There isn’t an exact mathematical formula which makes a certain page of your website rank on page 1 of Google.
As most SEOs will know, search engine optimisation isn’t a guaranteed art form and the process isn’t necessarily black and white. By fine-tuning your on page optimisation so that it’s as textbook as it can be, is the best start to getting your page ranked.
Best Practice Techniques for On Page Perfection
So what should a perfectly optimised page look like? A very quick and simple answer would be to use your key phrase in your URL, in your title tag and meta description, in your H1 tag, in your alt tags (images) and several times throughout the on page copy. But is there more that you can do? Here are a few more things that you should know about perfecting on page optimisation.
A Few Tips for Your URLs
1. Shorter URLS perform better than longer ones.
2. Replace numerical URL slugs with keyword rich URLs – the closer the keyword to the domain name, the better it will perform.
3. Although it’s not recommended to use hyphens in your root domain name, you should use hyphens as keyword separators in the URL slug – avoid using underscores altogether as there has been no evidence as of yet that they are more search engine friendly than the trusty hyphen.
Choosing Your Page Title
Not only should your page title summarise exactly what your content is about, but it needs to be search engine friendly. This is where choosing the right key phrases for your page becomes extremely important.
Research shows that pages with the keyword as the first word to appear on the page, did significantly better than pages where the keyword appeared later on in the content.
Using Keywords Throughout Your Content
Your URL slug, title tag and meta description need to reflect the purpose/topic of the on page content, so keywords should be used use throughout your copy. The sooner you can get your keyword in the text, the better.
It’s quite difficult to find the perfect keyword density but we usually work to somewhere between 2 and 5%, depending on the type of phrase. One of our biggest content writing tips is to write as organically as possible; if your article is relevant, the keyword should naturally appear.
We know that writing a quality web page isn’t all about percentages and calculations, which is why we like to use Wordle.net to get a good visual image of our keyword density.
This is a word cloud of this blog post:
Other things to bear in mind with your content:
• Images – there has always been much debate about how much weight the alt attribute has in SEO. Whether optimising your alt tags significantly improves your rankings or not, pages with relevant images are much more attractive and digestible for web users. As images are a great source of internet traffic, it’s also recommended that you use keyword-rich filenames as well as optimising alt tags.
• Bolding / Italicising – while many people apply bold text to their web copy, research by SEOMoz has shown that it doesn’t actually carry that much weight with search engines. Italicized text however, revealed a better correlation with high rankings.
• Keyword variation – there’s so much speculation about keyword variation and expert opinions will vary. However, we believe in writing as naturally as possible and there will be organic occurrences of keyword variation.
The Influence of Links
Quality writing is important if you want to attract natural linking from other sources. But what about internal linking? We all know that internal linking is important and pages which have been linked to usually have higher rankings, so don’t underestimate of linking between the pages of your site.
There have been suggestions that links used in permanent navigation such as sidebars and footers are not included by search engines. If you have keyword-rich links, it could be useful to use to navigation.