Basic On Page Optimization for beginners
March 5, 2007 – 1:40 pmI assume that you have gone through the initial parts of my SEO Tutorial .
Lets get into the topic on how to do OnPage Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization consists of basically two stages - On Page Optimization and Off Page.
OnPage optimization refers to the SEO activities we perform on a page in our site, and offpage optimization refers to the SEO activities we do on external factors which assist in a better ranking of our website.
Basic On Page optimization consists of
- Creating proper content having right keyword density
- Creating a title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag
- Creating sentences which is put into header tags h1, h2, h3, h4 etc
- Anchor text in links within the page, title tag for the link (which comes as tool tip)
- Alt tags for images
An optimum keyword density for content (current trend) is about 3-5%. i.e no of keywords / No of total words
Title tag : Its a very important entity of a web page. Its like a unique page number in a book. You need to have a very unique title for each of your pages. A keyword can be repeated in a title tag at the most 2 times (Main keyword of a page must be present in title tag at the starting position for best SEO advantage). A title tag is basically a sentence with not more than 100 characters long. Its a one liner which explains about your page.
Meta Description Tag: Its a brief description about your web page. Again main keyword in description tag carries a lot of importance.
Meta Keyword tag : You can list down the keywords present in the page one after another separated by a comma.
Earlier search engines used to rank pages based only n title, description and keyword tags. But it became obsolete when people started to misuse this fact and search engines developed algorithms to find them.
A major factor to get ranked in Google is the off page factor, which I will be explaining later. Again on page factor is very much required to keep the relevancy of page for a particular keyword.
Header tags: These are another set of tags which the search engines will have a close look at to identify the main keywords on a page. So keeping sentences containing in header tags - h1, h2, upto h4 helps in SEO. Text in H1 tag usually will be of larger size. This can be reduced by use of proper CSS (cascading style sheets).
Alt attributes for ‘img’ tags: Another important location to put your keywords for a page.
An optimum keyword density of should be maintained for the whole document, i.e including title, description, keywords , content, alt tags, header anchors etc. If you stuff keywords into a page, it will serve adverse effects than higher ranking in google.
We will discuss the donts in Onpage optimization in a later stage.