Get your Keywords on the Page

If your keywords aren’t in the content of the page it is really hard to rank for those terms. However, it can be done.

Fizbang suggests a 30 second “SearchEngine Optimization” check where you write down what your business is about in seven words or less and then remove the common words like “the” and “we”. Then you use your browser’s search function (Ctrl+F) to find those words on your homepage. If the words you wrote down aren’t on the page you may be in trouble.

Get Important Keywords in Dominant Positions

Your most important keywords should be in your page title, meta description, meta keywords, headlines and emphasized (bold) once within the body content. Including the keyword in the page URL and in an image alt attribute are also a good ideas.

The meta description tag is less important for search engine ranking than it is for the results page. Search engines often pull the meta description for display on the SERPs.Often people will copy the main headline when linking to your page so make sure that headline has your most important keywords in it.Don’t “stuff” your keywords. You shouldn’t confuse the viewer by forcing text where it doesn’t really fit. And you don’t want to confuse disabled people using audio browsers by forcing/stuffing keywords in the alt tags of your images.

If you stuff your keywords too much you may get penalized so if it makes sense to add your keywords somewhere, do it. If not, don’t.

Tip: Emphasized text should be done with plain old HTML tags like <b>, <em>, <i> or <strong> and not style sheets because the search engines do read HTML but don’t read CSS.

Keyword Density is Crap

Keyword density is measuring your keyword phrase against the rest of the text in the document. Keyword density is not important! If the search engines use it at all I suspect it is to detect keyword stuffing but there is no benefit to stuffing keywords to increase the density.

Term Weight is Important

While keyword density is debunked the search engines do seem to rely on term weight which is good news because term weight is much easier to achieve than keyword density. All term weight means is making sure your target keywords appear on the page more often than any other phrase.

Human Check

Close your eyes for 30 seconds. Think about something completely unrelated to your page. Open your eyes and see if the right keywords jump out at you. People rarely read web pages and instead skim them for content first. The search engines attempt to emulate this behavior when it comes to ranking pages so if your important keywords jumps up you are doing well.

Get a Second Opinion

Ask someone else what the page is about and see what they say. Don’t take their answer personally: web developers look at websites differently than normal users.

Spell Check

After all this work you should make sure your keywords are spelled correctly. Also, check for grammar errors as well. When developing links people are more inclined to link to pages that make them look good. If you have misspelled words and bad grammar you’ll get less links - no matter how good your ideas are.

You can rank for misspelled words though with Google’s “Did you mean:” feature being #1 for a misspelled word may damage your credibility more than help it.

Tip: Drop common misspellings if your keywords in your meta keywords tag. That way you can still rank for the terms without looking bad for the effort!

Clean Up Your Code

Code that validates can be read by the search engines. Code that doesn’t validate may or may not be read by the search engines. I recommend playing safe just to be sure.

Also, make sure your keywords are not “hidden” inside images, scripts or flash animations that the search engines can’t read.

Speed Counts

Check your load times. Faster loading is better and the search engines are starting to publicly acknowledge this. “Speed really counts.”

You can use the speed report at WebSiteOptimization.com for a diagnostic and tips for improvement.

Maintenance is Important

Every couple months check the outbound links on your pages to make sure they aren’t pointing to dead or redirected sites. You can also use Bad Neighborhood to make sure your links aren’t pointing to banned sites.

Additional Ideas and Tips for Onpage SEO

Use a CSS-based layout with positioning to put your most important content at the top of the code. If the page can survive linearization you are in good shape.

Site hierarchy is important. Make sure you are never more than 2 clicks away from your important pages to make them gain the most internal link-love. Also, make sure your site has the canonical fix in place to avoid duplicate content issues and to get the most value from the links you pick up.

When you link to pages in your site avoid generic anchor text like “click here”. Use the anchor text you would want other people to use when linking to that page including the keywords you want to rank for.

Acknowledgements

I took a look at SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO to make sure I didn’t forget anything. And HitTail inspired me to write this post.

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