Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Previously we looked at the basics of keyword positioning as a means of helping Google understand the content of your webpage. Continuing on from that let’s look at applying these techniques to our entire website.
Going back to our Rattan Furniture shop example, we’ve already optimised our home page, so what can we do to optimize our inner pages? The OnPage SEO techniques we covered last time still apply and should be used on every page on the website. But, do we want our inner pages to be targeting the same keywords in the same manner?
In a word, the answer is no. There’s no point for us to target the same keywords. Each page of our site is going to have specific and hopefully unique content which we will be optimizing in exactly the same manner as we did last time.
This time, however, there is a little more that we can do. We can build more SEO factors into our sub pages through navigation, file structure and file naming.
Let’s imagine that our Rattan Furniture site consists of the homepage, and about page, a contact page, and three pages each consisting of one particular piece of rattan furniture. The first thing to remember is that we want the content of all of our sub pages to relate nicely to our homepage, as well as the content on those pages themselves.
Firstly, let’s look at our navigation. Ideally, our links will be text rather than images, and the “anchor” text of them will relate nicely to what’s on the destination page. It is also beneficial for our page to be named with our keywords for that page in the filename.
Our navigation and filenames, including our 3 products, could be something like:
- Home (index.html)
- About Shop Name (about-shop-name.html)
- Rattan Garden Chair (rattan-furniture/rattan-garden-chair.html)
- Rattan Conservatory Table (rattan-furniture/rattan-conservatory-table.html)
- Rattan Patio Set (rattan-furniture/rattan-patio-set.html)
- Contact Us (contact-us.html)
As you can see, I’ve filed our products in their own folder called “rattan-furniture”. This nicely ties our products, such as patio-set.html together with the overall theme of our site. With this in mind, let’s look at the optimisation of one of our pages.
As before, our page title can take something like the following format:
Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2
But this time we can just focus on the content of that particular page, rather than the general keywords. So, let’s look at our Garden Chair page. Our TITLE will be:
Shop Name | Rattan Garden Chair
We’ll keep it nice and specific here, there’s no need for us to put anymore in here. What we’ve done here is cover a nice variation to one of our original keyphrases. By creating variations such as these we increase the chances of us capturing traffic, which is what this whole process is really about.
The rest of the page will be optimised as before: our H1 tag will match our TITLE tag, our page description will contain the keywords in the TITLE, our images will have an ALT attribute with our keywords inside and the image filename will also include our keywords and we’ll have a few instances of our keywords in our body text, with one instance enclosed in <STRONG> tags.
This we can apply to all of our remaining pages. Remember not to just pepper the pages with too many keywords, keep it relevant to humans and Google will understand.
The Final Touches
Before we move onto promoting our website we’re going to make sure we’ve added an XML sitemap to our site. You can generate Google-friendly sitemaps here. An XML sitemap will just help Google that little bit more to trawl ALL of your pages, and if your site includes dynamically generated pages, this will be incredibly helpful to GoogleBot.
We’re also going to install Google’s Webmaster Tools on our pages and submit our XML sitemap to it. We should also install Google Analytics too. These tools are going to be very helpful when we start our impending link building campaign, as they’ll help us monitor our progress and see what’s working and what isn’t.
Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.
He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.
He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.
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