On-Page SEO

By

Website Adelaide Jaroslava Vagner Svensson

2014

How can your business website

be found on Google?

Jaroslava Vagner Svensson

I been working with websites for many years and it has never been

as important as it is now!

Search Engine Optimisation – SEO

This eBook will take you through the most important and essential

steps in what you should do and where you should write specific

words ON your website. This is why it is called On-Page SEO.

Content

Content On-Page SEO explained Google Finding Your Primary Keywords Secondary Keywords Domain name Page URL Multiple Domains Text/copy Content Updates Keywords Density Headings Menu Names Images Image Folders Contact Details Alt Tags and Title Tags for Images Flash Internal Links Sitemap FAQ Meta Codes Meta Titles Meta Description Meta Keywords

ON-PAGE SEO

SEO is extremely complex but there are also very simple basic

factors that you can easily make the best of.

Your first step as a small business owner servicing a particular

geographical area is your On-page SEO. On-page SEO means

anything “on your website”. Once the on-page SEO is in place,

you can then start thinking about the off-page SEO; or anything

on the Internet that will generate more traffic to your website.

This great guide helps small businesses with a step by step

guideline on exactly how to make Google and other search

engines understand what your website is about. When the search

engines understand what your website is about, your website has

a chance on ranking much higher in the searches you are aiming

for.

The competition is

enormous

You might ask yourself “How can

you even compete on the Internet

today when there are many trillion

web pages and the number is

constantly growing”?

Only on Google there are over100

Billion searches per month!

The answer is simple;

You don’t need to compete with them all!

You “only” need to compete with your competitors in the area

where you offer your services.

Finding your keywords

• What are the most important words that describe your

business and your services? A.K.A fancy word – Keywords

• Or, what are the common words or phrases that are

appropriate to your business. Keywords are particular

words or phrases that describe the content of the web

page.

• Keywords could represent shortcuts that sum up a whole

website. It is important to determine the keywords for your

business at a very early stage, as those words need to be

used several times and in different ways, which will be

explained later in the book.

The keywords will form part of your website that will help

search engines match a page with an appropriate search

query.

Example

Say your business is working as a personal trainer and you are offering

services in Port Elliot in South Australia.

Your keywords could be: Personal trainer or Training coach

But since the competition for those words are enormous, and you

would be competing with the whole world, you could use:

“Personal trainer and training coach in Port Elliot.”

And that is now not only your keywords, but more important to day

with such stiff competition, your keyword phrase.

For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less

hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you

will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.

Your keyword phrase can include what you are and where you offer

your services. This will separate you from the rest of the world when a

person is making a query the search engines. If you include local

names, villages and areas, you have a greater chance of targeting

your potential client.

Secondary keywords

Your title could be “personal trainer”,

but maybe “training coach” is a more

common word used in a search?

Try to include the common words when you write your

content / copy / text in your website and not only use words

that are used by professionals in your field. People will use

common words in the search, and it is therefore important

that those words are present on your website. Otherwise, the

search engine will not consider your website as a good

match for that particular query.

Optimising for secondary keywords can be a golden mine

because when everybody else is optimising for the most

popular keywords, there will be less competition (and

probably more hits) for pages that are optimised for the less

targeted words.

Is it still difficult to decide what keywords to concentrate on? Use

some tools. Fancy word – keyword tools

There are tools to use that will show you how many people search

both locally and in the world every month. This could be used if you

are unsure of your keywords.

Some of these tools will often show how many searches are made

every month and if the competition is high or low.

Great tool with Google :

http://adwords.google.com.au/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home

Use a search engine and write free keyword tools. Often they will

let you try for free before you need to pay for the service. This

might also be worth a try.

Keyword Tools

I don’t think it needs to be so complex. If you know exactly what

you are offering, you know what people would use when they are

searching for your services and you know where you offer your

services, then you have a good search phrase right there. Just

watch out for using fancy words that are not used in a search.

Example

You would maybe use the term in your business “men's athletic

footwear” but customers would use words like “men's sports shoes”

or “men's sneakers” or “men's tennis shoes”. Make sure you are

using common words on your website.

Another example

People might search “broken arm” and clinic might write “fractured

upper arm bone”

Domain name

and keywords

At this point, you might already have a domain name and a website

up and running and you would like to keep it that way. If not, and

you are about to register a domain name, you will benefit from using

1 or 2 keywords in your domain name as well. The domain name is

very important in a search.

Example

If you have a domain name that is

www.klm-solutions.com

it will not mean anything to the search engines.

However, if your domain name is

www.bathroomrenovations-klm.com

it is much clearer to Google and other search engines what your

website is about. You could also consider registering a domain name

that is www.bathroomrenovations-adelaide.com

and make it even more specific and obvious what you are writing

about.

Once you start creating your pages in your website, you

should think about what you are naming your pages and

clarify what that particular page is about as well.

Example

Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. –

http://domainname.com/seo-services.html,

where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to

rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts

of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.

URL page name

Match keywords

in your domain Having good keywords in your domain name helps,

but your website will do better in a search if you use

great keywords in your domain name and those

words are missing in your text/copy. You cannot rely

solely on the domain name having good keywords,

they also need to be present in your copy/text.

Keywords and associated or synonym words

Use words around your keywords or keyword phrase

that are relevant to your keywords and your

business. This way you will make sure that the search

engine really understands what your website is about

and you will score a bit more “points” for it. If you

write about house renovations and no other words

associated with those words are in your text, then

you could end up being considered as not relevant

in a search.

Try to think of all related words to your business and

use them wisely in addition to the main keywords.

This is good for sites in English as search engines are

smart enough to use synonyms as well, when

ranking sites. However, for many other languages

synonyms are not taken into account, when

calculating rankings and relevancy.

Domain name and email

Always use you domain name in

your email addresses, this is maybe

not critical for on-page SEO but a

good way of promoting your domain

name / company web address.

Example: contact@websiteadelaide.com

or jaroslava@websiteadelaide.com

not websiteadelaide@gmail.com

Multiple domains

You might want to have multiple domains for your business. This

can be a good strategy if you think your domain name is too long

and want to have a short domain as well. You can safely use a

redirect that will take you automatically to your “real website”

and lets you use a short domain name version to type in the

browser window.

Example

Your business is called MLG Renovations where MLG does not

mean anything for the search engines. So, you might consider

having mlgrenovation.com but place your website on the domain

bathroomsrenovationsseattle.com and have a redirect to

mglrenovations.com. Bathrooms Renovations Seattle will describe

your business well to the search engine. Place your website and

the content on the domain name that describes your business,

best so the good keywords in your domain name, can be

matched with good keywords on your website.

WWW WWW

Text / copy content of

the website

Write text that describes your business where you use

your keywords and words associated to those words

and synonyms on your pages.

All those three factors are as important. Preferably

your most important words should be as high up on

the page as possible. This can be hard of course, but

try not to have your most important words only at the

end of the pages.

Every page should at least have 500 words or it will

not be interesting to the search engines. Repeat your

keyword when it is relevant but try not to overdo it.

Keyword stuffing your website means using your

keywords too often, will only harm your ranking.

Update!

Frequency of content change

Frequent changes are favoured. It is great if you can add

and write content for your website as often as possible.

However, it does not include when you only make small

updates to existing content.

Duplicate content

If you have the same content / copy / text on more than 1

page, it will not make your site look larger be the duplicate

content penalty will kick in.

There are of course some exceptions as there are article

directories or mirror sites that will not be banned and they

are often to a degree duplicate content. But it is a general

rule to be careful with copying your text / copy to several

pages.

Keyword density

Keyword density means % of times a keyword appears on

your page and in relation to the total number of words.

Usually it is advised to never have less than 2-3% keyword

density. There are several websites that will help you check

the density of a word where you can find a free service on:

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html

Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is

keyword stuffing and you are even taking the risk of getting

banned from search engines.

Headings The headings are placed within special codes that looks like this: <h1>

and <h2> and <h3> and so on. Heading H1 will be the most important

heading and the other headings will be subheadings. The headings

are important to the search engines as they will read them to try and

understand what that page or paragraph is about.

Example

Your heading might say “About us”.

To the search engines it means that this paragraph or page is about

“About us”. Anyone would then of course ask, about who or what?

If your heading would describe it a bit better it could say “About the

bathroom renovation company MLG Renovations” for example. You

might find a better heading, but I hope you see my point. Try to

describe the page while using good keywords.

You want to write content that is good and nice for the visitor to read,

but it is really important to have the search engines in mind unless you

have a really big website with vast amount of text content and a

good page rank.

Keywords in

your headings It is good to use your keywords in some of the headings. A

heading should be around 40 characters long according to

good on-page SEO. H1 is the most important and they run all the

way down to H6. You can have a few H1 on a page so try to

divide the page into sections with good headings.

The search engines consider bold text as important text and you

should therefore make sure you have some of your keywords

bold. Remember to not overdo this as well, but where it feels

relevant, you will benefit from having good keywords bold.

Bold Text

Menu names Menu names or the links to the different pages are also considered

important. The search engines reads them and you will benefit from

having relevant describing good words (keywords if possible).

Example

These are typical links and menu names of smaller websites and by now

you might already be thinking that they don’t say anything about the

business or the website. The menu name “Home” could be anything,

“About us” could be anything, “Services” could be anything and so on.

If it had said “MLG Renovations” at least your company name is out

there, “About MLG Renovations” you are again promoting your

company name, “Bathroom Renovations” to describe the service you

offer and finally “Bathrooms” instead of Products being very clear on

what products you are selling. This describes a bit about the content and

you are using some of your keywords.

Home Services About Us Contact

Images

The name of the imges

Google and the other search engines can’t read pictures. A website

with a lot of pictures and very little text will find it extremely hard to

compete for a good page rank. You always need a lot of text content

if you have business website and are trying to attract traffic to your site.

Pictures are however a great tool and important to any website to

make it look more attractive and appealing. A picture is also said to

“say more than 1000 words” and you should therefore absolutely have

pictures on your website.

But, every image can be optimised for the search engines. There are a

few things that the search engines like you to do and include so they

can understand what the picture is about. First thing is the name. You

should try to name the picture as something relevant and with good

words. Years ago pictures would often be names as 1432.jpg, 1252.jpg

and so on. As it is now so important to try to explain to the search

engines what the picture represents, they could be called

bathroom_renovation.jpg, mlg_renovation_staff.jpg and so forth. They

have good keywords and are describing your business and the images.

Folder names

Sometimes you might have folders with images in them to keep

them in good order. The folders should also have good names. A

folder named “newphotos” will not help SEO while a folder called

“bathroomrenovations” will.

Alt-tags in the codes

In the codes of each single image you have on the website, you

can also add something called alt-tags and image title tags. It is

also something appreciated by the search engines. If you are

working on your website in a website building system, they are often

easy to add.

Every system will have this option as it is an

important SEO factor. If you have your

website built in Wordpress, Joomla, Blogspot,

Tumblr or similar you will find it there as you

chose to insert your image

Contact Info The Search Engines knows there are a lot of website on the Internet

that are not trustworthy. It has become a big problem. It has

therefore become more and more important to display your

contact details clearly and easily found on your website. If you

don’t have these details easily accessible, you might loose some

search engine ranking. Google and the search engines don't want

to “recommend” a website you can’t trust.

Website Adelaide can help with updating and changing your

website. Some of the following On-Page SEO tips you might find

difficult to do yourself. I can help with those things and if you have a

website built in WordPress or a good content management system, it

is easy to do those changes.

The search engines don't read images but they do read their textual

description which is in the <alt> tag. Write a relevant description and

use your keywords if possible.

While there is no official length restriction on the length of alt text,

many experts recommend 125 characters or fewer.

Image Title-tags

When you hold the cursor over some picture, you can sometimes see

a text appearing. This text appears in a little box next to the cursor

and is called the title tag. This code is placed in the image code and

as: title=”something you would like to say about this”. This is another

place where you can describe your website or your business with

relevancy to the image.

Example: <img src=“pepperoni_pizza.jpg” alt=“pepperoni pizza”

title=“Pepperoni pizza with proper distribution of pepperonis”>

Alt Tags

Flash movies

or content The search engines can’t read and index the content of Flash

movies and flash content of a website. If your website is built with a

lot of Flash content, remember to use alternative textual description.

Ipod, Ipads and Iphone users are also missing out on your Flash

content as it will not be displayed at all in the browsers of those

devices. Using Flash content will therefore just make you missing out

on a large group of internet visitors.

Internal links

Try to link back and forth within your website without (as usual)

overdoing it. This is also a good way of making sure that the search

engines have registered (indexed) all your website pages. Link text is

read by the search engine and then it follows to the linked page.

When you are linking, you should try to link good keywords, synonym

words or words that are important to your website. Very often we used

to see links saying simply “click here”. But that is a very NO NO! The

words click here, does not mean anything to the search engines and

therefore not helping the website at all.

You need to link good words and then make sure they really represent

the landing page. The linked words should even be present on the

page you are taking your visitor to. If not, you might end up hurting

your SEO. But with careful linking, looking at your words and matching

them on the page you are linking to, will be good, if not great for your

on-page SEO.

Links

Surrounded words

Surround your linked words with good keywords and

relevant words if possible. It is not only the linked words itself

that are considered as important and describing words for

the linked page, but also close by words to the linked words.

Example

Rugs and carpets should be cleaned with our products for

best result. You can order our cleaning products for rugs and

carpets here.

Sitemap

The search engines like when you have an up-to-date sitemap. These

can be built in plain old HTML or special Google sitemap formats. The

sitemap will show the search engine what pages your website have

and you have a greater chance of getting all pages of your website

indexed. There are many different ways of creating and presenting a

site map, they can be visible for the visitor and they can be just there

for the search engines.

If you have an account with Google Webmaster tools you can place

a site map on the server and just add it to the webmaster tools and

Google will benefit from it when crawling your website. There are tools

on internet that will help with creating a sitemap for your website.

FAQ

You could consider having a page with FAQ. This page is a page

where you again would use all your good keywords and explain

your business / website to the viewer while including keywords

good for your SEO. At the same time this could save you and your

customer time while showing that you have the customers

concerns foremost in mind.

Example:

Your potential client might write in Google: “How to change a tap

in the kitchen?” and you are a plumber. You could write those

words as a FAQ question and then explain that you can buy the

tap and call me and I do the job

Meta codes

In many website building tools and systems you will find places

where you can fill in the meta codes. It will usually have one for the

whole site, in the Global configuration, and then a meta section for

every page as well. These codes are then added to the codes of

the page produced by the system.

Meta Title is one of the most important codes on the website!

The Meta Title is visible at the top in some browsers and you can

see words describing your website. If you don’t have a meta title,

the search engines will take the name of your page or something

else on your website and use that as a meta title. You could end up

with something like “Contact us”.

Contact us, could be contact anyone, anywhere in the world. It

does not explain anything to the search engines.

Meta Titles

Meta Title

The meta title should be different on every page and not have

more than 60 characters including the spaces. Try again to

place the good keywords in the beginning if possible and the

words you use in the title should also be present somewhere on

the page in the copy/text.

Meta title - visible in Google

From this

Meta Description

The Meta description tag should be used to write the description of

your site and this code is generally used as the description of that page

in a search result.

When writing the meta description you should make sure that the

keywords in that description can be matched with the words on that

page. If they are not to be found on the page itself, then you will not

benefit from those good keywords. Your good keywords should be as

early as possible in your description.

It is recommended that the meta description contains around 156

characters and this is including the spaces.

Example of a meta description in the codes

<meta name="description" content=“Web design and web production

by Website Adelaide. We build websites for small business all over the

world from Adelaide, South Australia. ">

Meta description is also visible in Google. It is the grey text you

see under the green linked website text.

It is recommended that the meta description contains around

156 characters including spaces.

Example of a meta description in the codes

<meta name="description" content=“Web design and web

production by Website Adelaide. We build websites for small

business all over the world from Adelaide, South Australia. ">

See a good example of Metropolitan plumbing company in

Adelaide using good keywords in their description and title,

plumber Adelaide, Plumbing service, Adelaide, plumbers.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are not at all important anymore. Some search

engines might still use them and it is a list of keywords that should

match the words of your page. The tag should be a maximum

of 256 characters.

Example: <meta name="keywords" content="web design, web

construction, website, website for small businesses, Jaroslava

Vagner Svensson, web builder for small businesses, website

builder Adelaide, web design Adelaide, web construction in

Adelaide, South Australia“>

I hope this eBook has been helpful. There could easily be 100

pages added about SEO and On-Page SEO, but I have

highlighted some of easiest and most important factors.

If you have any questions or need help with your On-Page SEO

please contact jaroslava@websiteadelaide.com

Website Adelaide offer packages with On-Page SEO that could

be a good start for your online marketing.

www.websiteadelaide.com is geographically targeted for South

Australia in Google to be able to compete with big companies

and budgets, but you can always find the website by typing in

the domain name. I work with clients from all over the word.