7 Fundamentals of On-Page SEO
1. Meta page title
Arguably one of the most important factors of your on-page SEO, the meta page title is one of the first signals that search engines look at when they try to rank your page.
A good meta page title should be kept to 70-75 characters long, and should include 2-3 keyword phrases (a good keyword phrase is generally 3-4 words long), with little to no keyword repetition.
Since your home page has a tendency to be the most linked to, use that space to optimize for highly competitive but lucrative keyword phrases. You can use your interior pages to optimize for more focused long-tail terms.
2. Optimized copy
While this may be becoming less important as Google and others advance their search algorithms, it's still important to write copy with keywords in mind.
But don't go overboard!
While you do want to include target keyword phrases several times within your body copy, remember that the primary target for your content is people, not the search engines. Above all else, make sure your copy is well written. You'll get more conversions from persuasive, informative content then keyword saturated search fodder.
3. Optimized images
Also not a hugely important factor, but optimizing your images can be a great, low involvement way to squeeze a little more SEO juice out of your on-page efforts.
Optimizing your images is easy.
- Keep your image size low.
- Use keywords in your image filename (keyword.jpg).
- Use keywords in your alt tags (alt="keyword text").
- Use keywords in your title tags (title="keyword text").
4. Internal linking structure
Many people think that when it comes to links, the only way you can optimize is through 3rd party backlinks. While 3rd party backlinks are an important part of SEO, there's still opportunity to gain ground by optimizing your internal site links.
Optimize your internal site links by:
- Using optimized anchor text for your navigational items. For example, instead of using the text "products" for your products page menu link, use something me descriptive, like "blue products".
- Find opportunities to link to other pages on your site within the body copy of service page and blog style content.
Remember, don't go overboard with this. It can look spumy to search engines and to site visitors if you go overboard.
5. Site speed
Back in April of this year, Google made the official announcement that it was using site speed as a ranking criteria for organic search. They even went so far as to release a module for their Webmaster tools platform that would allow you to track site speed.
Through our own tests, we've found that not only does improving site performance increase your keyword rankings, but it has desirable behavioral effects as well. Our speed improvements resulted in a major reduction in our site's bounce rate.
There are many ways that you can optimize your site speed, including some very technical server-side enhancements, but here are some places to start:
- Keep small image file sizes.
- Don't go overboard with heavy flash and graphic elements that take a long time to load.
- Use Google's Asynchronous tracking code for analytics.
- Don't skimp on your hosting - go with someone good.
- Move on-page CSS and javascript to external include files.
- Work to reduce code bloat.
6. Quality code
A lot of having quality code goes back to some of the points we discussed in optimizing your site speed. Having quality code can not only impact your site speed, but it also makes it much easier for search engine robots to crawl your site. As a general rule of thumb in SEO, the easier you make it for search engine robots to figure out what your site is about, the better you'll rank.
7. Original dynamic content
Key word here is original. The search engines, and Google in particular, love to see a website that frequently updates with quality, original content. This keeps the spiders coming back to crawl your site frequently, and gives you more opportunities for internal linking, among many other benefits.
If you don't have the resources to support a regular blog, at least work to get something dynamic on the home page, which could come in the form of a 3rd party RSS feed, or your companies recent Tweets, Facebook updates, etc.
Using a Drupal website?
If so, then your on-page SEO efforts just got much simpler. Be sure to check out LevelTen's Drupal SEO Module, the Content Optimization Suite.
