importance of on-page factors
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On-page factors
On-page factors are those factors that are on your website and which are directly within your control. While it may be obvious, you must understand that each page on your website must be linked. If you have submitted your main page to a search engine (or some other website is linking to the main page of your website) you MUST make sure that the main page is linked to other pages and those pages have links to other pages, etc. If you have a page on your website that has no back links from other pages it will never be seen by search engines and you will be pretty much the only person aware of its existence (which doesn't help the main idea of generating traffic).
Selecting domain name
Importance of domain name for high rankings in search engine optimization can barely be overestimated. A well-selected domain name helps to achieve very good results and generate traffic especially when it is complemented by other on-page and off-page optimization techniques. It stands a little different from the other on-page factors as it is not 100% within your control - domain name has to be unique and it isn't something you want to change frequently (preferably not at all), since your promotional efforts are targeting towards this particular domain and if you get a new domain name - the work has to be done all over again. So put some time into selecting an optimal domain name. Below are things to consider.
As it has been discussed you should have a set of keywords and key phrases with individual pages targeting their particular keyword. For a domain name however you should identiryf your main target keyword(s) or key phrase and try to register a domain name that contains those words, while still remaining easy to read and remember.
At this point it is often difficult to find a straight-forward domain name that has your keywords but you should still try to avoid domain names that can confuse your visitors. Repetitive letters is one sure way to cause confusion - for example John's Socks, would it be johnssocks or johnsocks? You can be sure your visitors will never remember and a significant portion of your traffic are returning visitors, who do not come to your website through search engines but come there directly because they remember it based on previous positive experience.
Let us consider an example. Let's say you want a site about car engines. Your first pick might be carengine.com. BUT, first of all it's taken but even if it wasn't it isn't optimal because it looks weird to a human eye - you first read the word "care" and then struggle to understand what "ngine" might mean. For this reason, car-engine.com would be a better pick but unfortunately it's taken. However the-car-engine.com is available (at least it was at the time of writing this article) and does the job just as well, so I would go for that.
Main TLDs (top level domains) are .com, .net, .org etc. I would say .com is your first pick as it is something that most people would automatically add to the address. If you can't find a free .com TLD, then try .net. If you manage to get a really good domain name, you might want to consider registering all main TLDs to make sure your traffic is not deluted by someone else registering a similar address.
Registering a domain
A domain name has to be registered. Registration is done on annual basis and it does cost money. Not a major investment - usually under 10 USD a year. One other alternative is to get a sub-domain at another website (i.e. www.yoursubdomain.somesite.com), which you can get for free, but that does not produce results anywhere close to having a separate domain name, so even though this site is about generating money with minimal investment my recommendation would be to register your own domain name.
You can search for available domains at a domain registrar (I hesitate to recommend any particular one - just do a search for 'register domain' and you will get plenty of results to choose from). As you will be looking for a domain name you will notice that many obvious domain names have already been registered, so you will have to be creative and try to find a combination of words that has not yet been registered but does not make your website name bulky or hard to read. Some of the registrars offers tools for selecting domain names, that offer alternatives if domain name you selected has already been registered.
Other considerations when selecting a domain name
While proper optimization techniques can help increase popularity of your domain, misuse of some tactics can hurt a domain and even get it banned from search engines. Before you finalize your selection make sure that domain is not black listed or banned. One site that offers a tool to check domain black lists is blacklistalert.com. A site that gives a registration history for a domain: http://domain-history.domaintools.com. If you want to get details you need to pay, but you can still see if there are any previous records of domain registration for free.
Directory and file naming
Similarly to picking the domain name mentioning your keywords in directory names and file names also helps to improve your page ranking. It does not have same level of effect as mentioning keywords in domain name, but file and directory naming is still believed to be of importance and since it does not require as much effort, my suggestion is to carefully think through your website structure. Try to name files according to what the content is in them, perhaps create several sub-directories and give them descriptive names.
Example of optimizing a domain name and site structure:
Let us continue with the example of an informational site about car engines. So we picked the domain www.the-car-engine.com.
Then perhaps create directories devoted to engine types: www.the-car.engine.com/diesel, www.the-car.engine.com/gas, www.the-car-engine/hybrid. Then create particular pages in these directories (for example in diesel) www.the-car-engine.com/diesel/fuel-economy.html, www.the-car-engine.com/diesel/emissions.html, www.the-car-engine.com/diesel/efficiency.html etc. So, with such naming technique, when someone will looking for "diesel engine fuel economy" your site is likely to be treated by a search engine as being more relevant and as a result will appear higher in search engine results.
When thinking out website structure, keep in mind that all pages must be interlinked. If a page does not have a link pointing to it either from your site or from an external site, search engines may not even be aware of this page's existence (also see sitemap section).
Page title
Page title is one of the most important on-page factors. It is completely within your control and with some basic considerations you will be able to significantly improve your page ranking by assigning your pages proper titles.
Each page should have its own title that depicts page content. No point in simply repeating your website name in the title as it gives little idea to the visitor and the search engine what that particular page is about.
The title has to be descriptive, yet consize. Mention keywords but make sure that it looks natural to a human visitor. In my experience it is also good to have some variation in the combination and order your keywords are appearing. Going back to our diesel engine fuel economy, rather than giving it a title "diesel engine fuel economy", I would do something like "Fuel economy of diesel engine". If not better for a search engine, it looks better to a human eye. As the title is the first and most noticeable part of information about your website that appears in the search results, it should be similarly appealing to a search engine (to be ranked higher) and a human user (to persuade them to click on your page).
Meta tags
Importance of meta tags is often argued. Some refer to them as important factor others say meta tags have no importance whatsoever. The truth is, different search engines put different weighed importance on different meta tags, but because some meta tags like keywords are so easy to manipulate and had been largely abused my opinion search engines tend to pay little attention to them.
Nonetheless, I still prep the meta tags on my sites as they still may help if done properly and every bit of help is needed in a competitive field. I will consider three meta tags that I use on my sites as part of search engine optimization – title, description, keywords. Similarly to title, meta tags should be individual to each page and not simply repeated across all pages on your website. Remember – they are meant to provide information about a particular page, otherwise they are of little value.
Importance and even necessity of a title meta tag is hard to establish as it is supposed to provide the same information as the title of the page. In my opinion it can't hurt (unless it is completely different from the title). What I usually do on my pages, is reiterate title text in meta-title.
Description meta tag should do just what ithe name implies – describe what a particular page is about. It can be longer than title (even couple of sentences). Description meta tag is actually one meta tag, which is undoubtfully important. First of all, search engines tend to pay more attention to information contained in description meta tag. Second of all, it is usually displayed in the search engine results right under the page title to give idea to the human reader what a page returned in search results is about. So it is equally important for search engine and a human visitor since a well-written description may persuade the visitor to click on your page among others returned in SERPs.
Keywords meta tag is completely ignored by some major search engines and others pay marginal attention to it – all for the same reason – they are way to easy to manipulate and have been misused for years. However, a properly written keywords meta tag can still be of an advantage. The basic concept to keep in mind when writing a keywords meta tag is to only mention keywords that actually appear in this particular page content. If you simply put every possible keyword you would like to target in this meta tag, but the page contains no information containing these keywords, it is highly unlikely to produce any positive results.
Header tags
The meaning of header tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5) is to organize content on the page and give human visitor and a search engine good structural picture of the page. The number after letter H is meant to indicate level of importance with 1 being more general, 2 – being more concentrated on a topic, 3 even more concentrated etc. Make sure to repeat your keywords in different combinations in the header tags but do it naturally, so that your header tags fulfill their primary purpose – provide structural clarity.
As far as search engines are concerned H1 tags are considered more important/relevant, however, I strongly believe that it is a combination of headers and other content on the page that produces results.
Anchor text
Anchor text is text that appears inside a link (between the a-tags). Remember how we discussed the importance of building external links to your site, which mention your keywords? Well, the same goes to internal links between pages on your website. When you are linking from a page on your website to another page on your website you have to try to use the target page keywords in the link text. This helps to increase ranking of the target page in respect to that particular keyword.
Let's take our old example with car engine pages. Say, you are writing content for your diesel engine fuel economy page. It would be a good idea to mention that hybrid engines offer even higher level of fuel efficiency and hyperlink the keywords to the hybrid engine page. This will help improve ranking of your hybrid engine page in relation to the hyperlinked text.
Internal anchor text on your own pages are typically not regarded as important as external links with anchor text pointing to your webpages but still provide considerable support to your page ranking when done properly.
I would say that the two main pieces of anchor text on any website are very often neglected – the menu and the sitemap.
Site menu
Your site menu is the main anchor text on your menu (not always is, but it should be). Think about it - the main menu is repeated on each page. This means that each page consistenly links all main pages of your website using the same anchor text. This significantly improves importance of these main pages in relation to the keywords used. So make sure that your menu links are descriptive and try to mention keywords where possible (yet still keeping it natural to an eye).
One of the worst things you can do for your site ranking is use images as menu links, as having an image instead of anchor text tells search engine practically nothing about the page you are linking to. Yet you see websites using image links in the site menu very often. Perhaps one reason for that is design considerations, however it is possible to have text links styled in a way that does not detriment the look of a website. This is however a more of technical discussion involving html/css techniques, which I will not be discussing now. For a small demonstration you can look at menu links on this website - they use a graphical background with a roll-over effect, yet the menu is still essentially a text link.
One other technique that helps improve usability of your website as well as improve search engine ranking of your website is repeating the menu at the bottom of the page (the footer). If user scrolled down to the page and then wants to go to the next page they don't need to scroll up to the main menu, they can just click on the bottom menu. This improves usability. Bottom menu is typically smaller and thus can have more descriptive anchor text as links (similarly to
Website map
Sitemap is a list of links to all pages on your website, preferably with organized hierarchy and a description of what each page is. Sitemap is important for several reasons. Sitemap improves usability as it allows your visitors to easily find content on your website that they are interested in. Similarly to site menu sitemap also creates a great opportunity to add descriptive anchor text and thus to improve rankings. Finally having a sitemap is a way to make sure that all pages on your website are linked and get indexed by search engines. For this reason, search engines also tend "to like" site maps.
In fact, search engines tend to like sitemaps so much they encourage webmasters to make a separate sitemap just for search engines. This sitemap is different from a traditional sitemap, which is meant for human readers and search engines. Sitemaps designed for search engiens are written using XML (extensible markup language) and provide a collection of all links on your website to a search engine. You can then submit your sitemap for example to Google using Google Webmaster tools, which is believed to speed up indexing of your pages.
Other search engine optimization techniques
No single optimization technique by itself can achieve very singificant results. Ultimate success of your search engine optimization efforts requires combined use of different optimization techniques, whereby each technique supports and complements other techniques used. "Follow through" with a keyword - from page title, to metas, to headers, to links and to content. When keyword is "promoted" using all of these techniques, this is when your optimization techniques will be most effective. Below is a discussion of additional optimization techniques that can help to improve search engine rankings of your pages.
Bold and italic text
Sometimes you want to highlight a part of your text for the reader. You can do this by making the text bold, italic or underlined. If you properly designed your content, these important parts will be your keywords. Marking parts of the content in this way seems to have some effect in improving your page ranking in relevance to that particular keyword, thus not only improving usability but also search engine rankings of your pages.
Optimizing images
Images by themselves are invisible to a regular search engine, therefore a search engine doesn't have any clue what an image is about, not without your help. Unless you are running a website where images represent your main content, I would not regard images as a huge traffic generating mechanism. They are however capable of generating some additional visitors. My sites generate about 2% of the traffic from image searches.
As you can see traffic increase from images is not major but neither is the effort required to optimize images. All you have to do is give descriptive names to your images and use alt tags. For example, if you have a picture of a diesel engine on your page instead of inserting image as
Optimizing text content
Text content is the main value to your visitor if you have an informative website like this one. Content, content, content - this is what you need to provide to your visitors. Write a lot of content, make it dynamic, make it easy to read. This is to create value. Now, to make sure this value gets to people who may be potentially interested in your topics, you need to try to organize content in the way that search engines will regard it as more relevant for a particular topic.
The main guidelines are to remember to mention your keywords in the text content of a page, try to use them in different variations, remember to mention them in the first two paragraphs of a page, as top portion of a page is usually considered more relevant than content towards the bottom. If you have a lot of topics/keywords to cover, create additional content pages - don't try to cover everything with one page. A rule of thumb is two - max three keywords per page. Be also prepared that visitors will not always be coming to your main page. This is an assumption that many beginning webmasters make. Visitors coming from search engines will enter your site on a page that has content that they were interested in. This means that you should not try to only optimize your front page, but each individual page for a certain set of keywords.
There is also a concept of keyword density, which is a percentage indicating how often a certain keyword/keyphrase appears in page content. Keyword density is believed to have an affect on ranking a page and there is a lot of debate about optimal keyword density. My personal belief that fine-tuning your pages to a certain optimal keyword density isn't really worth the effoft, as search engine algorithms are constantly changing and if you extensively rely on such an 'volatile' factor one day you can unexpectedly see your pages drop in search engine results. I prefer to use a combination of techniques that has been discussed and keep content flow natural. This seems to produce consistent good results.