What Are On-Page Factors?

 

Getting a good ranking in a search engine hasn’t been the easiest thing for many. Search engines are getting more smarter & intelligent everyday, so now it takes more than just good content to top your competitors.

 

On-page optimization is one of the very first step of SEO which every webmaster should look into. It probably won’t even take you an hour to learn and implement some of these on-page optimization techniques. So why it is so important? – Well literally speaking, if you can do proper on-page optimization for your website you can not only rank well in a search engine but also can increase the overall readability of your website for your visitors.

 

Below are some of the most important on-page optimization techniques for you. You can implement some of these if not all to give your site a better exposure to the search engines as well as to increase your overall CTR (Click-Through-Rate) ratio!

The META Tag and International Search Engines

The rules of search engines when it comes to on page factors differ greatly., but the META tag has been a point of intrest since of late.

After Infoseek (Go.com) closed in 2000, the meta keywords tag was left with only two major supporters: AltaVista and Inktomi. Now Inktomi remains the only one, with AltaVista having dropped its support in July.

“In the past we have indexed the meta keywords tag but have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality. We do continue to look at this issue, and may re-include them if the perceived quality improves over time,” said Jon Glick, AltaVista’s director of internet search.

As for Inktomi, the search engine has no immediate plans to follow AltaVista’lead:

“The meta keywords value is just one of many factors in our ranking equation, and we’ve never given too much weight to it. That said, we will continue to use it as long as our relevance modeling shows that it adds value,” said Ken Norton, director of product marketing for Inktomi’web search division.

Therefore the Meta Tag is not as important as it used to be.

Title Optimization

A site’s title tag is by far the most important website optimization element. A title tag should be short but descriptive enough for your visitors to identify you and your business. Title tag is the first thing that is shown & indexed by the search engines. So naturally it is given a very high importance – out of thousands results that a searcher sees, your site’s title has to be appealing enough for him to want to find out more information. On the other hand, your title has to be appealing enough to the search engine in order to rank you above thousands of other similar websites like yours.

Important things to include in your title:

• Your Name/ Business Name / Site Name: This is very important for breading propose. If you feel that your customers may search you by your brand name than it’s also useful to put it somewhere in your title.
• Keywords: If you want to rank for a certain keywords it is always good to place some of them in your title tag. A Title tag represents the whole flavor & content of your website. So if you are selling pizza online you can include keywords like – order pizza, home delivery pizza etc in your title tag. Don’t staff too many keywords in your title. Write a title which is readable to humans & also good for the search engine. (e.g. Domino’s Pizza, Order Pizza Online for Delivery – Dominos.com)
• Include your 1-800 or other toll-free numbers: Some may not agree with me on this, but I think including your phone number in the title tag does help your visitors to take a direct action! It also makes your site look more professional and legit when it’s being displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Searchers are likely to ‘click’ on the result that has a phone number attached to it because in their unconscious mind, they will have a good impression on the authenticity of the business and the level of support. If you prefer not to include your number in the title tag, you can alternatively include it in your Meta Description which will give you almost the same benefits.

The KEYWORD Tag

 The KEYWORD tag used to be important for ranking. It’s not anymore, however, it’s best practice to include entries here as some search engines still pay some attention to them. Also there is evidence that the major search engines look for consistent entries across the tags.

 So in the keyword tags put the keywords (actually keyphrases) you discovered in your keyword analysis. Actually you need to restrict it to a maximum of 25 words. Also use lower case and separate each phrase by a comma and a space.

 Should you have the same keyword tag on each page?

 Ideally you should change the order of the phrases, and put the phase being optimised for at the beginning of the list. So in the example above the homepage is being optimised for ‘event management’, so this is the first phrase in the list.

 The DESCRIPTION Tag

 This is more important than the KEYWORD tag ( but less important than the TITLE tag).

Quite often this gets listed in the hitlist directly below the title so it will have an impact on whether people click through or not.

 For example:-

 Your Events, Manchester UK – Christmas party organisers

Christmas party organisers by Your Events uk, looking after your christmas

production, venue, catering and entertainment.

www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php – 14k – Cached – Similar pages

 This is the result of a google search for ‘christmas party organisers’. First line is the contents of the TITLE tag; the text below the content of the description tag. So ideally it needs to be a bit salesy – encouraging people to click through.

 Again – no longer than 25 words, and put the phrase being optimised for at the front of the description.

 The H1 Tag

 Unlike the other tags we’ve discussed the contents of the H1 tag appears as visible text on your web page.

 Its best practice to include a version of the title tag as the H1 tag.

 If your title tag says New Frontier SEO- Translations and Localisation Services’ The H1 tag could be something like “Quality Website Translation and International SEO Will Catapult Your Business Into The Global Marketplace”.

 That is, a bit more ‘call to action’ oriented. Essentially this has the affect of placing your keyphrase for the page being optimised for as a headline at the top of your page. Something the search engine spiders seem to like a lot.

 I this case the page is being optimised for two phrases – ‘technical translations’ and ’software localisation’. Generally we should try to optimise one page for each of our keyphrases. Sometimes we can get away with two but three is pushing it as you will see when we discuss copy writing below.

 There’s on more thing to do to ensure your pages get top rankings….

 Write Keyword Rich Visible Text For Your Optimised Pages.

 Search engine spiders thrive on keyword rich content. Also the higher placed it is on your webpages the better.

 If you can get 200 words of text at the top of each page of your site (ideally right below the H1 tag content) and include your keyphrase (the one the page is being optimsied for) around 6-8 times, that is pretty optimal.

 This is not always easy and we’ll discuss some issues in later lessons to help when it isnt.

 Essentially the TITLE tag content for a particlar page is compared to the keyphrases which appear on that page. The more the better, within certain guidleines.

 The trick is to stay within certain ‘keyword density’(KD) limits. Around 1.9% is good. Five keyphrase repetitions in 100 words would be a KD of 5%.

 This should satisfy the spiders and also you should be able to put together reasonable copy for human visitors.

 These tips will help you to catapult your Global SEO campaign!