On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization - On-page optimization refers to search engine optimization of individual Web pages so that they are ranked well in search engines for specific keywords. The goal of optimization is to make a page rank number 1 or close to number 1 in results retrieved for a specific search or searches. Off-page optimization generally refers to getting links to a Web site. The terms are useful but may encourage a somewhat incorrect approach to search engine optimization. There are really three sorts of optimization to be done: On-page optimization, Web site design optimization and external "off page" or more properly off - site optimization.

The diagram shows the place of on-page search engine optimization in Search Engine Optimization design:

on page search engine optimization

The diagram reminds you that in addition to on-page optimization factors and Off Page Optimization factors, which are usually taken to mean links from other people's websites, there is a third group of factors that relate to Website SEO design.

How to do On-Page Optimization

On page optimization begins with correct choice of keywords to place the page in a promising niche. Of course, the page must have useful content and should link to authoritative and relevant sources off the site.

The most important optimization factors:

Keyword - Select one word or phrase that is the number 1 keyword of your page. Unless you are Wikipedia or Yahoo! or some other large site, you aren't going to be able to optimize for more than one keyword, especially at first, though you can optimize for general factors. Choose a relatively popular search phrase, make sure you have the most popular spelling for it, and choose phrase for which search engines retrieve relatively few pages. Your niche also depends on the authority of your Web site. If you have 10 million pages and 200 million links to your Web site, you can optimize for the most common and popular search terms. If you have 100 pages in a new Web site, it will be a long time before a page about sex, maps or automobiles will be number 1.

File Name - Use the keyword in the file name of that page. Avoid very long URLs - widgets.com/blue_widgets.htm is better than widgets.com/catalog/products/2008/blue_wigdets.htm

Content - Put at least 500 words and preferably much much more of original content on that page. There is no optimum "page size" - the more the better. Look at the #1 listings for many pages - the files are often larger than 100Kbytes. (see Optimum Page Size Superstition) Keyword density in the page should be about 5% including stop words (stop words are common words such as and, or, if, that may not be counted by search engines.

Duplicate Content - Do not make a whole Web site or base major pages on copied pages (duplicate content) or "scrape" content as these will often be downgraded by search engines or put in Supplementary listings. Really obvious "ripoff" pages and sites may be flagged as spam. However, you can add value to duplicate content and use it either as a major part of your site or as additional pages to increase your Web presence. Examples of useful duplicate content:

Documents with introductions - Standards that are relevant to your industry may be listed in a dozen places, but if you add an introduction to the standard that deciphers it for the lay person, you are adding value, sometime a lot of value and that page can be top listed for the document in question.
Maps with explanatory text - There are a lot of public domain maps around for the asking. If you put such a map on a page with some text explaining it, and optimize the map for quick download, it may become an attractive "link bait" page.
Journal articles with your comments - These are often the basis of Web logs.
Quotes, Poems and Jokes - Some public domain materials such as poems, quotes, the bible are not considered "duplicate content." If you add some text about the quote or poem that explains the context and tells something about the poem or author, it has a better chance of getting a high listing and provides a service to your readers. I have also had moderate success with humor pages, as long as they are not the major content of the Web site.

Do not violate copyright laws!

Placement of text - The title of the page in the banner at the top that visitors see should be the keyword phrase, and it should be an <H1> </H1> header:

<H1>On-Page Optimization</H1>

There must be no other <H1> header on the page. The keyword should appear in the top left column if you have one, and many people believe it should appear again at the bottom of the page. Check this page and its source to see how I think it should be done.

Header Tags and Metatags - In the <Head> section of the html code, the first line should be the <TITLE> and it should contain your keyword - one and only one keyword as a rule:

<TITLE>On Page Optimization</TITLE>

The next line should be the description metatag, which should repeat the keyword, explain a bit about it and also provide variant spellings. The description is important not only for search engine spiders. It is shown to people who view the listing in search engines. It should tell what the page is about in a way that is likely to get people to click on that link. For example:

The next line should be the keywords metatag. This tag is evidently not used by Google, or it may be treated as regular text. Other search engines may use it. The keywords tag should include the main keyword of the page, and synonyms and misspellings and variants that might be part of the long tail of less frequent keywords that will get you higher listings for those words and draw visitors to your site.

<META name="keywords" content="On-page optimisation, opitimization, Keywords, definition, on-page optimization factors, Website optimization, Web page design"

Title attribute in links - The title attribute in links, should be used to tell the search engine spider what the link is about if that isn't obvious from the anchor text in the link. For example:

<a title ="Communist Subversion Strategy" href="http://somesite.info/what_is_to_be_done">V.I. Lenin, "What is to be done?"</a>

Images - If you have images on the page, they should preferably have file names that include the keyword, and they should be linked with full path, absolute links, and they should have an "alt" tag or attribute that describes the image, including the keyword in the text. Example:

<a alt="Nazi Leader - Adolph (Adolf) Hitler" href="http://somesite.com/hitler.htm">Hitler</a>

The tag tells the search engine that the link is about a Nazi, which is important if your page is about Nazism, and gives the full name of the leader in variant spellings.

Minimally correct html code - Search engine spiders can read non-standard HTML code, sometimes even if it is very bad. They can also read code from other file types. But if the code is really hopeless, the search engines may read it incorrectly and downgrade your page. Check that the page has at least the following structure:

Check that every tag with an opening bracket "<" also has a closing bracket ">" and that every open quote is matched by a close quote.

Use a Googlebot (the Google spider) simulator to make sure that the entire page can be read and that there is no "junk code" that stops the spider. This can really happen!

Clean Code - As much as possible, remove "junk" such as unnecessary styles or <FONT> tags or language codes that may be inserted by Dreamweaver, Web site designer and similar HTML editing tools. How do you know if code is unnecessary? For example <FONT FACE = "ARIAL"></FONT> is junk code, because the attribute is cancelled without affecting any text. Some tools can produce 10 lines of these codes with no text at all if you are not careful. Documents copied from Word often contain a lot of style references and other code that has no effect on appearance of the page. A page should be at least 65% text - more is better.

Non-HTML pages and blogs - Many of these hints do not apply to Word documents, PDF files, Powerpoint presentations and other documents that can be registered in search engines. At least, the content, titles and file names of such documents should be consistent with optimization. Never use a non-html file if you can put an html file on the Web. If you use non-html files, and want them to be visible in search engines, link them to an HTML page that describes the content of the PDF or presentation or document in the greatest possible detail. Web log pages should concentrate on correct titles and content. The titles should have an <H1> attribute and the title information should be in the <TITLE> tag, description and keywords for that page, using the page title (or article title) variable of the Web log.

Avoid Javascript and Flash. If you need to have this code, put it in a separate file and refer to it from the page. Put styles in a separate style sheet.

Check competitor pages that use the same keyword - Using a tool or even eyeballing it, look at the top pages retrieved by Google and Yahoo for a given keyword. If there are millions of Web pages for this keyword, chances are that the top page retrieved by the search engines are those that are best optimized. Look especially at pages from small Websites that are retrieved among the top results, because you know they are not there because of website authority. Ignore pages from larger sites because those pages may be listed at the top because of off page optimization factors.

What not to do - Here are some don'ts:

Never change a file name or domain name after the page or Website has been indexed and is getting visitors. You lose your entire investment of time in search engine optimization.
Don't make the entire page or most of it, an image, especially if it is the main page. Web pages must have text.
Avoid Black Hat SEO - nefarious practices may work for a while, but they can get you banned.
Avoid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Superstitions
See also: Website design pitfalls.

On Page Optimization Tradeoffs

There are inevitably some tradeoffs in optimization. If you use the title "On page Optimization Factors" your page might have a page chance to be well positioned for visitors searching for [optimization factors], but inclusion of the word "factors" may lower the position of the page in search engine results for [on page optimization]. The same applies to using different variations of keywords or trying to optimize for several keywords. Over optimization - using an unnaturally high percentage of keywords in the text might be viewed by search engines as "spamming."

A more general problem in Website design is to balance what search engine spiders "like" to see versus what users and customers expect. The customer may need to use their company name in the domain name, even though the name doesn't have any semantic relation to what they are selling. The customer may want a Javascript drop-down menu because everyone else has one at their business site, and you cannot always convince them that such menus are bad for search engine optimization. The customer may want a graphic banner at the top of the page, though the best thing to put there is a text title that is the keyword of that page. You can work around these issues with a bit of ingenuity, but you need to be aware of the problem.

Think like a Search Engine for on page optimization

At one level, you need to remember that search engine spiders are generally very "stupid" machines and will take you quite literally. For example, at one time I used to link to articles from the front page of a Website with the keyword "more." Google Webmaster Central analyzed such pages and decided that the major keyword on the page is "more."

At the same time, you have to try to understand that search engines are generally interested in evading optimization. They want to see, or claim they want to see, what the page is really about and how many other Web sites really like it. They will hopefully get better and better at seeing what pages are really about, so they will understand that "more" is irrelevant, and that "Communism" and "Communist" are about the same thing, while "Communitarian" and "Community" are about something else. They are not always that smart however.

What On page Optimization is not

A page is a page is a page. Therefore, the age of the Website or its size or any other factors extraneous to that page are not relevant to on page optimization. If the page is moved to a different Web site, its on-page optimization remains precisely the same. If someone tells you that such factors as age of the Web site are important in on page optimization, they haven't though about the problem very well.

Unknown factors in On-Page Optimization

We do not know, and search engine companies do not tell us if they look at whole words only, to what extent they do stemming, and whether density of keywords in a page is measured according to number of letters or number of words. Which is better "BlueWidgets.htm" or "blue_widgets.htm" ? If I write a page about Widgets, do "widgetization" and "widgetism" "count" as much as "widgets" in optimizing for keyword "widgets." Are search engines case sensitive? Google isn't, some others might be. Is [widgets] treated the same as [widget] ? Some of these questions can be answered simply by running the query. In over cases, there is no way to know. If you wrote [blue widgets, green widgets, big widgets] in the keywords tag, is that considered "keyword stuffing" or "Spamming" for keyword [widgets]?

Practical On Page Optimization

Good on-page optimization guides tell you to do (or not do) all of the above, and to have content reviews and the like. However, a Website may have 20,000 or 30,000 pages. If you are using a good Content Management system, some of the technical aspects are taken care of in any case, but there really is not time to try to optimize the content of 30,000 pages. You need to concentrate on a few major pages or large articles that are portals or Doorway Pages (in the good sense) to the rest of the site. These pages should be optimized for their keywords and have a lot of good content and should be checked in various tools.

Here is a different view that incorporates some good advice, and some advice that may be "superstitions:"

http://www.abcseo.com/seo-book/on-page-factors.htm

Ami Isseroff

October 2, 2008

Note - Definitions of Search Engine Optimization terms are based on inferences from common usage and definitions given by other sources. Conclusions about search engine behavior are based on understanding of the behavior of the most popular search engines. Both are subject to error or may change. Search engine company management may define or use a term or set or change any policy in any way they see fit, and may make these definitions and specifications public or not. These decisions and definitions are beyond our control.

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