On-Page Optimization: A Page’s Title

If the page title is not well-written, visitors won’t be enticed to click through to a site, so ranking well won’t generate much traffic. Title pages should:

• Reflect the content of the page
• Be unique for each page on a site, not duplicated.
• Use target keywords
• The first words in the page title get more importance than the later words
• Leave the company name out of the page title, especially on interior pages, since it is a keyword one will always rank high for anyway

On-Page Optimization, Keyword phrases should be:

• Separated by a pipe character ( | ) or hyphen ( – ). One must be brief. Search engines discount the importance of a given keyword in the page title more or less depending on the total number of words in the title. If a page title has 10 keywords, each word is about half as effective as if the title only had 5 keywords. This means we need to try to eliminate words that we don’t want to rank for, like “and”, “with”, “or”, etc.
• Limited the length to about 4 keywords. 70 characters is the maximum length that will be shown in search engines
• Written to have click-through appeal for a human visitor

Organic SEO On-Page Optimization: Your address URLs

URLs are what a user enters in the address bar of a browser to visit a web page. For example, http://www.orangesnowman.com. We target keywords in the URL so that Google and the public can easily deduce what a page is about? On-Page Optimization, when incorporating keywords into the URLs of your pages, we consider the following:

• Keywords that appear earlier in the URL are considered more important than ones late proceed them in the URL.
• The more important a page is, the closer it should be to the root level of a website/blog, in other words they are not inside a folder that is inside another folder
• Keep URLs short, about 2 -4 keywords into the URL address
• Separate words with dashes, not underscores or other characters. Parameters like “?” and “%” in a URL can confuse search engines, and should be avoided at all costs.
• A website/blog by Orange Snowman will automatically generate clean URLs
• The keywords we choose most also be used in the page’s content

On-Page Optimization: Page Headings

This is one of the most important elements that inform the user and search engine as to what a page is about. A heading is a phrase that describes the content that follows in the copy below. Page Headings provide a quickly sense of what is contained in a document. Just because words look like a “heading” to humans doesn’t mean they look that way to the search engines. There is a special way to “tag” words on pages so they look like headings to search engines when they crawl a page. In general, one can’t just look at the web page and know whether or not the headings are tagged appropriately for the search engines. To check this, one needs to view the source HTML. One can right-click on a web page and select “view source” or “view page source”. A new window will open that shows the HTML source behind the page. A true heading will be wrapped in a tag that starts with [h1] and ends with [/h1]. There are other headers with smaller sizings available as well, from h2 to h6. On-Page Optimization, the  importance on a headings scale down with the size, we can indicated the important content down a page using this heading tag.

On-Page Optimization: Metatags

Metatags descriptions and keywords are not as important for SEO as they use to be. They don’t factor into rankings at all for a site, but it is sometimes displayed by Google on the Search Results page. It can be a great opportunity to placed some very targeted content for your audience to see on the search results page. A good description is approximately 2 sentences (no more than 150 characters) use target keywords, phrased to entice the public to visit a site. We keep target keyword as close to the start of the description as possible, and only use it once, or twice if one can make it sound natural. Potential customers will actually be reading this text on search results pages, so make sure it sounds good! This description should be unique on most, if not all, pages. On-Page Optimization, metatags are hidden in the page source code, and aren’t used by Bing, Yahoo or Google. We only use 2-3 keywords, and make sure that they accurately reflect each page’s content. They should not be the same on every page of a site. Stuffing keywords can flag a site as a spammer. Potential customers will actually be reading this text on search results pages, so make sure it sounds good! This description should be unique on most, if not all of the pages.

On-Page Optimization: Alt Images

Search Engines can’t see the contents of images on a site, but we can help clue them into the content. Some images, like navigational arrows or dividing bars do not need to be optimized as they do not contain any significant content. The key is to take the images that are most important to your business, and help the search engine learn what they are about. We select images with content related to your web site, company, products, services, and so forth. On-Page Optimization, there’s nothing wrong with skipping images that aren’t very important. The benefit from optimizing images is that it will help search engine spiders know more about a site and what it’s about. These factors are crucial when trying to rank for targeted keywords. Search engines are now offering image searches. If an image is optimized, there is a good chance that it will start to rank in an image search for the targeted keywords.

“All the above word clouds illustrate how the search engines see each paragraph. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.“

On-Page Optimization: SEO Copy Writing

SEO articles/posts target keywords and topics that will attract the search engines and with it many potential customers. Orange Snowman can provide original, up-to-date content for your website or blog. SEO writing is very different from content writing, article writing, story writing and news writing. To most people SEO writing is boring-technical-mumbo-jumbo writing stuff. Our basic SEO writing targets the search engines if you need the article/post also to be appealing to humans there is a little bit more work involved (as reflected in our fee structure). Also highly technical subjects need the clients involvement and additional research fees apply. SEO copy wrting is an integral part of on-page optimization.