SEO Made Easy Part Three – On Page Factors

In parts one and two of this article series I introduced the advantages that WordPress offers when engaging in SEO, and some free plugins that can help you get there, as well as the importance of doing effective keyword research before beginning any serious SEO campaign.

With these two things covered, it's time to discuss your content strategy. The first and most important element to this is what is sometimes referred to as your "on-page" SEO strategy.

Start At The Top

We're going to look first at the nuts and bolts of the written page content, starting from (where else?) the top. Once you've identified the one keyword phrase (and only one!) that this page should focus on, there the matter of placing that phrase appropriately throughout your page.

Title

The first element is your page title. This information will appear between your title tags at the top of your HTML code, and it will also be the text that appears at the top of your browser window.

Meta Description

Next comes the page description. This will appear in your HTML code near the top and it's call your meta description. Readers won't see this on the page, but it's the text that Google tends to use to describe your page in its search results. Using an SEO plugin (if you're a WordPress user) will allow you to create unique meta descriptions for each of your posts and pages. If you're lacking one, Google will likely just pull some content off of your page that relates to the keyword phrase being searched for.

Heading Tags

These are other important hints that a search engine will look for on your page to determine what it's about. The theory? If the author cares enough about the keyword phrase in question to use it in one or more of his or her page headings, then the page is likely relevant to the keyword being searched for. It's a matter of priority.

But just what are heading tags? They are like headlines in a newspaper, and you see them all the time on web pages everywhere. They are slightly bigger text, sometimes in a different font, and will mark the beginning of the web page or of a particular section of a page. You create them easily in WordPress, or by wrapping them in "H" tags. There are tags for heading sizes 1 through 6, 6 being the smallest. Use these strategically throughout your content. HINT: The most important is having an "H1" tag on your page with your exact keyword phrase. Luckily WordPress creates most of these automatically out of the page titles and places the heading at the top of the content.

Bold, Italic, Underline, Etc.

Another way to tell search engines (and your readers) which elements of a page are important, you can use any of these styling methods, or more to emphasize your keyword phrase. Do this sparingly, but try to get some of this type of keyword placement into your page. Again, it's all about priority and relevancy.

Tags

If you're using WordPress or another blogging software you will likely be able to apply tags to your blog posts. This is another place to enter in your keyword phrase, along with some other related keyword phrases. Another advantage to tagging is that the blog will create "tag pages" with a stream of posts that are tagged with a specific keyword. These tag pages can also benefit your site's SEO, giving increased relevancy to your keyword niche.

This heading is all in caps because it's important! You may be thinking after all of these keyword placement techniques that your page will contain only your keyword phrase. This is exactly what you don't want to do! This will be perceived as "keyword stuffing" by search engines, a practice that will get you turfed in no time.

Instead you want to place lots of quality relevant content around your keyword phrases and keep the occurrence of them relatively low. How low? Studies indicate that your keyword phrase should make up no more than 5% of your overall written content.

This means that your page will need enough content to support the 5% rule and still use all of these techniques in your keyword phrase usage. So you had better get writing!

Isn't this all a bit "unnatural"?

Now of course you might be thinking about the difficulty of using this kind of a clinical approach; especially when it comes to natural readability for your audience. This is something of an art form, but you'll get better with time, and no one will blame you for being strategic if your content is good overall.

Drew Clifton is a certified, professional SEO in Canada, who also performs professional web design in Canada. His favorite publishing platform to work on is WordPress, and on his website you can find examples of his recent work, a description of his services, as well as some free advice!