You can talk to most SEO professionals and while their philosophies may differ on SEO, there’s few basic principles that most can agree on, but one is this: on-page SEO is important for your site. Now, I’m not going to go as far as saying that I think it’s the most important thing for ranking your site, but it’s certainly important.In basic terms proper on-page SEO is simply making sure the hierarchy of your site is clear, concise and directed at what you hope to accomplish. For example, if you want to rank for the term web marketing, your site would consist of content and words that are relevant to web marketing, not kitchen utensils. Sound pretty straightforward, right? Well, it is. Sort of.One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced with companies is trying to convince them that when it comes to on-page SEO, more is not always better. As a matter of fact, most of the time it makes things worse. When I conduct an on-page SEO audit, the first thing I focus on is copy on the site. Most of the time I find that companies have over-optimized for their keywords. In other words, they’ve broken one of the cardinal rules of Google which is “do not keyword stuff”. They’ve tried to fit every possible keyword that they’d like to rank for, in every single paragraph of every single page of their site. Ok, that’s a bit exaggerative. Perhaps not every paragraph, but certainly every page. BIG NO-NO.For most companies, optimizing one keyword per page is pretty impossible to do for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they generally have a million keywords and only a four page website. Ok, maybe not a four page website and a million keywords, but suffice it to say that the number of keywords that most would like to rank for far outweigh the number of pages of content on their site. And, the second and perhaps the most frustrating thing from an SEO perspective is that their SEO is an after-thought. They’ve spent thousands of dollars along with countless man hours on designing a site and, at the last minute, they’ve decided they’d like to throw in a bit of SEO, making it impossible to go back and optimize one keyword per page.In those cases where it’s impossible to optimize one keyword per page, I advise to pick one main keyword, and two other related keywords that would naturally occur in the course of “conversation” and utilize those within the copy. And, not as many times as you can, but rather in a natural way. The general rule of thumb I like to follow for content on a page is that the main keyword should appear three times: once in the opening copy of the page, once in the middle and once in closing. The other two “secondary keywords” should appear no more than two times each, positioning the keywords in the same manner. In the SEO world, we call this “keyword density”. If you’re writing average length paragraphs, the rule above should put you at 2-4% keyword density which, in my opinion, is ideal.In addition to properly crafted copy for on-page SEO, I also recommend utilizing available tags such as the title, h1, h2, and, particularly, those nifty little alt tags for images. Many put a great deal of emphasis on meta keyword tags and, frankly, Google doesn’t even utilize that particular tag as a key ranking factor and the reason is this: keyword stuffing. Companies and individuals alike were placing every possible keyword within that tag, helping their site rank for things it shouldn’t even rank for. Google got wise and changed their algorithm and now that tag is virtually useless. I do still include it, simply to complete the package, but I don’t put any value in it.When it comes to on-page SEO, you can do it right and you can do it really wrong. And, if you really want to do it right, I recommend consulting with a premier SEO company and knocking it out of the park. As I like to say, go big or go home.
You can talk to most SEO professionals and while their philosophies may differ on SEO, there’s few basic principles that most can agree on, but one is this: on-page SEO is important for your site. Now, I’m not going to go as far as saying that I think it’s the most important thing for ranking your site, but it’s certainly important.In basic terms proper on-page SEO is simply making sure the hierarchy of your site is clear, concise and directed at what you hope to accomplish. For example, if you want to rank for the term web marketing, your site would consist of content and words that are relevant to web marketing, not kitchen utensils. Sound pretty straightforward, right? Well, it is. Sort of.One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced with companies is trying to convince them that when it comes to on-page SEO, more is not always better. As a matter of fact, most of the time it makes things worse. When I conduct an on-page SEO audit, the first thing I focus on is copy on the site. Most of the time I find that companies have over-optimized for their keywords. In other words, they’ve broken one of the cardinal rules of Google which is “do not keyword stuff”. They’ve tried to fit every possible keyword that they’d like to rank for, in every single paragraph of every single page of their site. Ok, that’s a bit exaggerative. Perhaps not every paragraph, but certainly every page. BIG NO-NO.For most companies, optimizing one keyword per page is pretty impossible to do for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they generally have a million keywords and only a four page website. Ok, maybe not a four page website and a million keywords, but suffice it to say that the number of keywords that most would like to rank for far outweigh the number of pages of content on their site. And, the second and perhaps the most frustrating thing from an SEO perspective is that their SEO is an after-thought. They’ve spent thousands of dollars along with countless man hours on designing a site and, at the last minute, they’ve decided they’d like to throw in a bit of SEO, making it impossible to go back and optimize one keyword per page.In those cases where it’s impossible to optimize one keyword per page, I advise to pick one main keyword, and two other related keywords that would naturally occur in the course of “conversation” and utilize those within the copy. And, not as many times as you can, but rather in a natural way. The general rule of thumb I like to follow for content on a page is that the main keyword should appear three times: once in the opening copy of the page, once in the middle and once in closing. The other two “secondary keywords” should appear no more than two times each, positioning the keywords in the same manner. In the SEO world, we call this “keyword density”. If you’re writing average length paragraphs, the rule above should put you at 2-4% keyword density which, in my opinion, is ideal.In addition to properly crafted copy for on-page SEO, I also recommend utilizing available tags such as the title, h1, h2, and, particularly, those nifty little alt tags for images. Many put a great deal of emphasis on meta keyword tags and, frankly, Google doesn’t even utilize that particular tag as a key ranking factor and the reason is this: keyword stuffing. Companies and individuals alike were placing every possible keyword within that tag, helping their site rank for things it shouldn’t even rank for. Google got wise and changed their algorithm and now that tag is virtually useless. I do still include it, simply to complete the package, but I don’t put any value in it.When it comes to on-page SEO, you can do it right and you can do it really wrong. And, if you really want to do it right, I recommend consulting with a premier SEO company and knocking it out of the park. As I like to say, go big or go home.
