Search Engine Marketing Articles

"On page factors for SEO"

By Roelof Vermeulen
14 June 2006

Introduction

SEO requires wide spread knowledge, analytical personality and the ability to merge technical and marketing knowledge. Constant research is a requirement to ensure that decisions taken are effective. In general terms for the beginner SEO the system to obtain high rankings consist out of 2 main factors. These factors are on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors require extensive knowledge of HTML and the ability to apply the knowledge and strategies whilst still keeping website usability and conversions in mind. Bear in mind that content should primarily be written and presented for human visitors, but there are some tricks you can use to make a document attractive to both.

Importance of on-page factors

With Search Engines such as Google effectively integrating over 100 on-page factors and over 200 factors in general, SEO can become extremely technical. However by simply understanding these factors you are already able to comprehend the basic principles that are needed to obtain rankings. On-page factors to a great extend are the easiest part of the entire SEO process as once it is applied correctly it very seldom needs updates or changes, in order to affect rankings. However SEO needs on-page factors to be applied correctly, in order for the other factors to effectively benefit the site’s rankings.

Keyword targeting with on-page factors

The most complex part of the entire SEO process is the effectiveness of the site to target specifically themed keywords in order to amplify their effectiveness by means of off-page factors. The entire time throughout the process usability needs to be kept in mind to ensure the most possible conversions of the pages. To a great extend keywords can be compared to the bricks of a building and all the other factors can be seen as mortar bonding the keywords together. When building a house you need to build a strong but presentable structure in order to be proud of it but also to ensure that you have value that increases in time. As with a house the more additions the house has the more its value increases. A website is exactly the same in that it needs have good keywords and good technical factors to act as mortar. At the same time it needs to be presentable and additions in pages, increases the site’s value.

Examples of important on-page factors

• Most SEO’s has no choice but to focus on technical detail in order to apply on-page factors to a website. However, when you design a site from scratch there are a complete new process that takes effect that I will explain a little later. Let’s look at the basic on-page factors that you need to address in order to ensure proper rankings.
• Page titles: Page titles apart from needing to be descriptive are one of the most important factors that indicate what keywords a page are targeting.
• Meta tags: Keyword and description meta tags are part of the minimum design standards required by the W3C website standards authority. They are also needed for Meta search engines and directories.
• H1 – H5, Bold, Italic and Underline: Although these factors are low in importance it is important that they are used correctly. It is especially notable that web designers often use a class description when making use of a style sheet. This should be avoided as the robot or spider cannot identify the meaning.
• Bulleted lists like this one, can make a document more “readable” for your human visitors and can help add some emphasis to keyword phrases for the search engine too.
• Stemming or latent semantics: These are keywords that are related. The use of these keywords can indeed increase odds for ranking of related keywords and can amplify the importance of targeted keywords.
• Duplicate content: This factor is rated as medium in importance. It is very important that the content on your site is unique in all aspects. It is common knowledge that search engines have the technology to identify content that has been modified. Duplicate content can cause a page to be completely disregarded by the search engine algorithm.
• Themed or related words: Search engine algorithms often look for themed or related words in a specific topic to evaluate the document’s relevance.
• External links: This is regarded as one of the strongest on-page factors. Search engines seem to think that a proper document will reference external sites. It is important to note that pages referenced should also be carefully selected.
• Internal linking structure: The internal linking structure should carefully thought through and planned to ensure that the relationships between pages within the site structure are well themed to target the most competitive keywords.
• Age of document: It is well known fact that especially Google rate the age of the document as important.
• Copywriting: This factor is fairly new to on-page deliberations but is rated as the most important on-page factor by far. The standard of a document is rated by the way the writer presents the information. The more natural it appears to be the better.
• Frequency of content updates: It is important that content is updated at a regular frequency. This factor is regarded as highly important also from an online marketing perspective in general and improves recency and conversion rates.
• Document depth: The depth of a site is highly important. The more content referred to by means of deep linking the better.
• W3C coding standards: Although the coding standards are disregarded by many SEO’s as not important, it is logical that they are extremely important. Search engine algorithms are programs that make use of coding standards to interpret the HTML in a page and make sense of it. This is a logical process and I cannot emphasize enough how important this factor is.

These are only a few of the on-page factors that play an important role with on-page SEO. There are several more technical factors that are also of importance, for example 301 redirects, HTML language used and server settings. But that is a topic all by itself.

On-page factors - conclusion

SEO is a specialist field that in large part merges together many online marketing techniques, that when used in harmony with one another can have a powerful effect on one another. The opposite is also true. The ignorance of a website owner can make the role of an SEO extremely difficult or even completely impossible.

About the author

Roelof Vermeulen has been involved in the IT industry since 1996. Starting out as a VB and FoxPro programmer for a software company in the insurance industry, he was responsible for the landbased marketing, training, compiling of the help file and report designing as well as installation of the software. After designing a few software solutions for a distribution company in the West Rand he was approach by an international company based in Cape Town in 1998 to design a website for them that can compete internationally.

This opened the door for him to become involved in online marketing. After 2 years in landbased marketing he has seen a new challenge and since then online marketing has become his true passion. As an added benefit he had the privilege to gain experience in two of the most competitive industries online. He also forms part of a selected group of webmasters in a competitive niche industry, where he plays a key role in training and assisting them in their online successes.

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