An On-page Optimization SEO Checklist

Every now and then it helps to run down the checklist and make sure you’re not missing anything straight-forward. A few months ago I shared an SEO checklist of fundamental steps for SEO campaigns but I don’t often discuss the on-page stuff in meticulous detail.

So let’s have a little fun and get into meticulous detail. Most of you could probably write the main points in this list in your sleep but I find that people forget the whys we do things as they do the things. I’ll follow up to the list with my reasonings below.

1. Elevator pitch 1 in the Title
2. Elevator pitch 2 in the meta description tag
3. Keywords in the keywords meta tag
4. Include a robots meta tag
5. Elevator pitch 3 in the H1 header and/or masthead
6. Keywords in the on-site navigation
7. Keywords in relevant ALT= text copy
8. As many relevant text blocks on the page as seems reasonable
9. Emphasis on keywords where it makes sense
10. Gratuitous emphasis on keywords if it makes sense
11. Keywords in outbound link anchor text
12. Use absolute URLs in all links
13. Keywords in the page URL

Elevator pitch 1 in the Title – Most people would say “put your keywords in your title tag”. Some people say “repeat them as many times as possible”. Title tags have a limited amount of useful real estate. Many people who have counted characters in search results pages specify a 65-character maximum for writing a compelling page title. You can get around 9-12 comfortable words in 65 characters so repeating keywords is expensive. Do it only if it really seems necessary because putting uncompelling titles in front of search engine users is worse than not putting compelling titles there.

The title is virtually ignored after the user clicks through to the page. You want the title to tell people what your page is about and WHY they should visit the page.

Elevator pitch 2 in the meta description tag A good meta description tag is relevant to the targeted keywords for the page. Like the page title, the meta description is not useful after the person clicks through to the page. You should use the meta description to tell people why your page is important to them (although I don’t like schlocky sales pitches — I prefer to be informative). People MAY be looking for someone to give their money to, but research indicates they are more likely to look for information before they part with their money.

Hence, use your meta description to provide people with as much compelling information as you can. Educate them through the meta description. And make sure the search engines show your meta description as often as possible (see the “robots” meta tag point below).

Keywords in the keywords meta tag Most SEOs don’t care about the keywords meta tag any more but since both Ask and Yahoo! still place value on the tag it’s worth using for good search engine optimization. You don’t need an opinion on how much value is placed on the tag. It’s not like you’ll break your hand typing in a few keywords.

Some people still spam their keywords meta tag to death. Unless you’re putting unique expressions that people actually search for in your keywords list, you’re wasting your time. Either go for the relevant mis-spellings or just cite your most page-important keywords.

Some people also use the keywords meta tag to mislead potential competitors. While I don’t necessarily recommend this tactic, in a highly competitive vertical where the meta tag probably won’t help as much as other factors, you may want to keep your competitors guessing about which words convert the most for you.

Include a robots meta tag A lot of SEOs don’t believe in setting permissive values in the robots tag. That is, they don’t believe in putting “index,follow,archive”. I do. But even if you don’t want to use those tags, you should always use “noydir,noodp” to ensure that Yahoo! and Google won’t use directory descriptions when displaying your page in their search results. Tell the search engines that you place value on your description meta tag. If you don’t value that tag, why should they?

It would be cool if there was a robots directive that said “always use meta description”.

Elevator pitch 3 in the H1 header and/or masthead Not everyone has gotten over the “Ew, H1 headers are ugly” phase of their SEO childhood. H1 tags work well because the search engines recognize them as a combination of bold and LARGE FONT. Some people believe that the inherent HTML hierarchy of the Hx header system may also be taken into consideration. Emphasis helps. Hierarchical structures may also help.

Keywords in the on-site navigation “Home” remains the most highly optimized keyword on the Web because most people link to their root URLs with that word more than any other. You can link to SEO Theory or you can link to SEO Theory Home but if you just link to Home you’re really not telling people what the link leads to.

That is, internal link anchor text is useful not just for search engine optimization (associating link anchor text with destination pages) but it’s also useful to people. Descriptive, informatiove, helpful navigational link anchor text is always preferable to pretty or “white noise” link anchors.

Keywords in relevant ALT= text copy So every good (and bad) SEO now knows about how useful ALT= text can be. In my opinion, you should write this text as if there were no pictures there. Be informative. Be helpful.

Some people do link through images, both internally and externally. Your ALT= text does act like normal link anchor text, but make sure your text is relevant to the image and the destination because you never know when your page will be subjected to human review. Besides, if you need relevant links all you have to do is create relevant copy in which to embed them.

As many relevant text blocks on the page as seems reasonable Repetition is very important to algorithm relevance, but I left it off my list because if your on-page optimization is based solely on repetition you’re either doing it wrong or you’re handicapped. I’ve relied upon repetition and emphasis when contributing copy to other people’s sites. Inevitably someone who doesn’t know what they are doing (or who doesn’t care about optimization) changes my copy, reducing repetition and emphasis.

There is no limit to the amount of copy you can place on a page. You can use 100 words or 10,000 words. If I were using 10,000 words I would want to maximize the repetition for my most important keywords. Keyword density is not a factor and hasn’t been a factor for years. It’s keyword repetition that matters, but if you create a page that looks like spam chances are pretty good someone else will decide it IS spam.

Every paragraph should have a keyword theme and that keyword theme should be relevant to something, either to a page you’re linking to (as in a sidebar article) or to the rest of the page’s theme. Don’t agonize over semantic concepts. Search engine optimization is more mechanical than conceptual at this time.

Emphasis on keywords where it makes sense Do you include bullet points in your copy? Do you break up your copy to make it easily scannable? These are basic usability issues but if a search engine is anaylzing how you organize your copy it will notice where the emphasis lies. Think of word emphasis as if it’s money. You get 1 dollar to spread across the words on your page. A 5-cent word gets less emphasis than a 50-cent word. Each time you emphasize a word or expression, you take some value away from other emphasized words and expressions.

Gratuitous emphasis on keywords if it makes sense When would it make sense? For most business sites it would not. But keep your options open as you become more creative. Just remember that gratuitous emphasis is not necessarily going to improve your search results rankings for any particular keywords.

Keywords in outbound link anchor text Telling SEOs to link out with relevant keywords to other sites is like asking Patton to leave his tanks unattended. The rule of thumb is, if you provide one relevant value-passing link the destination page should rank higher than yours (all other things being equal); if you provide ten relevant value-passing links, your page should outrank the other ten (all other things being equal). Why? Because your page is the resource (and it’s using the relevant keywords at least 10 times).

This should be a no-brainer but a lot of SEOs struggle with it. Repetition, repetition, repetition. You’re happy enough to build repetitive text through inbound links, you should be happy enough to do it through outbound links. It’s easier to link out than to get inbound links though it comes with no guarantees.

Use absolute URLs in all links A lot of Web developers just have absolutely no clue about how screwy their sites look when they use 10 different formats for URLs. I’ve always told people to just pick 1 format and use that but if you’re going to link out to other sites then just use absolute URLs. It won’t kill you to do it right. It DOES kill you to do things wrong and being lazy is a much more sure path to doing something wrong than being meticulous.

Keywords in the page URL I think the SEO community has almost figured this part out. Keywords-in-domain name don’t matter except for branding. Keywords-in-page-URL help with search engine optimization. You should ask yourself, “How can I place 1,000 value-accruing pages of content on this new domain?” every time you buy a domain. Don’t stop yourself from looking past the immediate need. Don’t stop yourself from being creative.

That doesn’t mean create spammy-keyword-bursting-page-names-that-no-one-respects. It just means that you need to think about embedding relevant keywords in the page (and image) file names, not in the domain name.

I do strongly recommend use of hyphens ( – ) as separators. Yes, Google may now be recognizing underscores ( _ ) as separators but it takes less effort to recognize and remember a hyphen than an underscore.

I strongly recommend AGAINST running words together in page names. Run words together in domain names but use hyphens in page names. I personally prefer hyphens in domain names but it seems that most people would prefer NOT to use hyphens.

Summing up on-page optimization

If you assume for the sake of discussion that search engines don’t exist, you still have to optimize your content for presentation to people. On-page optimization therefore becomes critical because you want people to follow your directives. You want them to appreciate your work. You want them to come back to and recommend your site to other people.

Search engines appreciate the kind of on-page optimization you do for people and, frankly, in this business far too little attention is paid to real on-page optimization. It works better than most SEOs believe it does and it has always worked very well. Don’t even think to yourself, “Yeah, but in competitive queries you need links“.

BZZT!

Wrong response.

In competitive queries, you need as many options to work with as you can get and on-page optimization offers you a great deal more flexibility and resilience than chasing links ever will.