Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO
In the previous installment we looked at finding the best keywords for us to target with our website. Now that we have our list compiled we need to start working on our page, with the goal of helping Google really understand the contents of the page.
Once Google understands completely what your pages are about, it can then start coupling this with your backlinks to decide where to put you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
So how do we do this? When search engines were in their infancy, SE’s tried to understand the contents of pages by calculating things such as keyword density.
Techniques such as keyword stuffing could then be used to fill the page with the desired keywords and thereby raising the density for that term, and in turn ranking better for it.
Nowadays SEs, and in particular Google, are a lot smarter. They no longer look at your keyword density, and instead use other markers to understand a page.
These markers are semantic markers already built into HTML. HTML was originally conceived with the idea that the way a page was constructed would format the information, tag it, in a way that made it understandable.
The use of <h1> tags, for example, aren’t just there for styling purposes.
Semantics in HTML
These tags give you the chance of not only greater control over the styling of your pages, but also they provide good explanations of your pages. By placing our keywords in these semantic tags, we can put more emphasis on the words we want, and make Google’s job a lot easier by spoon feeding it the content of our pages.
These semantic markers include:
TITLE
META Description
H1 – H6
STRONG
Before we get placing our keywords within these tags, it’s important to remember that Google tries it’s damndest to be human. GoogleBot wishes it was human. And with this in mind, it likes pages to be relevant to humans, and readable by humans, so we’re not going to go overboard here – keyword stuffing is not acceptable simply because it’s not useful to humans.
Using our Rattan Furniture as an example, keyword stuffing in a title might look like the following:
<title>Rattan Furniture, Furniture Rattan, Rattan, Rattan Garden Furniture, Rattan</title>
This just isn’t necessary. Simply saying something many times is not going to make GoogleBot rank you better. GoogleBot isn’t in charge of rankings, it just parses and indexes pages. Remember, OnPage SEO generally isn’t going to shoot you up the rankings by itself, so there’s little point wasting your time doing this kind of activity.
Something more appropriate, something more human-friendly might take this format:
Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2
So in our Rattan Furniture example:
Shop Name | Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture
This would be effective for our homepage – it’s nice and general about the content of our site, contains all of our keywords and isn’t unnatural looking.
The next place for our keywords is out META description tag. This text is often displayed in SERPs, so again, we need to make this human friendly, descriptive, and punchy too; this is our hook to get people to click on our site so it really needs to include a call to action. Keep it reasonably short, under 25 words if possible. Obviously we’ll include our keywords and phrases in here too, again, remembering not to keyword stuff.
As for the META Keywords tag, Google does not read or index this. But, Yahoo and MSN do so it’s worth including them. Keep it to one instance per word.
Next up we’ll be using our <h1> tag. This is our main heading for the page. I’ve seen many designers who are being far too clever for their own good using this tag to display the corporate logo.
Whilst semantically I suppose this would be correct, it’s a wasted opportunity if you ask me. We’ll use the <h1> tag here to re-affirm to Google the contents of this page by slightly reworking our TITLE:
<h1>Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture from Shop Name</h1>
After that we’ll try and include a few instances of our keywords and keyphrases throughout the body copy of our homepage. Remember that our keyphrases overlap nicely so if we just include 1 instance of each, we’ll have 3 instances of “rattan” and 5 instances of “furniture” without doing any stuffing.
We don’t want “furniture” to overtake “rattan” by too much, so we’ll try to add a couple of extra “rattan”s to even them out. It may be prudent to split the text up into a section for each of our keyphrases and use the <h2> – <h6> tags to emphasize each particular keyphrase.
We’ll also place the first instance of our keyphrase in the body inside a <strong> tag to emphasize it.
We must also remember to apply an “alt” description to any images placed on the page. The same applies to everything that went before – no keyword stuffing – a short description of the image is best, including 1 instance of our main keyphrase:
<img src=”images/rattan-furniture.jpg” alt=”rattan patio, garden and conservatory furniture” />
We can put variations of our keyphrases on other images, but remember to not keyword stuff, make it a good description of the image and keyword rich.
Apply all of the above and you’re on your way to having a nicely optimised page. Next time we’ll be continuing with OnPage SEO, and looking at optimizing the sub pages of your site, and what kind of navigation structures your site should have along with page titles and other naming conventions.
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.
Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.
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