On Page SEO Optimization
June 27 2009
There are two type of Search Engine Optimization. On page and off page. Off page optimization is anything done separate from the site, i.e. article pr, social networking, linking and directory submissions. On page is where you refine your website to make the most of the advantages SEO can offer.
Title optimization is the most important element of on page optimization. It should be short but descriptive. It needs to tell visitors enough about your site as it is the first thing that is shown in the search engines. It should include your or your business name and few targeted keywords.
Next is meta tag optimization. Although these are nowhere near as important as they used to be, they take such little effort to do, it’s worth the effort. The meta description should contain your USP straight away. The USP is your Unique Selling Point. What makes you or your business different from the others. What kind of speciality do you offer and market yourself as offering. Whatever it is, include it here with a clever scattering of keywords. Depending on the type of business you are running, there is a school of thought that says it is useful to add your phone number in the description. The belief is that visitors who see a phone number in the SERP are more confident in the legitimacy of the site and the business itself.
HTML tags are another page element that need a little SEO attention. Your headers are considered important by Google at least. H1 tags should be used to define the site’s title or heading. H2 and H3 are used for sub titles, headings, post titles and other important sections of the site. Separating page content with headers enhances human readability as well as search engine.
Keyword optimization is the most used phrase of any SEO conversation. This takes some thought and planning before implementing to get the most out of it. The idea is to create website content that is readable and relevant while being populated with your target keywords. There are plenty of tools on the internet that can help you with keyword selection, but only good judgement or a good copywriter can weave them into your website copy so they don’t stand out.
It is important to not overdo the keywords. Even if you can create good quality content to hide them in, the search engines are believed to penalize website they think are ‘keyword stuffing’, i.e. just adding keywords to spoof the search engine.
Alt text is another important facet of any website. The search engine spiders can only read text. They simply don’t see images or video. So even if your site is content rich and is always updated, if you don’t add text to your media it won’t do you any good. Alt text is a method of describing the media on your web page. This does two things, one it tells any visitors that something relevant is missing of something happens to the media and two, the spiders can read it.
This is by no means an exhaustive analysis of on page optimization, there simply isn’t enough room to go through it all. It should be enough to give you a basic idea of how it all works, and encourage you to read further.
