On-Page SEO factors: ( On-Page SEO Related )
When I put up my first web site, I believed that Google would naturally bump me up into its rankings as long as I used certain phrases on my site and optimized the on-page factors. I started off by bolding terms like work from home and make money online, thinking that Google would think I was cool and rank me really high.
Of course, we all (hopefully) know that that isnt the case. However, there has been discussion in this forum concerning meta tags; let me set the record straight THEY DONT MATTER. Heck, I rarely use meta tags in my sites unless I want the description to be something very specific. The keywords meta tag means absolutely nothing nowadays, while the description meta tag serves only to choose what displays as an excerpt when your site is ranked.
On page factors ARE important however. Heres a break down of what a well optimized site would have:
- < h1 > tag – This is your header. Only use this once or twice on the page.
- < title > tag I recommend using your keyword twice in your title. Use something like this format: (Keyword) How I (Keyword) Quickly So if your keyword is How to Jump Higher, you could use: How to Jump Higher The Quickest Way to Learn How to Jump Higher
- < alt > – You use the alt tag when describing a picture. Having your images optimized for the search engines helps your overall on-page optimization.
- Keyword density of 2%. This means that you use your keyword (or a variation of it) twice for every hundred words that you have on your page. If youve got 1000 words, you should have your keyword on the page about twenty times.
- Bold the keyword at the beginning and at the end of your page. What I usually do is bold it the first time that its used (preferably in the first sentence) and in the footer. In the footer, Ill have the copyright symbol followed by my keyword, and I bold it there.
While all of this is well and good, it only makes up about 20% of the SEO process. The other 80% is made up of your sites structure and the links that you get to them.
A bit about site structure: Google likes to see that your site is well organized. You dont need to freak out about this, but you should have relevant pages linking to one another, and they should silo out. In other words, you should have a sub-page that links to other relevant pages, and irrelevant pages should not link to one another.
With that in mind, Google sees no difference between an internal link and an external link, which means that your most relevant pages can be good sources of link-love to one another. However, links from irrelevant pages do little to help your ranking.
Of course, the most important part of dominating in the search engines is by getting links to your site, and it is very important to focus on getting one-way links to your site. Google can easily see reciprocal and three-way linking structures, so it is best to focus only on one-way links. Remember that Google sees one-way links as a vote, and getting links from high PR sites is a more emphatic vote.
Instead of doing link exchanges, here are a few places to get quality one-way links to your site:
Directory Submissions: Classic and outdated, but they still work. However, you can usually only submit your index page and have one link to the site. Still, it helps with your main keyword.
Articles: My favorite and most used form of getting one-way links is from articles. The more you write, the more link love you get. I usually write and rewrite my articles to get unique content without having to be overly creative. Then I submit unique versions of my articles to different directories.
Social Bookmarks: I bookmark just about everything, but having links from Propeller, BuddyMarks, and StumbleUpon are all very high quality links that will get attention to your sites.
An even better strategy is to write good articles, submit them article directories, and then bookmark your articles. That way, the PR of your articles is elevated, which passes more link juice back to your money site.
Its important to remember that SEO is a long process, youre not going to rank overnight. But the payoff is far worth the effort. Once youre ranked for your key terms, you have an endless source of free traffic coming to your sites.
On-Page Structure:
As specified in Part One, I believe on-page optimization (that is, h1 tags, title tags, image attributes/descriptions, bolded keyword in the footer, keyword density) to be important, but vastly inferior to the importance of link building.
One aspect of optimization that was brought up by a reader of Part One was having keywords in the domain. Heres my take:
For on-page optimization, having the keyword in the domain does very little for Google. It WILL help for other search engines, but not so much for Google. However, there are plenty of article directories and bookmarking sites that do not allow for anchor text. Therefore, having the keyword in your domain still allows you to get link love, even though you dont get to choose the anchor text. In other words, the URL is essentially the anchor text, which gives you at least some credit when your keyword shows up in the domain. Therefore, I believe you SHOULD attempt to have your keyword in your domain, even though it does little for the on-page optimization side of things.
Optimization, however, is different than your on-page structure, and the overall structure of your site can have a profound effect on your overall ranking. Heres why:
1) Google takes into account your internal links.
2) Google is strongly influenced by human activity and uses it as a factor. Put simply, if humans stay on your site longer than they stay on other sites, your ranking will increase.
Therefore, your sites structure does matter. And if your pages are optimized, then each external link that you acquire will become more powerful.
It makes sense, then, to optimize your sites structure for both humans and for robots. One way to do manipulate this, if you will, is by using a rel=nofollow tag. Heres how it works:
When you use this tag in your link, the search engines pass it over and dont count it as a vote. In other words, if I have 100 links pointing to my blog that say Ryan Moran, but all of the links have the rel=nofollow tag, then I will get zero points from Google. I may still get traffic, but no link love from Google.
If youve ever heard it said that you need to be careful when you make a comment on a blog because it might have nofollow, this is what they are referring to. Again, this is because a link with a nofollow tag will not pass along any credit.
However, you can use this tag on your site to your advantage to optimize your internal linking structure. Heres how:
In simple terms, the more links you have on a site, the less value each one has. In other words, if youve got links to your home page, five internal pages, your external link partners, an ‘about me’ section, some articles, and some miscellaneous external pages, the value of each link can get diluted pretty quickly.
This is especially true if you have a low-pagerank site. If your Google pagerank is 6, then youve got enough to spread around to more links, but if your rank is 1, then it can get used up very quickly.
But, you can minimize this by using the nofollow tag on links that are unnecessary. For example, your site navigation often exists so that humans can easily find pages on your site. However, the anchor text of the links does not represent what keywords are being targeted. Therefore, you can use the nofollow tag on your navigation to prevent them from using up your link juice.
To implement this tag, it looks like this:
< a rel=nofollow href=http://www.google.com >Anchor Text< /a >
If you use the nofollow tag on links that are not important, you can raise the effectiveness of each link. This does two things for you:
1) Allows you to keep links on your site that are made for HUMANS, without flooding your site with links that dilute the quality of each one.
2) Allows you to link internally to your site with maximum effectiveness.
For sake of reference, here are the pages that I will link to without the nofollow tag:
- Internal Pages that Im trying to get high in the search engines
- External links to high PR sites, like Wikipedia, that exist to raise my Quality Score or Google relevance (remember, Google likes to see that youve linked to outside authority sites).
- External links that are reciprocal or sold to another person.
In this way, you can optimize your site for humans (and increase the time that they spend on your website) while manipulating the internal linking structure for Google.
So, heres a recap of some main points:
- Internal linking matters
- Human activity matters
- Number of links matters
- You can minimize the number of links that Google sees by using a nofollow tag, thus increasing the validity of each internal link.
- Sites made for humans can be optimized for search engine spiders.
Objection: Those who frown at this model will suggest that Google will have a hard time indexing all the pages of the site. This is why I always have a link to the Sitemap on my page, which Google will index and crawl each link. Plus, I expect that external links to each of the deep pages will exist, as well, allowing for sites to be indexed.
Internal Linking:
Others disagree, but it is my opinion that Google sees an internal link the same as it sees an external link. For example, when a story obtains first-page listing on Digg, it will likely rank well on Google, even if it has no external links. Therefore, internal links are often overlooked and very powerful, given that they are relevant and of high quality (just like external links).
My sites are usually divided into what I call hubs. If I have a hub about muscle building, then the main page of it will link out to the reviews of muscle building products. A link from a page about muscle building will have a very targeted link to a page about Vince Delmonte Fitness Review. At the same time, a link from my hub about Hoodia weight loss will be much less relevant.
In other words, your internal linking structure should follow the same rules as your external factors: link to pages that are relevant.
Internal linking is especially effective in a strategy that I call the Competition Crippler. This is a guaranteed way to really tick off your customers, and it involves getting a double listing on the search engines. Heres how it works:
Once you are on the first page of Google for any term, it is very easy to get a second listing on the same page. Therefore, you can have spots #1 and #2 instead of just one of them. Sometimes, a second page that ranks on page #5 will leap to page #1 with this technique. This works well for me, because Im often able to knock a competitor below the fold when I have two listings on the same page.
It is very easy to do this if you have an efficient internal linking structure. Once youre on the first page of Google, link THAT page to a secondary page on your website that is at least partly optimized for the SAME term.
If your primary page is on the first page of Google, then it can be assumed that Google sees it as authoritative on the topic. Therefore, if you link it to a secondary page, it is a very, VERY powerful link for the search term. As a result, you can achieve a double listing on the front page without having to do much extra SEO.
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