3 Absolute Necessities in On-Page Optimization

People often focus much attention on the way their site is read by search engines. They constantly tweak this, change that, move this around, etc. in an attempt to move their pages higher up in the search engine results. But is all this really necessary?

When looking at the on-page SEO factors, there are three that really stand out as important in terms of Google rankings:

Title tags
Alt text
Staying on topic

Title tags:
Think newspaper – a good newspaper article headline both grabs your attention and tells you what it is about. It should reflect the subject (keywords) and compel readers to want to view the article.

Setting an individual title for every page of a website is not always possible. These days, much code is written dynamically, pulling from databases and feeds instead of just simply rendering code. If you’re stuck in such a situation, it is a good idea to come up with a system. One I often recommend for e-commerce stores is:

{keyword1}, {keyword2} | {compelling price statement} | {brand}

An example of this would be “Small Business SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing | Free consultations | Search Satisfaction”

The problem that you will run into with such a structure is that everything after the 70th character gets cut off in Google’s results pages, meaning your “compelling price statement” and branding could be cut off if your keyword phrases are too long. This is why it is always a good idea to set your title elements with their length in mind, and individually per page, if at all possible.

Alt Text:
While alt text won’t help necessarily help you achieve page one rankings in the normal web search results, it help tremendously with image search. Paired with keyword-oriented file names, alt text tells spiders what an image is about. Put it on a page about those same keywords, and you’ll find it much, much easier to rank in image search (good when people need to see what a product looks like before they buy it).

On lesser-competitive web search terms, you may find that alt text will bump you up a spot or two. Since it’s not a huge factor, you can’t solely rely on alt text to bring in the money, and should focus your time on more important factors if image search is not a likely source of quality traffic for your site.

Staying on topic:
If a page is not on topic with its target keywords, then ranking it will become much more difficult. Staying on topic means everything reflects the target keyword(s): title element, header tags, alt tags, and body content.

Simply staying on topic will allow the natural flow of keywords throughout your content. It will give the right hints to bots as to what the page is about. It will help you rank for long-tail phrases that are naturally related to the subject at hand. If you’re worried about on-page optimization, then staying on topic is absolutely vital!

But… on-page optimization will only get you so far in the results pages. 95 times out of 100, you’ll find that you’ll need something more to put you on top. If you’re getting hung up in the rankings, and need that extra boost, give us a call today to discuss a custom link-building campaign for your site.