On-Page SEO tips: 5 key areas of your page to optimise
Posted by Stephen Morris on Thu, Jan 26, 2012
Effective search engine optimisation (SEO) requires both on-page and off-page optimisation. This article focuses on some good habits to adopt when creating content for your inbound marketing. Without on-page optimisation you won't get the most from your efforts when it comes to ranking well in search engines.
Improving your on-page SEO will help search engines "read" your webpages and decide what they are about and how valuable that content is. The search engines in turn will know how to present your site in search listings for your key terms.
On-page SEO tips to improve your rankings
This article gives you 5 key on-page SEO tips to follow when creating content - blogs, articles, web pages, anything. When you create a page, optimise it to one key phrase and be sure to optimise in these 5 key areas to help you get found with SEO.
1. Optimise the navigation menu
On most websites, the un-optimized navigation sits on every page, representing a wasted SEO opportunity. Make your menu earn its keep by including key phrases in the links as opposed to generic terms: for example, change "Products" to "Night Vision Products". This makes your intention for that page apparent to both customers and search engines.
2. Make your URLs work for you
The SEO guidelines for optimizing your URLs are very straightforward - minimise gobbledegook and make sure the target keyword is included. For example, if you have a page to target "inbound marketing uk":
Good URL: www.strangepr.com/inbound-marketing-uk
Bad URL: www.strangepr.com/europe/countries/uk/services/23456b55-a342
The good URL is easy to read for humans and search engines. The bad URL has too many levels, and has a meaningless strong of numbers instead of the keyword we are targeting.
3. Mind your H1s, H2s and H3s - use headings and subheadings
Search engines pay particular attention to the words used in headings and subheadings on a page, and assume they are "important". Make sure your keyword or phrase is at least present in your H1 tag.
4. Optimising the body text
The content of a single page should be focused on one idea, so you know to include your target keywords in the body of your text. However, its a bad idea to use that keyword or phrase more than twice in the body. Not only does it look odd to the human eye reading it, search engines could penalize your search rankings if it thinks you are "key-word stuffing".
Keyword stuffing is when someone uses a keyword excessively to attempt to manipulate search engines into sending people to that page for that term. However, as well as reading poorly for humans, search engines increasingly demote and blacklist such sites (Google's Panda update was about reducing the effectiveness of link farms and keyword stuffing).
If you need to refer the keyword more than 4 or 5 times within a page, use synonyms to keep the theme without repeating yourself.
Also, try to use bold font on your keywords, just to reiterate to search engines what's important about your page, as well as make them stand out to a reader.
5. A picture is worth at least one keyword - optimise your images
Whilst the web user can't read the code of an image just by looking at a page, search engines can. Name your image files with appropriate keywords and create meaningful ALT tags to describe the image. This is both helpful to the visually impaired but also beneficial to on-page optimisation.
For example, most cameras automatically name images something like "DSC002.jpg". Before uploading this to your website, rename the file "night-vision-camera-dog.jpg". Use key phrases in the alternative text such as "Dog viewed with a night vision camera". In this instance the keyword being optimised is, of course, "night vision camera."
If you'd like some more on-page SEO tips, help with your SEO strategy or a review of your results, contact Strange PR for a no-obligation chat.