Download - On-Page Optimization Framework
Proposed On-Page Optimization Framework for Seattle SEO Consultant
The relevancy metrics that search engines use to rank pages comes from on-page
elements. This section shows the best format for these metrics. Before getting into the
specifics for step by step instructions, I will depict a broader picture first to orient you
with the scope of the subject:
Page-Level Information Hierarchy
Diagram of formatted page
The above diagram shows the best practice for optimizing a URL with a single keyword
or phrase. Notice that the relevant phrase is located in all of the SEO page elements.
This page has the given keyword phrase in all of the appropriate places to make it as
relevant as possible. It does this without spamming by mentioning the keyword in
semantically helpful places without overuse. By that I mean, the page looks and reads
like it was written for a human rather than a search engine.
This may sound overly vague, but the only “bad” place for using a keyword is where its
mere appearance implies that it was done more for algorithmic benefit than for
usability. That can happen anywhere, including titles, headings, body copy, figure
captions, alt text, or anywhere else you can place copy.
Important Note: There are some locations, in which keywords will do nothing for you,
regardless of the number of times you use them—inline comments in code, the meta
keywords tag, and keywords inside a graphic image (such as a screen shot of text) to
name a few.
The following section would try to lay-down a step-by-step process which would serve
as the guideline for content writers, Designer and SEOs to accomplish the on-page
optimization of a given page that would not only achieve the SEO objectives geared
towards Search Engines but achieve the human factors in terms of readability and
easily consumable format that lowers the bounce rate and improves metrics like time
on page, page views, time on site etc.
URL
The URL of a page is important for search engine crawlers and humans alike. URLs
should use as few characters as possible (to make it easier for humans to remember
and to link to) and accurately describe the content of the given page.
Step I
The URL shall be written to include the given keyword and are formatted in a category-
based system that helps users and search engines understand what the given page is
about without having to visit it.
Example:
http://www.example.com/NewHomesSeattle.aspx
Step II
The closer the targeted keyword is to the domain name, the better. Thus,
example.com/keyword.html outperforms site.com/category/subcategory/keyword.html
and is the most recommended method of optimization. It is not really something carved
in stone but site or in our case section development team lead shall try to conform to
this principle as much as possible
Step III
The URL casing shall be consistent throughout the site. That means, if you are using the
capitalization like Depuy-Hip-Recall in the URL where first letter of each distinct word is
capital and separate with a hyphen then use the same theme throughout the site.
Responsibility: SEO Lead
Designer
Validation: SEO Team Designated person
Title Tag
Title tags are the most important single on-page factor in SEO. Not only are title tags
present in search engine results and in browsers, but they are increasingly used as
anchor text of links from social media sites. So crafting SEO friendly title tags can help
with both user experience and link relevancy.
Step I
The targeted keywords shall be close to the beginning of the title and that the brand is
included to increase click through rates.
Primary keyword shall be the first one listed followed by the secondary keyword DePuy Hip Recall | Defective Hip Recall | Sullolaw.com
Or when brand is important as in our case Traffic Practice Area sullolaw.com | Traffic Attorney Houston | Speeding Ticket
Step II
The Search engines read (and more important, factor into rankings) up through 80
characters or more, engines typically truncate the title tag at around character 65. This
means that any character beyond 65 (or even earlier, if a word overlaps that
character) will be turned into ellipses and will not even appear on most SERP. (Long-tail
queries can sometimes have title tags longer than 65 characters.) Therefore, following
shall be ensured:
1. Title Tag shall be limited to 65 characters including spaces whenever is possible.
2. If possible, for very competitive terms, craft your titles so that your page’s
message is clear by the time you hit 35 or 40 characters.
Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person
Validate: SEO Team Designated person
Important Note: I consider the title tag and Meta description to be the one-two punch
of our URL’s “elevator pitch.” You have a few seconds (at most) to convince users that
clicking your page will satisfy their query intent. Users will use the title and description to
decide whether to click your result or someone else’s, so they must be keyword-rich
and serve a quick but memorable message.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the free advertisements webmasters get to include when their
search results are included in a SERP. They should be optimized and tested just like
traditional advertisements.
Meta descriptions are not directly used by the search engines to establish rankings. This
means they are most helpful to webmasters when written like ads to entice clicks rather
than for search engines to aid rankings.
Step I
Meta Descriptions are an important place to use keywords due to the bolding that
occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Usage has also been shown to help
boost click-through rates, which in turn increases the traffic derived from any ranking
position.
1. Therefore, The challenge is to use targeted keywords in the description and still
come up with the copy that shall stand out on SERPs and help getting clicks
2. The Description shall be limited between 160 t0 225 characters included spaces
3. The common mistakes with Meta descriptions include keyword spamming
(including a given keyword an unreasonable amount of times), misspellings,
grammar mistakes, and odd capitalization so we need to avoid them strictly.
Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person
Validate: SEO Team Designated person
Meta Keywords
1. Meta keywords were the first search engine–specific HTML attribute. It once was
a very powerful tool for manipulating search results. For this reason, it is no longer
used by search engines.
2. WARNING: Be mindful, however, that some internal search engines (the
algorithm that powers your on-site search feature) use Meta keywords to help
return searches from within your site. The Google Search Appliance, for example,
can be configured to use Meta keywords in its algorithm. So before you nuke all
the keyword tags on the site (or recommend that no new tags be written), be
sure they’re not used for other purposes.
3. This webmaster resource was abused in the early days of the Internet and is no
longer useful. It was used by Yahoo! as a very minor ranking metric but was and
still is completely ignored by Google and Bing. If it is included, it provides a simple
way for competitors to automate competitive analysis.
Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person
HTML Headings (H1 – H6)
When HTML was first designed as a markup language for presenting information online,
headings were essential for information hierarchy. As the Web has evolved, their impact
has weakened because HTML was used in ways that it was not originally designed for.
The correlation studies at SEOmoz showed that HTML headers do not carry the same
ranking weight that we had originally presumed. They are very important for
establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined
semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization. We
recommend them on all pages as an aid for users but don’t stress the importance when
other opportunities for SEO improvement are available.
Step I
Although the H tags are not given that much weight but Search Engines still use them to
infer content in semantics context and establish information hierarchy of a page so
following is important in their usage on a webpage:
1. The first heading that establishes the topic of the page shall be of H1 and shall
use the primary keyword targeted for the page.
2. Then sub-topics which divide the context of the page into multiple sections are
good candidate for H2 tag and shall use the keywords that are related to that
sub-topic
3. H3 onwards tags can be used to further breakdown the sub-topics into distinct
headings and shall include relevant keywords for which that paragraph stands.
Responsibility: Content Writers
Designer
SEOs
Validate: Designated person in SEO department
Images
Images are fundamental tools of the modern Web. Although computer scientists have
made great strides in visual semantics, human aids are still needed for computers to
understand images on large scales.
Step I
1. The alt text attribute shall be included in all HTML code for images on all publicly
accessible pages.
2. It is suggested that while adding images with descriptive and keyword focused
alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings.
3. It is recommended that relevant text shall be included directly before or after
the images. This helps provide search engines with further context.
4. When you have a “hot” image, one that links to another page, alt text is
especially helpful and is the next best thing to anchor text when describing the
content of the destination page to engines. For example, if you use an image to
link to your “plumbing supplies” page, it’s imperative that you use the alt text
that describes what users (and engines) will find when they click the image.
Using an image to link to a page is less desirable than using plain text, but if
there’s no other way to do it, write your alt text as if it’s anchor text.
Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person for writing Alt attribute
Designer for giving related name to the image file
Validate: Designated person in SEO department
Nofollow
Originally, the stated purpose of the rel="nofollow" attribute was to keep a given
link from passing authority. In other words, where a typical link is one page “voting” for
another, the "nofollow" attribute simply removed the “vote” aspect. But it was not
immediately clear that the tag also acted—at the individual link level—the same way
the Meta robots "nofollow" attribute worked, telling engines to not even crawl the link.
Subsequent information from Google has expressed that notion as well.
The proper syntax for the "nofollow" attribute is to be inserted in an <a> tag alongside
the href to which it refers:
<a href="/url-here.html" rel="nofollow">Anchor text here</a>
Step I
1. It is recommended to use rel="nofollow" for thwarting would-be spammers of
user-generated content specifically on commenting at our would be blogs.
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designated person in SEO department
Rel Canonical Link Element
rel="canonical" is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which version of
duplicate content is the main or canonical version. It has shown a lot of promise and
has already worked well for some of my clients who suffered from duplicate content
problems before implementing this attribute.
Suppose, for example, that we have an article on our site that has two versions—one for
presentation on the website and other is the printer friendly version. The two articles virtually have the same content with different purpose. The rel="canonical" attribute
was created to give engines a clue about which URL is the “authoritative” version.
Step I
1. The proper syntax for rel="canonical" is to place a code line in the <head>
section of a page. It should be placed on all instances of duplicate content to
show which version of the content should be shown in search engine results.
2. For example, if we have an article at one URL (article.aspx) and a printer-friendly
version of the same article on a separate URL (article.aspx?print=1), add this
attribute to both pages with the URL of the original article so that the engines
know to ignore the printer-friendly version and thus prevent detracting from
relevancy metrics: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sullolaw.com/article.aspx" />
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designated person in SEO department
JavaScript
JavaScript and Flash are more complicated to parse for search engines than HTML. We
know that while engines are growing more and more capable of interpreting the data
within Flash files and JavaScript environments, they’re not yet very good at doing it
consistently or at using that information to allocate authority the way traditional HTML
does.
Although the search engines can crawl JavaScript and Flash, I choose not to add the
risk of hoping they will correctly parse the code’s structure. Their ability to analyze these
languages is inferior to their ability to understand HTML, and choosing to code in the
former can lead to lower search engine rankings.
Step I
1. JavaScript links shall be avoided for the pages which needs to crawled by
Search Engines and are related to the keywords ranking and part of our SEO
endeavors. They are implemented in JavaScript with the location object: window.location.replace('http://www.example.com');
2. It is recommended that JavaScript shall not be directly coded in the pages that
are part of the SEO. These scripts shall be included in the separate files and shall
be downloaded to the pages at the runtime.
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designer
301 Redirects
301 redirects are the preferred method for redirecting URLs for SEOs. 301 redirects is the
best way to redirect URLs but they do have disadvantages. The main disadvantage is
that only between 99 and 90 percent of link value is transferred through these redirects.
This is as opposed to the 0 percent that is transferred through 302 redirects.
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designer
Blocking Pages from Search Engines
There are many ways to block pages from search engines including the Robots
Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt), IP blocking, and Meta robots. While the first two work in
most cases, Meta robots is generally the best option as it keeps the pages out of the
search engine indexes while allowing their links to pass value to other pages.
Meta robots (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt because it
keeps the given URL out of the search engine results (noindex) and allows all of the links
on the page to send link value (follow). robots.txt files are useful but should be used
sparingly and only if a Meta robots tag is not an option.
Step I
1. Following is the format of the “noindex, follow” tag in head section of a page
which you want not to be indexed by search engines and consequently will not
be the part of SERPs but still pass the link juice that is Ranking power to flow
through it to other pages:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: QA, Designated SEO Eng’r
Parameter-Driven URLs
The search engines have been very clear on this. Their crawlers can parse and crawl
parameter-driven URLs, but it is more difficult and often leads to duplicate content
issues. This is backed up by SEOmoz correlation data, which showed that pages with
static URLs tend to rank higher.
Step I
• Example:
www.example.com/product?param=1¶m=2
It is recommended that whenever possible the parameterized URLs shall be avoided
and only used when absolute necessity like when we use them for our telephone
tracking for paid campaigns.
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designated SEO Eng’r
Footer Links
Footer links are hyperlinks that are included at the bottom of webpages and frequently
spammed as they are not as important to user experience as other more prominent
links on a page. Therefore, Use footer links sparingly. Recommended figure is no more
than 25 relevant internal navigational links. This number is not a hard limit and it is
important to be mindful of intent when choosing keywords.
When the number of links in the footer increases significantly, however, and the anchor
text starts to look a little too “optimized” then there are many examples of Google
penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that magically lifted upon removal of
footer links stuffed with keywords. Manipulative links in footers are easily detected
algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.
Step I
1. It is recommended that Footer links shall be carefully planned and implemented
based on above discussion.
Responsibility: SEO Lead
Validate: Designated SEO Eng’r
Considering the Panda 2 updates and new focus of Google to deliver best search
experience to its users, followings are some of new metrics which would play a crucial
role in ranking a particular page of the website:
Use of CSS rather than Nested tables for page layout
Step I
1. The CSS shall be used rather than nested tables for webpages layout
Responsibility: Designer
Validate: Designer
Metrics like Bounce rate, Page Views, Average Time on Page, Page
Views/Visit
Step I
1. We need to check the bounce rate, Page Views, Average Time on Page, Page
Views/Visit of each important page of the site and pinpoint the reason why a
particular person is bouncing back to SERPs for looking for something which he
did not find on our site on this page or was put off and did not care to explore
our site any further.
2. There could be many reasons but most of the time it is either less relevant
information available on the page or the presentation of the information is not in
optimal format which is easily consumable.
3. Before even analyzing the bounce rate we need to critically check our entire site
for the factors discussed in the previous point.
Step II
1. Following is the possible way to check for the relative completeness of the
content:
a. Get the keywords list for which page stands for and write down the
possible questions one can think of around them and try to answer them
in the content developed.
b. For existing pages go through the same exercise and figure out what is un-
answered there and get it added.
2. The second thing is presentation of the information on the page which has a
great potential either to engage visitor or send him elsewhere looking for the
same content present on that page.
Step III
1. This step answers the problems discussed so far and would be quite helpful in
increasing the page’s Search Engine and User friendliness and help improve the
readability factor to great extent.
a. Make more paragraphs and break them up with headings
i. It’s hard to read long, uninterrupted text.
• If your paragraph is more than 4-5 lines long, consider breaking
it into multiple paragraphs. You may feel the phantom stare of
your 6th grade English teacher, but Ms. Ewing wasn’t lecturing
on writing web-friendly copy. On your site, more paragraphs are
a good thing.
• Add headings to clearly categorize your content and create
another visual break. Your headings should provide the user
with a high-level outline of the content on your page.
• There’s an SEO benefit to using logical headings as well. From
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
b. Create Lists
i. People love bulleted or numbered lists because:
• They’re shorter than paragraphs. (Translation: Faster to read.)
• They take less work to digest. (Translation: Easier to read.)
• They’re another great tactic to create visual interest on a page.
(Translation: More likely to be read.)
c. Internal Linking and Correct Formatting
• Internal Links - Links provide another opportunity for visual
variation and can serve as calls to action to draw your users to other important information on your site.
• Bold and italics - Use these for emphasis, but use them sparingly.
Lines and lines of bold content lose its punch.
d. Help! I’m drowning in a sea of text!
i. Some SEO Leads will tell you to reduce your copy as much
as possible to keep all of your text appearing “above the
fold” or above the cut-off of the browser window where a
user would have to scroll to see more. While I agree it’s
important to keep your copy crisp and concise (with good
grammar and spelling, too, of course), you can’t always cut
your content down to 200 or 300 words.
2. Consider the screenshot below that compares a page of text with no
enhancements and that same text with imagery, headings and bold text.
Though the page with the extra elements is actually longer, it’s the superior
sample. You don’t need to worry about readers drowning in a sea of too much
text if you make that copy readable.