essential, you need to learn how to promote your website as any other business. The second thing you need to put in are you keywords. Pick the top keyword you are targeting or two and place them in your title tag. So, if you are an SEO firm your title should be something like: Practical SEO – Affordable SEO Services. You can go up to 55 characters no worries; remember to include the business name and the keyword in your title.

We all know that Google doesn’t pay too much attention to meta tags and meta description any more, but there is still importance in having a good meta description. Meta description is your advertisement; it is a brief description of what your website is all about. Some people will look at this description and based on that they will decide to visit your site, if it is written in a proper format, or if it something out of the yellow pages they might skip it and never come back. Make sure that your website meta description has what your visitors want to know, offer and promote your services through your meta description. If your website is about baby clothes than add something like “baby clothes giveaway, buy one get one for free.” Or whatever promotion your website offers.  Also be sure to include a few relevant keywords in your meta description, but don’t stuff your description with them, you won’t gain much by doing that.

Besides meta tags a very important aspect of on page optimization are HTML tags, like header tags, strong, italic etc. This is not only good for the search engines, but by highlighting the important parts of your content you are increasing the chance that the visitor will read that part as he will find the bolded text to be of greater importance. H1 tags are used for the most important title on the page, don’t play around with this and don’t overuse the tags. H2 and H3 tags are usually used for post titles and other important section of a web page. One of the reasons why we use header tags is to separate important aspects of the content, like here, each of the subheadings separates different parts of the content and gives the reader the opportunity to read what is of interest to him. Other things to use are bold or strong text styles or italic, you can bold your keywords, which will give them some importance, but don’t overdo it.

This is the part that most web owners get wrong, the either stuff their pages with keywords or don’t implement keywords at all, and the biggest mistake of most people is that they don’t target the right keywords for their website. Research is the mother of writing high quality content, so without proper research you can’t write something good and you can’t find a good keyword. You can use Google Adwords Tool or SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool, I wouldn’t suggest paying versions, there is a free alternative to everything. Keyword density is not as important is it was, so stuffing your pages can only do you harm, but still you need to have some keyword density in order for the search engines to determine the relevancy of your page. I suggest going between 1% and 3%, personally I never go above 2%, but 3% can’t hurt you at all. In my experience I have found that keyword density of 1% with plenty of synonyms has a far greater effect than the overall keyword density, of course you need to place keywords in the strategic places to get the most out of them. So like we already said, keyword in the title of the page, few keywords in the description, title of the post or article, in the beginning of the article, few keywords sprinkled in the body and two repetitions in the last paragraph will do. Of course, for better exposure and better conversion you want to target long tail keywords. You can rank for them easier and they are more likely to attract customers that will convert.

Link optimization is done to ensure the overall optimization of your link structure which will lead to better navigation and better understanding of the content; it will also give importance to pages you link to through anchor text implementation. Targeted anchor text is the most important part of linking, the anchor text provides value for the link, if you are linking to a music shop website a good anchor text would be “free music download”, a “click here” or “read more” anchor text doesn’t provide relevance and it’s a waste of the link. Make sure that your websites and your pages don’t have too many outbound links from the pages, whether they are linking to your internal pages or to some other website. That might make the search engines see your page as a link farm. Also, the fewer outbound links you have the more powerful the link will be.

Image optimization is one of the things most websites fail to do. I recently started working for a client whose website simply needs to have images on the home pages, not only does he lack those images, but his top 3 competitors have a colorful images on the home page that are well optimized and relevantly filled with ALT tags. A user can see the image and interpret the meaning, but search engines can’t, that is why we need to optimize images as well. Alt tag is one of the most important parts of optimizing an image, this is the text that will be seen by the search engines and also the text a user will get when he hovers over an image, if the image fails to show for some reason the ALT text will appear on the page. Also, the file names of your images shouldn’t be DSC42645.png, make the names meaningful, use the keyword like you should use for the ALT text, make the name of the image to be something like seo-prinicples.jpg. The same goes for image title and when you are linking an image, use your keywords.

These are 5 simple on page optimization steps that will get your website far greater chances of succeeding in the online world. You must remember that failing to do this will greatly diminish your chances for success. Optimizing your website is a must in the competitive market that we are in. And without on page optimization your further SEO efforts will not be so fruitful. Sorry for the long post, but trust me when I tell you, if you implement what is written here your website will be on the road to success.