Search engine rankings are becoming more and more competitive. Anything that can be done by your competition, that is not being done by you, is a sure fire way to stay stuck at the bottom of page one, or worse, stuck on page two or three in the search results. Onpage optimization is probably the easiest SEO to implement on your website and now this information is free on this site, there is no excuse for not implementing onpage SEO today.

Today, Google uses the text in the links that point to your website ( anchor text ) as a primary means to rank websites. Fortunately for many, it really is that simple. Unfortunately for others, it is not as simple as it may seem. Depending on the competitiveness of your search terms, and all things being equal, the difference between page one rankings and page two rankings can be something as simple as optimized title tags and a well written description.

Onpage SEO is important.

Just as important is your keyword research, your inbound link building, your internal linking, your website structure, your website content…

In reality, it is all very important and can be the difference between daily unique visitors and no daily visitors at all. Take the information in this series and apply it to your website.

Also, this entire serise of articles are available in a PDF ebook. It is free to download when you join my email newsletter.

This went out with 1999. Actually, many top SEO professionals have stated publicly that keyword density never really existed, except as a part of a service that could be sold to the unsuspecting website owner. There are still many so called SEOs who reference this relic of an idea but it really tells more about their lack of SEO knowledge more than anything else.

Do not concern yourself with keyword density.

The meta title tag is located in the top head section of each of your website’s pages. This tag has the ability to move your website in search rankings quicker than any other meta element. It is this tag that is displayed as the title for search engine results.

Affordable SEO » Affordable SEO Services » Local SEO Specialist comes from this meta title tag and should include your desired keywords and phrases. Three guesses what I am trying to rank for.

I have done extensive tests on my meta title simply to see what SEO related phrases and words drew the most traffic. I offer very affordable SEO services and have found that Affordable SEO and Affordable SEO Services send the best converting traffic to my website. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, I am only at not quite where I would like to be for affordable SEO or affordable SEO services.

I’m working on that.

I rank much better for Local SEO Specialist. I also rank well for variations of my title tag.

It is worth noting here, many of my inbound links include affordable, local and specialist in the link text, but these rankings were greatly improved by the inclusion of these words in my title tag. Other variations of my title tag placed me in similar positions in Google but the search phrases are less competitive and send less traffic. It took about six months of testing to get my site where it is now and, as of this writing, I am still not where I want to be for Affordable SEO and Affordable SEO Services.

Your title tag is your first opportunity to confirm with the search engines what your inbound links are telling them. Your most desired keywords must be in your title tag to rank well for those words or phrases. How well you rank will depend on your inbound link count, the link text and the authority of the linking website.
Google, Yahoo and MSN give you a maximum of 66 characters in your search listing title. So, the meta title for your website needs to be no longer than 66 characters. Any characters beyond the first 66 will not be displayed.

Very Important: Every page on your website must have a separate title. Your title should never contain the words Homepage and there is absolutely no reason to include your website name or address in the title. Search engines will know your web address from your url. These are the most common mistakes I see in website titles. Don’t make these mistakes.

Like keyword density, this meta tag has lost favor with the search engines several years ago. Google has stated that it ignores the meta keyword tag. Yahoo appears to recognize this tag to a minor degree and some people have stated that this tag is a good place to put misspellings of keywords but I have seen no proof that Yahoo will rank your website for misspellings found in this tag. I do agree that if
you were trying to rank for misspelled words, this would be a better place to put those words instead of visibly on your website pages.

Personally, I have keywords in my meta keyword tag but it is only because the tag is there, not because I think the tag is giving me any benefit. My own personal experiments with a two word phrase and a four word phrase placed in my own meta keyword tag produced no returned result for my website when those phrases were searched for with and without quotes ( “” ). So, I firmly believe there is no ranking ability from the meta keyword tag. You can include it or you can ignore it. It is entirely up to you.

Very Important: Though Google has stated they ignore the meta keyword tag, never put keywords into your meta keyword tag that do not directly relate to your website’s theme, topic or niche. Also, never repeat the same keywords over and over again in this tag. You do not want any search engine thinking you are trying to spam their results by stuffing keywords into the meta keyword tag.

The description is the actual text that is displayed under the title in search results. This tag is your first chance to reinforce keywords found in your title while at the same time allowing you the opportunity to make a statement that actually draws Internet searchers into your website. The description tag has very little ranking power but can add to keywords and phrases that match inbound link text and titles.
Like the title tag, the description tag is limited to no more than 149 characters long including spaces.

Though not very long, these 149 characters do allow for some flexibility in what is stated in the description tag. This tag should include keywords when they make sense. However, the best use for this tag is to increase the click through rates of the pages it is on. Description tags that entice the searcher into wanting to know more about your website tend to send more searchers into a website than one that makes little sense at all because it is stuffed with nonsensical keywords and phrases.

The following was at one time my website meta description.

Affordable SEO Services | Small Business Web Site Internet Marketing | SEO Services Every Small Business Can Afford | SEO Service @ $199.00 | SEO Training

Affordable SEO Services: Key worded phrase that matches my title.
Small Business Web Site Internet Marketing: A popular searched for phrase that describes what I do.
SEO Services Every Small Business Can Afford: A call to action phrase that again ties to the title and the beginning of the description.
SEO Service @ $199.00: Teaser phrase that answers the question “How affordable?”
SEO Training: I had to sneak that in.

The pipes ( | ) are in the description as a way to segment the different phrases in the description. This is done more as a way to draw attention to the individual phrases within the title. These are no longer in my description tag.

Something I have discovered in an experiment, I wrote several descriptions for the same page, all of which were included in the description tag. Each description was unique to a closely related set of keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases came from actual search data that my analytics showed as sending people to my site. The idea was to see if Google would display these alternate descriptions when those search phrases were searched for. That is exactly what happened.

I wrote six different descriptions, less than 149 characters long each separated by a hyphen ( – ) and found in several cases that those alternate descriptions would be displayed in the description of the search results for the keywords and phrases that I had chosen to target. This discovery provided an opportunity to control the description that is displayed in the search results when the searched for phrase is not actually on the page that is returned in the search results. Search phrases that match words or phrases that are actually on your website will commonly be pulled into the description that is displayed in the search results.

The actual description that Google displays is up to Google. My experiment with additional descriptions provides an opportunity to control this important text for readability and click through rates. I have no knowledge of any ranking benefits from adding additional descriptions. I did see that Google would piece together snippets from the different descriptions which allows for even greater flexibility in what text appears in the description tag.

A trend with some website owners is to leave the description tag empty. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this as long as you don’t mind Google piecing the description together from text on the page for you. Google will ignore some or all of the description text if the search phrase you are ranking for is found on the webpage itself and not in the description tag. These snippets of short text or phrases can and will vary from one search engine to another.

I would recommend having more description than you need over not having any description at all. Very Important: Never duplicate the same description on different pages on your website. A common reason for web pages not being indexed is duplicate titles or descriptions.

The Meta Robots tag is really not needed for the vast majority of websites unless you have a page that you do not want indexed into the search engines.

Example:

In this example, noindex tells the search engines to not include this page in the search engine index for ranking. Basically you are telling Google, Yahoo, MSN and all of the others that you do not want this page found on the Internet. There are many valid reasons for doing this. Personally, I can’t think of any that would apply to my sites.

The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to follow the links on this page. The debate on nofollowing links is too complex to begin to discuss here. Currently, nofollow is being used to protect your website from linking to questionable websites or to restrict PageRank to certain pages on your website and to prevent passing PageRank to sites that may have paid for the link on your website.

Obviously, you do not want to noindex any pages that you want to have searchers find in a search. Not having this tag in your web pages tells search engines that the page is free to crawl and index.

This tells the search engines the same thing as not having any meta robots tag at all.

There are other meta tags that can be put into the head section of a web page but none are really very important. I have seen meta tags that were completely made up and almost silly in nature. No search engine will take hints from made up meta tags to help in ranking any website. Stuffing keywords into made up meta tags can actually cause your website to be banned. Stay with the tags that are listed here to be safe and never believe any claim that a little known meta tag trick will help your website to rank in any search engine.

The body refers to the content on the webpage that is visible to searchers and any visitor to your website. Besides the title of the page, the body is probably the most important real estate on a website because the body is the content that search engines read to know what your site is about. Without the words on a web page your website says nothing at all.

The body of a web page provides opportunities to emphasize the words and phrases that you are trying to rank for. These opportunities are not only important to the search engines that find your website but also the people who find your website.

Header Tags

Header tags are tags labeled H1, H2 and H3, through to H6. I have personally never seen a website that had header tags beyond H4. Not to say that there are not any out there. I guess a website with a great deal of content may need more than a H4.

The purpose of header tags is to organize page structure, thoughts and ideas and important content on a web page. Generally, the content under a H1 is more important that the content under a H2 and a H3 and so on. In reality, I have used and have seen most websites use header tags simply as a section title with the first section being given a H1 tag and the next section being given a H2 and so on.

Many SEOs state that header tags are important onpage elements that need keywords and phrases important to that page to help with the focus and ranking of that page. I have no real test data to prove this idea wrong. Many sites that I have ranked have had header tags but some have not. I believe header tags should be used by any website with CSS style sheets because the appearance of header tags can only be controlled with style sheets.

It is common practice to put keywords and phrases into header tags. It is believed the tags help with the website rankings. I do not believe that header tags will, in any way, help a website to rank for competitive search terms. I do believe that header tags help search engines to understand what specific parts of the page are about, as well as the page as a whole. Header tags will help to focus the topic of the page they are on with search engines which will help that page to rank better for the desired words and phrases that the incoming link text and the title and description target.

Obviously, header tags can aide in your rankings but alone provide minimal ranking abilities. It is smart to include your desired search terms within your header tags but repeating the search terms is not recommended. It is best to use variations of your desired search phrases in header tags and it is best to use sentences in your header tags as opposed to just stuffing keywords into the tags.

For websites that do not use style sheets, header tags are probably not feasible. Without style sheets, header tags can be large and ugly on the page. Fortunately, websites without style sheets can still emphasize sections of a web page without styles or headers. You simply use the tag.

Any Successful SEO Strategy includes strong elements on page to emphasize words and phrases that are important to that page. Using the tag in the place of header tags with enlarged text is just as effective as header tags to organize page structure, thoughts and ideas and important content on a web page and will essentially perform the same function as header tags without putting large ugly text on your website. The tag is especially useful within the body of the web page text to help important words and especially phrases stick out to the reader of that page, as well as the search engines.

The element will not make your website rank on the first page of Google but is excellent for telling search engines what a page is about and what is important on the page.

Probably the most important element to ranking any one web page is the overall content on that page. Using keywords and phrases along with all of the text on a page is what ultimately makes a page relevant for search. Having important text on a page that you want to rank for is essential but if the remaining text on the page is not relevant to those important words and phrases, you will not rank for anything. There is an old saying, “Content is King.” This is as true as any aspect of SEO. To express the ideas and information that you want searchers to find in your website, the more content the better.

There is a common belief that 300 to 500 words on a page are enough to satisfy the search engines and your visitors. This is true, if you believe that only the minimum content requirements are satisfactory. Trust me, websites that hold top search engine positions are not doing so based on maintaining the absolute minimum requirements to satisfy what others say or believe to be the standard.

To achieve total success with your website’s search engine optimization, words mean everything. The words that point links to your website are important. The words in the title and description are important and the words on your web pages are important. The more words the better.

There you have it, onpage SEO for any website seeking higher rankings. I hope you find this information and useful. The process is easy to follow and no one is better prepared to perform onpage SEO for your website than you. This information can make a difference in your website traffic, your online leads and your Internet sales, whether those sales are for a “real” brick and mortar business or an Internet operation conducted entirely online from your kitchen table.

You are now one major step closer to ranking higher in the search results. Please let me know how it goes for you. Email me at terry@terryreeves.com to contact me directly. You can also contact me from my contact page.

To rank in Google it takes links pointing to your website. These links need to say something about your website. Unfortunately, most links to most websites or web pages say “click here”. Does click here say anything about your website?

The links that point to your website need to say what your site is about or what you do on your website. If you are a plumber in Chicago, the links to your website should look like this: Chicago plumber, Chicago Illinois plumber or even plumbers in Chicago. Link text like this tells Google what your site is about. When Google indexes your site and finds that your site is about plumbing in Chicago, you have now began the process of ranking for key words and phrases that will bring targeted searches to your website.

Onpage optimization is a process YOU need to implement on your website. Targeted link text is the process I will implement for your website to let Google, Yahoo and MSN know what your website is about and what your website needs to rank for. If you are ready to rank for search phrases that will bring customers to your website, contact me and let’s begin that process today.

Thanks for reading.

Terry Reeves