On Page Optimisation and Tips for doing it Right

While going through some of my comments for my previous post on link building strategies, someone talked about on page optimisation and it got me thinking about it and I realised I actually had never written a post about it. That is so wrong, and I can only apologise. on page optimisation is one of the first steps to take when starting out on SEO. It could be a very simple task or a very precise one, depends on how you want to look at it. Here's a simple diagram of on page optimisation which I'll expand on.

On Page Optimisation. Click to enlarge

Keyword Optimisation: I've talked about this in a number of posts, in fact, I even have a label/tag for it here so I'll just skip it. Bottom line, it's very important.

Tag Optimisation: There are lots of tags when it comes to SEO, including:

• Title tag
• Meta tags (keyword and description mainly)
• Heading tags (H1, H2, ...)
• Anchor tags
• Image tags
• Canonical tag

That's just naming the main tags. There are some other tags but I don't take them too seriously. The most important thing to remember when optimising most of these tags is to be keyword friendly. But do avoid keyword stuffing!

Updated: Here's a more indepth article on tag optimisation which I guest posted over at Kikolani's.

Internal and External Linking: Talked about this on an article titled power of internal links. One of the most important things to note when linking internally is URL format. Most times the Content Management System (CMS) makes life easy for us by always being the same format, descriptive but not too long. However, when you're designing a website without the use of CMS, you need to be all that and consistent in your naming.  It's always a good idea to put keywords in your URL, that way when people see the URL they have an idea of what to expect from the article, and it attracts users as well as the crawlers.

Keyword Density: There's has to be a balance for your keyword density. To much is termed key word stuffing (black hat seo) and not enough would mean it's not your keyword. The average keyword density percentage is 2% - 6% depending on the content volume on your website. Sometimes when a particular keyword has a rather high density you should consider using synonymous keywords to bring it down. If synonymous keyword are selected and inserted right, you could end up killing two birds with one stone by ranking for multiple keywords which mean the same thing.

Sitemap and Robots.txt: Sitemap.xml  help your websites to get indexed faster, especially when submitted to search engines.The Sitemap.html page is sometimes used by human users to navigate your website especially if it's a big one. Robots.txt files are used to include and exclude pages which you don't want to be found on the Internet. Although using the robots.txt does not always work, note.

Statistics Tracker: This is the time to install a statistics tracker on your website to monitor what's going on all over your website. Mainly, I use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster, but these days I'm into Get Clickey (first month is free) for the hourly stats. Sometimes I use Awstats as well, it gets updated hourly as well, its free but not as cool as Get Clickey.

These are the main things I look into when I do on page optimisation on a website. Usually, once you are done with this the next stage would be off page optimisation, which I mentioned here. That part of SEO can take forever, literally. But other than that, that is simply it for on page optimisation, is that easy or what?