Following the keyword research, on page optimisation is often the first step. Please understand that each and every page of your website needs to be optimised. This will not pose too much difficulty if your website is rather small but if you have dozens (or hundreds) of pages, the work to be done will be substantial.
Here are eleven on page optimisation factors that may impact your SEO:
Web Design
Web Design impacts SEO in a variety of ways:
- The website design should be attractive and professional so as to keep your visitors on your site as long as possible.
- Website coding should be as “clean” as possible and should validate with the “W3C validation tool” whenever possible.
- Your images and coding should be optimised so as to maximise the loading speed of your site.
Meta Title
The “meta title” information is added to the page source (i.e. your website coding) and should be kept relatively short (no more than 60-80 characters) and should include the two-to-three keyword phrases you are specifically trying to optimise the page for.
Meta Description
The meta description text should read well and must include your primary keyword phrase and should be relevant to the page you are optimising for. The meta description is generally shown to searchers just beneath the clickable title. If your description tells of a benefit or evokes curiosity in the reader, you will enhance your ability to get visitors. Google will only display the first 156 characters (including spaces) of your meta description so it’s best to use that as your maximum length.
Meta Keywords
Most SEO Experts agree that the meta keywords are worthless when it comes to SEO and so should be kept to minimum.
Web Page URL
It is highly recommended that the web page URL includes your primary keyword phrase. If you were targeting the term, “search engine optimisation,” for example, you might change the url to be:
www.yourdomain.com/search-engine-optimisation or even www.domain.com/search-engine-optimisation.html.
Page Content
The on page content must be unique to your website and should also include the keyword phrases you are targeting. You don’t need to worry about the specific “keyword density” anymore as that is mostly a thing of the past but it does help to include the terms you are specifically targeting at least once.
On Page Link Text
As you can control your on page link text, you can increase your on page optimization for a term by using the term in the text link that points to your other page. The gain is generally considered minimal so this should only be done sparingly and only when the keyword phrase is relatively short.
Outbound Links
Search engines expect a website to link to others on the same or similar topic as there can never be the one all and be all source on the internet. Therefore it is ok to have outbound links to authority sites as long as you are not competing with them for same products or services or else you may end up losing visitors.
Visit Depth
Search engines track how many pages of your site the visitor looked at before leaving and which specific page they exited from. You can see this data for yourself when viewing your web stats and can use the data to help you improve your visitor’s experience.
Visit Duration
Many search engines track how long your visitors remain on your site. The longer the average is, the more apt the search engines are to believe your site is relevant to the keyword phrase that brought them to your web page in the first place.
Page Load Speed
The search engines do their best to deliver the best possible visitor experience and if your pages take forever to load, it’s easy to conclude that you will not be able to retain visitors let alone inspire them to return. A well defined on page optimisation framework yields better and quicker results with off page optimisation.
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