Perfect On-Page SEO

How far could you take on-page SEO? There are believed to be around 200 factors that are taken into account by Google’s search algorithm in ranking a page. Many of these are likely to be connected with off-page factors such as the link profile, domain diversity, quality scoring as well as PageRank. On page SEO factors are generally not as important but even the smallest factor has the potential to have some effect for some queries. It is also important to realise that many of these factors can be used improperly or excessively, causing problems or penalty filtering.  There can be a fine line between good use of the techniques and over egging the pudding.

Page Filename – a name which is descriptive of the content of the page is more useful than a generic filename for both users and search engines. Choose descriptive filenames for pages.

Descriptive Directory Names – possibly a small factor in the search engine ranking but easier for users to comprehend.

Page Title a most important factor is the title of the page. This is the title that appears between the title tags in the head section of an HTML document. Go for the key phrases that have a high-search volume but that are related to the content of the page. A maximum length of 65 characters is allowed but  3-6 words is advisable .

Good meta description is required to bring in visitors rather than give the edge in rankings. It should be related to the content of the page it is on. It can appear in search engine snippets, so make this as appealing as possible.

Keywords – not important but some lesser search engines may still use this information. There is some evidence that keywords are noticed by Yahoo and that they may be useful for misspellings. I doubt if it helps but it doesn’t hurt to include a few keywords that relate to the page content. Don’t waste space by adding hundreds of keywords or repeating the same keyword over and over again.  4-10 different keywords would be okay.

Sitemap – addition of a sitemap is useful to let the search engines know which pages exist. Without a sitemap there is a danger that page might be unreachable. I also believe that sitemaps will be used as a lazy way of  finding new content. Many web applications automatically update their sitemaps. Crawling the site without a sitemap is likely to take longer.

Document Outline is the layout of the document in terms of heading and sub-heading. In the Firefox extension Webmaster Development Tools, you can examine the document structure of a web page within the information menu/view document outline. Each page should contain one <h1> heading and if possible <h2> headings for subsections and so on.  Bold text and italics can also be used to emphasise keywords.

Nofollow to the really not important links such as terms and conditions. Nofollow on possible duplicate content pages. A belt and braces approach would also define canonical tags for duplicate content pages.

Images – add captions, alt information and title information. Filenames should be descriptive. More information can be found in this post on image optimisation.

Flash – ranking with Flash explains how to use swfobject to show Flash or alternative content if it cannot be displayed.

Layout - content first layouts use CSS to ensure that your most important content comes before everything else. Removal of legacy code and replacing with CSS for tables and positioning will help to reduce the code required to display the same content.  CSS is now the standard for positioning and gives precise control over layout. Tables should be used only for displaying data.

Internal linking – linking to other pages within the site can distribute PageRank to other pages making them more important also good for users.

External CSS – externalising stylesheets is a good practice because it reduces the bandwidth. The CSS file is downloaded and then the cached version is used for subsequent pages. The main reason for external stylesheets is to reduce the code to content ratio. Similar benefits can be obtained by externalising JavaScript functions.

Analytics code - to track visitors and entrance and exit pages. it should be added from day one of the optimisation to track how search optimisation is progressing.

Valid Code there is no direct evidence to suggest that valid code ranks better than code that has errors in. However, to say that it is not important is to say that it okay to write sloppy code. Code which has errors is much more likely to cause unforeseen problems than code that follows agreed standards. Once you are in the habit of producing code that follows standards it is not difficult to produce good code. Like religious beliefs, W3C standards should be a high ideal that you should preach, even if we do not always abide by them.

Content – it is a cliché, but nonetheless true, that this is by far the most important part of the of the page. It is the raison-d’être of the page. All of the above techniques can still be used to create a worthless page. Good content is what transforms into something that creates links and generate interest. The other factors help to present it better or allow search engines to spider and index the content is on the page.

Have I left anything out?