Day: 12 April 2011

On Page Optimisation is where all the information gathered in earlier parts of the process guide us as to how we should construct the actual pages. Each page should, ideally, act as a “landing page” so try and forget the notion that the “home page” is the one to be optimised.

It will be optimised but other pages should get the same treatment – but for different keywords. On one site I am familiar with the home page is the ‘most popular’ landing page in absolute terms. But of all the page visits only 3% land directly in the home page.

Some optimisation techniques will be dependent on what type of site you have. Having said that, all optimisation should include the following.

Title Tag: For keywords and geographic and other relevant information such as company name. On that, many companies optimise (unwittingly) for their company name in the title. All well and good if it’s a recognised brand and that name will be searched.  If it’s not, place more emphasis on the products/services that a person will be searching for.

If you want to see why using keywords in internal linking for images is important, do a Google image search for ‘click here’. You’ll see a good few ‘click here’ buttons, which is fine. But you’ll also see a huge number of images that have been indexed under ‘click here’ and not under something that they actually are Click Here! It’s such a waste of SEO property.   

In looking at a site with the site analysis or site audit hat on there are a number of areas that you would want to concentrate on. Below are listed some of the areas that should be analyised.

Crawling and indexing: How many pages have been indexed and how many pages are there on the site. Is there a gap (there can be small gaps at times)?  Is there a big difference between the indexed and actual pages and why? Using an online crawler (or offline) like seo-browser will show you how your page appears to a search engine – which will be very different to how it’s rendered in a browser. See blog article of a real life example of this difference.

Search engine Ranking: What is the current status of your site in the various search engines? Where does it rank (if at all). It’s a fairly straightforward exercise and just has to be run off against some of the chosen keywords for benchmarking purposes.

URL Structure: The URL’s on your site are important not only for the spider visitors, but also for humans. A URL that can be “read” is infinitely better than one that’s generated by a content management system without any instructions to alter that URL. Keywords in your URL may give you a bit of a boost in the search results.

Site Structure: Similar to your URL structure you should try and make your site navigation as simple as possible. By site navigation we mean how easy is it to get from, say, the home page to your checkout page. During that excursion, is it easy to tell where exactly you are and is it easy to navigate forward and backward.  This planning really should be done when the site is being designed as it’s easier to execute at that point than after. It’s still very possible to restructure a site after it’s been in the wild but it means using redirects etc which can be problematic.

Code: Although small code problems are not exactly a deal breaker but if a search engine comes across bad or poorly formed code it may abandon the page altogether. Its best to run your code through a code validator just to make sure that it’s all above board.

Page Speed: This is a big issue currently and according to Google’s representative on earth, Matt Cutts, page speed will be one of 200+ factors used in calculating page rank. The best approach to this is to either check your speed online. I like Pingdom Tools as it keeps a record of a sites performance so you can see how your efforts are being rewarded. There is plenty/a fair amount you can do to improve your pages speed. Look at the code and especially your images as they are the low hanging fruit. You can ensure that large files loaded at the early part of the page load are actually needed at that point (like css or js files) and that if they are needed should some of them be compressed (like a GZIP compression of some of the css files if your server allows it)

 Page Title and Descriptions: Page titles and descriptions in a lot of search results inform human visitors what the page they could potentially click on is actually about – and are worth a big effort. There is more information on this particular topic here

Keyword Analysis We’ve looked at it here is some detail. Essentially it’s a root and branch analysis of the site looking at it from a keyword point of view 

Sitemaps: There should be two types of sitemap a sitemap for the human element and another for the spiders. The latter is a xml file which you can build on line for free. Put the xml file in the root directory of the site and then make sure that in Google Webmaster Tools you submit that file to Google. Just be careful that the URL’s you use in that file are exactly the same as you use on site otherwise there may be an issue with duplicate content.

404’s: You can use many applications like xenulink to make sure that all the links on your site lead somewhere.  You will also get a steer in GWT if some of your URL’s lead to a dead end. A lot of CRM systems have inbuilt 404 pages where, if a page does not exist, it throws up a simple 404 notification. This normally stops all spiders in their tracks as there is no way forward. It’s best to make a 404 page yourself, one that gives the uses some options if they reach a dead link. Many custom 404 pages have site search options etc, its something not only for the spiders to keep plugging away, but for the end users as well.

Robots.txt: This is a small file that points and guides spiders as to what they can index and what they should keep away from.

Keyword Research is the next stage of the process. Having compiled a list of industry terms in our first pass and then seen, through the competitor analysis, which terms your closest competitors are aiming for, we are now beginning to build up a lexicon of words specific to a particular industry.

But while you will find certain keyword expressions being mentioned again and again, there is a trade off between the time, cost and effort it would take to rank on that specific phrase and the volume of business it would bring your way.

Obviously in certain markets there are trophy terms accepted by the industry as a whole to be key drivers. But the first thing to get to grips with is what words and phrases do potential customers use to look for a product or service. For an individual beginning to search for a product is always a learning process.

Initially searchers will begin using broad product search -“Mobile Phone” for example. But as they define their product preferences and begin to eliminate or adopt certain products, their search terms become way more focused. Further they begin to learn terms and rapidly narrow their search from product category, then to brands and then to specific products.

If you think that visitors are going to spell your company name or the product correctly, think again. Out of the 1006 keywords used only 37 managed to used “St. Patrick’s” in the correct form with a period at the “St” and no sloppy apostrophes attached to the name – and certainly no abbreviations of the same.

Taking on board that people will search in different ways, you still have to have a list of primary phrases that you feel will act as strong drives. But these front line phrases will only deliver a certain amount of traffic and here we introduce the concept of the ‘long tail’.

Take again that week in March, the top 100 keyword phrases brought in just shy of 10% of the total visitors. The top 500 dragged in nearly 20% of the total traffic. As there were many thousands of keyword phrases used during the week, over 70% of the visits were spread across tens of thousand plus key phrases. The points to illustrate here:

• there are a few phrases that have good search volumes in any industry but they can be very difficult to rank for due to the sheer volume of competition
• whatever way you look at it, the majority of your traffic will come from other quarters – from the long tail.
• in order to capitalise on this you have to have a site with relevant content and enough content to cover many of the long tailed searches.

Keyword research is incredibly important and you have to spend a bit of time on it. Opting for a keyword(s) that are not a good fit for a page or that are low volume can be a disaster for a site.