Onpage SEO or How to Optimize Your Website for Your Keywords

This is a guest post by Alex Petrovic, you can find out more in his bio at the end of this post

Great part of onsite optimization relies on keyword placement and optimizing your pages for your chosen keywords. Once you have done the research and find the keywords you wish to target you need to implement them into your pages and posts in order to successfully engage in link building and expect to see some results.

Now we don’t live in 1999 anymore, so keyword density is a thing of the past, regardless of bunch of old articles that still float around the web, and some can even be found in top results (way to go Google). What you should be focusing on are LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing), or basically synonyms and keyword variations that will enrich your content and give it more relevance to your topic.

Example:
Main Keyword: Running Shoes
LSI Keywords: footwear, sneakers, tennis shoes,
Keyword variations: men running shoes, women running shoes, running shoes on sale, running shoes for flat feet, ergonomic running shoes, Nike running shoes (insert brand name in front), running shoes review and the list goes on…

The important thing here is to make your content varied with keywords; this will help you write a quality post without thinking of slapping on keywords in each sentence. Now let’s talk about keyword placement and positioning. Here is an overview of things we need to watch out for:

  • Titles
  • URL’s
  • Content titles
  • In content keywords
  • Internal Linking
  • Alt’s

 

Title Tags

Title tags are one of the biggest priorities when it comes to keyword placement as this is the title of the document and search engines find it very important. As you probably know search engines read the page from top to bottom, so the first think they look at is the title tag, this is the first thing that gives them a clue of what the page is about.
The best practice for titles is to include a sentence like phrase where your keywords are placed and add the company or website name at the end, example:

New York Electrical Bikes Shopping Store – Company Name

The title is descriptive and it has important keywords placed, it also helps with branding. Note that the example title is 55 characters, so I could have placed a word or two more, but no need, you just need to be mindful of the maximum character limit, which is 70 characters that Google will show in their search results.

URL Structure

Url structure doesn’t have as much importance as the title tags, but nevertheless it has an overall influence on the onsite optimization. It is one little piece that needs to come into its own place like everything else in the SEO world.

Keywords in your URL will influence and improve the overall relevance of the page in question. Now there is a question whether you should use only the main keyword or the entire title as the URL (this mostly doesn’t apply to ecommerce websites as they mostly deal with dynamic URL’s), example:
1.http: //www. website. org/category/three-words-keyword/
2.http: //www. website. org/category/three-words-keyword-that-will-help-with-something-something/
Some will argue that it is better to use just the main keyword; others (myself included) are more for the second option. If we are talking about main pages like contact or a particular service than its fine to use the main keyword, but for posts or product pages the URL is better of being as descriptive as possible. You will also be adding additional keywords to your URL. The main thing to remember with titles and URL’s is to put your main keyword at the beginning.

Content titles

With everything said about titles and URL’s there is not much need to talk too much about title of the content or product. The same rules apply, the difference is that you should always place the one main title in the heading so that search engines would recognize it as a title of the product or post, usually H1 tags, for subheading as they move down the ladder of importance you can assign h2, h3 and lower values.

Content Keywords

And here comes the golden part of onsite keyword optimization, including your keyword in the content.

Basically, no keyword stuffing, don’t repeat one keyword and use the same keyword over and over again. The idea is to create a valuable piece, great content or amazing product description that speaks for itself. When you write about something you are bound to mention the product/topic/name/keyword a few times in the post. Now once you finish go over the post and try to vary it a bit by adding LSI keywords or using keyword variations like long tail keywords containing the main keyword.
As for the placement, which is also arguable, but in most cases you should include the main keyword once at the beginning of the content, and after that you can just sprinkle variations without giving too much importance to where they should be placed. Maybe a reminder at the end can do you good.
With keywords already placed in the title, url, content title, do you think you need to place a bunch of them in the content. The answer is obvious, so just concentrate on quality content and you will do just fine.

Internal Linking

Breadcrumbs and internal linking are important for keyword optimization, especially if you are linking from within the content. Keywords that you use to connect your pages give significant importance to those pages, especially if the link comes from a related content.
If you link from content about wood stoves to a page about furnaces that is great as it is logical place to put your link, but linking to an online casino just because you said that a certain brand of stoves can be a gamble is way off limits.
You have to think carefully about the anchor you use and from which pages you link out, if there is relevance you will boost up your pages significantly just by implementing a few internal links. As with everything else, don’t overdo internal linking, keep it to a logical level and link if there is a reason to link, not just because you can.

Alt Tags

Yes, images should be optimized for your main keyword; they are an important part of onsite optimisation. First off, don’t upload images titled DSC2537, name them properly using your keywords, let’s take an example:
Name: mint-chocolate.jpg
Title: Dark Mint Chocolate
Alt Tag: Dark Mint Chocolate Manufacturer name
This would look something like:  <img alt=”Dark Mint Chocolate Manufacturer name” title=”Dark Mint Chocolate” src=”http:// www .website. org/uploads/mint-chocolate.jpg “>

Images don’t just decorate the page or give insight to the viewer what the product is, they also tell the search engines a little bit more about your page, so don’t neglect them.

To summarize, keywords have a few places where they need to be, but remember to be moderate about them. Slapping keywords all over through content, links and alts will get you a very different result, one you wouldn’t hope for. This can all sound too much, but trust me, this is something you finish within a few minutes, and it’s that easy and simple once it becomes a standard practice, well everything besides content itself can be finished in a few minutes.

Before you think of social media, link building, landing pages to target, you need to sort out your onpage, and these few keyword practices will greatly help you in achieving just that.

image credit:Idea Go

 

This is a Guest Post by Alex Petrovic is an SEO strategist with  Dejan SEO company
where is holds the position of Link building team leader

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CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.
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