On Page SEO

Increasing Online Visibility

On Site Optimization Factors

On Page or On Site SEO page factors have certainly changed over the years in internet marketing.  At one point in time keyword meta tags were held in the highest regard and now they are completely ignored by Google. With so much conflicting information in the data age, it is hard to get a reliable answer that you can bank on.

On Page SEO:  What is Working Post Panda?

Since Panda (starting in February 2011 till Now), the impact of duplicate content and over optimization has become much more severe with penalties. It used to be that duplicate content could only harm that content itself. That is, if you had duplicate content only that page would be filtered out. Usually, that was ok. In extreme cases today, your entire site might be impacted by duplicate content or over optimization and be quickly de-indexed or have a large drop in rankings site wide.

What Google Wants for "On Page SEO"

What is the Fix for Google’s Panda Update?

In a few words, Fresh Relative Content That’s Seems Natural.  Read a recent Matt Cutt’s quote on Google’s Panda Update, “our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that creates a good user experience and employ’s white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics” simply stated, Google is looking for websites that care about their customers user experience, not a site that is written towards search engine spiders or optimization.

I want to touch on two points here that are beyond the scope of what I can write here in this one article. Any one serious about learning SEO,  should study both how and why Google uses SEO relevancy and White Hat SEO techniques to rank and position sites in the search engine result pages. I will make sure to post these pages back soon and create links for my readers. Now back to On Page SEO.

Best Top 10 On Page SEO Factors:

• SEO Friendy URLs
• Title Tags (No More than 70 Chars)
• Meta Description
• Page Headings (H1, H2, H3, ect…)
• Image & HTML Filenames
• ALT image text
• Use of Bold, Italic, Bullet Points and Quotations
• On Page Interior Links with Keyword Rich Anchor Text
• Outbound Links to relevant High PR sites
• Body Text itself should be more than 300 words with keyword density of 3-4% AVG.

Other on page SEO factors to consider:

Please keep in mind to use the above list both sparingly and looking natural, no one enjoys reading an over optimized page of text, especially not Google! Now having said that let’s move on to other factors to consider when talking about On Page SEO. One factor that is relatively new to ranking factors is page load times or site speed. If you are using wordpress there are many plugins that help website load times, such as W3 Total Cache Plugin which you can download and install to help your site load much quicker. Continuing with this idea of helping Google, you should also supply them with both a robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, which will improve the effectiveness of Google accessing and indexing your sites content.

What do Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml Files Do?

Robots.txt This is a file that is created and uploaded to your hosting service to tell search engines which directories to look into for indexing and cashe of information. You would want Google to index your standard information HTML files, but not something like your Plugin files or JavaScript Library which people have no use in reading. Here is an example of a Robots.txt file and a link for a free robots.txt file generator.

Robots.txt Example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /wp-plugins/

If you need more information on Robot.txt files you can read more from the link.

Sitemap.xml This is often called a directory tree of the files that exist on your server with a map of hierarchy on how they are structured.  A common On Page SEO technique is called “Silo-ing” which is storing like minded ideas under a parent menu item, just like this website! You may have your main navigation with a word like SEO as the parent then have other like minded ideas that follow such as, Local SEO, Custom SEO, On Page SEO, Off Page SEO. Just like a stacked Silo of just grains, you have organized your site’s information into categories that make sense. A sitemap is a coded picture of how you have organized your site and what pages link to one another.

Sitemap.xml Example:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=who</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=what</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Don’t worry if you don’t understand the code here, there are also Free XML SiteMap Generators, which you can input your URL and get a free sitemap to install back on your server! Again this tells Google how you have strutured your pages and linking and you can learn more about Google XML Site Maps from the link provided.

I hope you find all information provided here both useful and profitable for your website, if you adhere to the outline here, you will be well on your way to online marketing success! We are always here for further SEO Consulting.