On Page SEO

If you want your webpages to rank well in the organic search results, you need to pay attention to how you keyword optimize the page. Part of the problem with keyword optimizing is there’s a lot of old information floating around out there. To understand how to really optimize your pages, it’s helpful to understand what the search engines, like Google, are trying to achieve in search results.

Too often we internet marketers look at Google’s results only from our point of view. In other words, we’re sometimes more interested in how we can manipulate search results than providing quality content that deserves to be ranked highly. Over the past two years, we’ve seen Google take major steps in “cleaning up” their search results.

We’ve seen Google institute a succession of changes such as:

not showing more than one PPC ad that directed searchers to the same site raising prices on keywords for non-performing AdWords ads getting rid of MFA (Made for AdSense) sites-you know the ones where you would search for something only to find yourself on a meaningless page full of links and no content and just recently Google announced its bias against “thin affiliate sites”.

I’m just naming a few of many examples. What Google’s trying to do, however, is deliver the best results they can for searchers.

So, if Google’s interested in delivering quality content to searchers, then the best SEO strategy in the long run might be to create quality content! And this is what the basis of a good keyword optimized page needs to be-quality content, written for humans.

Having said that, we have to realize we’re working with search engines, here-software-machines. Google’s algorithms are not yet capable of recognizing quality content in the same way that a human would. So, effective keyword optimization of a web page needs to hinge around 1) quality content for humans, 2) a few clues for search engine spiders.

Ideally, each web page on your site, should be optimized for only one keyword phrase. Let’s say your niche is dog training. So, you might have a page devoted to “housebreaking yorkies.” To optimize your page for that keyword phrase, it needs to be in the meta tags, that is the title tag, the description tag, and the keywords tag all need to have your keyword phrase in them. Your keyword needs to be in the title of your page, say in an h1 heading. It also needs to appear in the first 90 characters of your content. Finally, your keyword phrase or a slight variation needs to appear in your copy some, but not too much. How do you gauge too much? Well, right now, I reference the keyword phrase slightly more than good writing dictates. (If that makes any sense.) It also helps to use your keyword phrase in a link on that same page. If often just put a link from the current page to the home page just above my footer.

This is what I’m doing right now. Actually, I’m starting to move from this slightly to just writing well for human consumption. I don’t know, but I think Google is probably making rapid strides towards being able to really understand the quality of a page just as an informed human would.

What you need to do is to try to follow the points I mentioned, but focus on writing well for humans. All of the criteria I mentioned are what’s called “on-page” criteria. Google tracks probably hundreds of off-page criteria. How long a visitor stays on your site is an off-page criteria.

So, what makes a visitor stay on your site? Relevant, quality content. Basically they need to find what they’re looking for-hopefully more than they’re looking for.

Bottom line, you need to deliver good, quality content. Write for humans, not software spiders! If you do that, most of the rest will take care of itself.