Over the coming months I am looking to document everything that there is to know (or more likely what I can find out…) about SEO. This post is about On-Page Optimisation – What is the ideal way to perform On-Page Optimisation?

*I am more than happy to be corrected and/or edit this as I go along!

Things to consider…

• Campaign keywords in the Meta Title – God says that it isn’t a good idea to use too many keywords in the meta title, we try and stick to this but also find that repetition (another favourite of God’s) seems to work. For example ‘Holidays in Mallorca: Search Holidays in Mallorca & Minorca with Directline’ *

• Campaign keywords in the Meta Description tag – Meta descriptions vary on every website. We usually either write something that features the keyword and then a call to action or leave it to Google to decide as it will generally incorporate the search query.

• Campaign keywords in the keywords Meta tag – Why are you still using Meta keywords? They have no say in the modern Google algorithm! Correct but wrong. We still use them as they tell Google what your website is about. This is useful for link relevance, think about it…

• Campaign keywords in the H1 header and/or masthead – Overrated but something that we do from time to time, does it make a massive difference, I’m not sure.

• Campaign keywords in the on-site navigation – Vital. Get your keywords on the page! Use emphasis like Bold, Italics, Underlined, “Quoted” and Google will take notice. Try Google’s Wonderwheel tool to find relevant keywords that are similar to your campaign keyword.

• Campaign keywords in relevant images (Alt text) – Alt text for an image based link is in effect choosing it’s own anchor text. This can be incredibly useful. Alt text for an image without a link is worth doing for the anally retentive but it’s worth is fairly low.

• Campaign keywords in outbound link anchor text – Sending a link out to a decent resource? You don’t want to give it decent anchor text as you’ll increase their rankings! Wrong. 1 outbound link may lower your relevance score for a keyword. 10 outbound links may make you the top-ranked site…

• Use absolute URLs in all links – Common sense, repetition.

• Campaign keywords in the page URL – Useful but not vital. Is it worth rewriting URL’s for the benefit? Sometimes, be sure not to forget about where links are pointing.

* I’ve added a link to the website that is currently 2nd in Google for the term ‘Holiday in Mallorca’ and just wanted to see if my link made a difference 😉

Internal Linking:

Use your internal linking to show which pages are most valuable to you (more internal links = prominence)

As any good SEO knows, the power of internal linking can be considerable. This is when we link internally on a site from one page to another. Once again, by charting your link texts we can look for opportunities for using related terms that maintain the theme, but give diversity. We don’t need to actually use the target term with the internal linking if we already have enough external links using that text. What you should do is utilize semantically related phrasings as link text on the internal linking to build around the core term.

Modern document scoring metrics

1. A terms frequency in the document.
2. A term’s frequency in the search term used.
3. Total number of documents in the index.
4. The number of documents that feature this search term.
5. The document length in bytes 🙂
6. The average document length.

What does this tell us?

1. Get your keyword in your content.
2. Add synonyms and other relevant keywords into your content to help increase the chance that the search term used is relevant to your content.
3. The competitor levels will mean that search terms that have a lower number of documents in comparison to the total indexed will be easier to rank for (logical I know!)
4. Write long posts that are informative, relevant and useful 🙂
5. Make sure that your posts are longer than everyone elses in your niche (you see David Harry and Michael Martinez doing this all the time…)