On-Page Optimization Framework

Proposed On-Page Optimization Framework for Seattle SEO Consultant

The relevancy metrics that search engines use to rank pages comes from on-page

elements. This section shows the best format for these metrics. Before getting into the

specifics for step by step instructions, I will depict a broader picture first to orient you

with the scope of the subject:

Page-Level Information Hierarchy

Diagram of formatted page

The above diagram shows the best practice for optimizing a URL with a single keyword

or phrase. Notice that the relevant phrase is located in all of the SEO page elements.

This page has the given keyword phrase in all of the appropriate places to make it as

relevant as possible. It does this without spamming by mentioning the keyword in

semantically helpful places without overuse. By that I mean, the page looks and reads

like it was written for a human rather than a search engine.

This may sound overly vague, but the only “bad” place for using a keyword is where its

mere appearance implies that it was done more for algorithmic benefit than for

usability. That can happen anywhere, including titles, headings, body copy, figure

captions, alt text, or anywhere else you can place copy.

Important Note: There are some locations, in which keywords will do nothing for you,

regardless of the number of times you use them—inline comments in code, the meta

keywords tag, and keywords inside a graphic image (such as a screen shot of text) to

name a few.

The following section would try to lay-down a step-by-step process which would serve

as the guideline for content writers, Designer and SEOs to accomplish the on-page

optimization of a given page that would not only achieve the SEO objectives geared

towards Search Engines but achieve the human factors in terms of readability and

easily consumable format that lowers the bounce rate and improves metrics like time

on page, page views, time on site etc.

URL

The URL of a page is important for search engine crawlers and humans alike. URLs

should use as few characters as possible (to make it easier for humans to remember

and to link to) and accurately describe the content of the given page.

Step I

The URL shall be written to include the given keyword and are formatted in a category-

based system that helps users and search engines understand what the given page is

about without having to visit it.

Example:

http://www.example.com/NewHomesSeattle.aspx

Step II

The closer the targeted keyword is to the domain name, the better. Thus,

example.com/keyword.html outperforms site.com/category/subcategory/keyword.html

and is the most recommended method of optimization. It is not really something carved

in stone but site or in our case section development team lead shall try to conform to

this principle as much as possible

Step III

The URL casing shall be consistent throughout the site. That means, if you are using the

capitalization like Depuy-Hip-Recall in the URL where first letter of each distinct word is

capital and separate with a hyphen then use the same theme throughout the site.

Responsibility: SEO Lead

Designer

Validation: SEO Team Designated person

Title Tag

Title tags are the most important single on-page factor in SEO. Not only are title tags

present in search engine results and in browsers, but they are increasingly used as

anchor text of links from social media sites. So crafting SEO friendly title tags can help

with both user experience and link relevancy.

Step I

The targeted keywords shall be close to the beginning of the title and that the brand is

included to increase click through rates.

Primary keyword shall be the first one listed followed by the secondary keyword DePuy Hip Recall | Defective Hip Recall | Sullolaw.com

Or when brand is important as in our case Traffic Practice Area sullolaw.com | Traffic Attorney Houston | Speeding Ticket

Step II

The Search engines read (and more important, factor into rankings) up through 80

characters or more, engines typically truncate the title tag at around character 65. This

means that any character beyond 65 (or even earlier, if a word overlaps that

character) will be turned into ellipses and will not even appear on most SERP. (Long-tail

queries can sometimes have title tags longer than 65 characters.) Therefore, following

shall be ensured:

1. Title Tag shall be limited to 65 characters including spaces whenever is possible.

2. If possible, for very competitive terms, craft your titles so that your page’s

message is clear by the time you hit 35 or 40 characters.

Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person

Validate: SEO Team Designated person

Important Note: I consider the title tag and Meta description to be the one-two punch

of our URL’s “elevator pitch.” You have a few seconds (at most) to convince users that

clicking your page will satisfy their query intent. Users will use the title and description to

decide whether to click your result or someone else’s, so they must be keyword-rich

and serve a quick but memorable message.

Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the free advertisements webmasters get to include when their

search results are included in a SERP. They should be optimized and tested just like

traditional advertisements.

Meta descriptions are not directly used by the search engines to establish rankings. This

means they are most helpful to webmasters when written like ads to entice clicks rather

than for search engines to aid rankings.

Step I

Meta Descriptions are an important place to use keywords due to the bolding that

occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Usage has also been shown to help

boost click-through rates, which in turn increases the traffic derived from any ranking

position.

1. Therefore, The challenge is to use targeted keywords in the description and still

come up with the copy that shall stand out on SERPs and help getting clicks

2. The Description shall be limited between 160 t0 225 characters included spaces

3. The common mistakes with Meta descriptions include keyword spamming

(including a given keyword an unreasonable amount of times), misspellings,

grammar mistakes, and odd capitalization so we need to avoid them strictly.


Validate: SEO Team Designated person

Meta Keywords

1. Meta keywords were the first search engine–specific HTML attribute. It once was

a very powerful tool for manipulating search results. For this reason, it is no longer

used by search engines.

2. WARNING: Be mindful, however, that some internal search engines (the

algorithm that powers your on-site search feature) use Meta keywords to help

return searches from within your site. The Google Search Appliance, for example,

can be configured to use Meta keywords in its algorithm. So before you nuke all

the keyword tags on the site (or recommend that no new tags be written), be

sure they’re not used for other purposes.

3. This webmaster resource was abused in the early days of the Internet and is no

longer useful. It was used by Yahoo! as a very minor ranking metric but was and

still is completely ignored by Google and Bing. If it is included, it provides a simple

way for competitors to automate competitive analysis.


HTML Headings (H1 – H6)

When HTML was first designed as a markup language for presenting information online,

headings were essential for information hierarchy. As the Web has evolved, their impact

has weakened because HTML was used in ways that it was not originally designed for.

The correlation studies at SEOmoz showed that HTML headers do not carry the same

ranking weight that we had originally presumed. They are very important for

establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined

semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization. We

recommend them on all pages as an aid for users but don’t stress the importance when

other opportunities for SEO improvement are available.

Step I

Although the H tags are not given that much weight but Search Engines still use them to

infer content in semantics context and establish information hierarchy of a page so

following is important in their usage on a webpage:

1. The first heading that establishes the topic of the page shall be of H1 and shall

use the primary keyword targeted for the page.

2. Then sub-topics which divide the context of the page into multiple sections are

good candidate for H2 tag and shall use the keywords that are related to that

sub-topic

3. H3 onwards tags can be used to further breakdown the sub-topics into distinct

headings and shall include relevant keywords for which that paragraph stands.

Responsibility: Content Writers

Designer

SEOs

Validate: Designated person in SEO department

Images

Images are fundamental tools of the modern Web. Although computer scientists have

made great strides in visual semantics, human aids are still needed for computers to

understand images on large scales.

Step I

1. The alt text attribute shall be included in all HTML code for images on all publicly

accessible pages.

2. It is suggested that while adding images with descriptive and keyword focused

alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings.

3. It is recommended that relevant text shall be included directly before or after

the images. This helps provide search engines with further context.

4. When you have a “hot” image, one that links to another page, alt text is

especially helpful and is the next best thing to anchor text when describing the

content of the destination page to engines. For example, if you use an image to

link to your “plumbing supplies” page, it’s imperative that you use the alt text

that describes what users (and engines) will find when they click the image.

Using an image to link to a page is less desirable than using plain text, but if

there’s no other way to do it, write your alt text as if it’s anchor text.

Responsibility: SEO Team Designated person for writing Alt attribute

Designer for giving related name to the image file


Nofollow

Originally, the stated purpose of the rel="nofollow" attribute was to keep a given

link from passing authority. In other words, where a typical link is one page “voting” for

another, the "nofollow" attribute simply removed the “vote” aspect. But it was not

immediately clear that the tag also acted—at the individual link level—the same way

the Meta robots "nofollow" attribute worked, telling engines to not even crawl the link.

Subsequent information from Google has expressed that notion as well.

The proper syntax for the "nofollow" attribute is to be inserted in an <a> tag alongside

the href to which it refers:

<a href="/url-here.html" rel="nofollow">Anchor text here</a>

Step I

1. It is recommended to use rel="nofollow" for thwarting would-be spammers of

user-generated content specifically on commenting at our would be blogs.

Responsibility: Designer


Rel Canonical Link Element

rel="canonical" is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which version of

duplicate content is the main or canonical version. It has shown a lot of promise and

has already worked well for some of my clients who suffered from duplicate content

problems before implementing this attribute.

Suppose, for example, that we have an article on our site that has two versions—one for

presentation on the website and other is the printer friendly version. The two articles virtually have the same content with different purpose. The rel="canonical" attribute

was created to give engines a clue about which URL is the “authoritative” version.

Step I

1. The proper syntax for rel="canonical" is to place a code line in the <head>

section of a page. It should be placed on all instances of duplicate content to

show which version of the content should be shown in search engine results.

2. For example, if we have an article at one URL (article.aspx) and a printer-friendly

version of the same article on a separate URL (article.aspx?print=1), add this

attribute to both pages with the URL of the original article so that the engines

know to ignore the printer-friendly version and thus prevent detracting from

relevancy metrics: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sullolaw.com/article.aspx" />



JavaScript

JavaScript and Flash are more complicated to parse for search engines than HTML. We

know that while engines are growing more and more capable of interpreting the data

within Flash files and JavaScript environments, they’re not yet very good at doing it

consistently or at using that information to allocate authority the way traditional HTML

does.

Although the search engines can crawl JavaScript and Flash, I choose not to add the

risk of hoping they will correctly parse the code’s structure. Their ability to analyze these

languages is inferior to their ability to understand HTML, and choosing to code in the

former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

Step I

1. JavaScript links shall be avoided for the pages which needs to crawled by

Search Engines and are related to the keywords ranking and part of our SEO

endeavors. They are implemented in JavaScript with the location object: window.location.replace('http://www.example.com');

2. It is recommended that JavaScript shall not be directly coded in the pages that

are part of the SEO. These scripts shall be included in the separate files and shall

be downloaded to the pages at the runtime.


Validate: Designer

301 Redirects

301 redirects are the preferred method for redirecting URLs for SEOs. 301 redirects is the

best way to redirect URLs but they do have disadvantages. The main disadvantage is

that only between 99 and 90 percent of link value is transferred through these redirects.

This is as opposed to the 0 percent that is transferred through 302 redirects.


Validate: Designer

Blocking Pages from Search Engines

There are many ways to block pages from search engines including the Robots

Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt), IP blocking, and Meta robots. While the first two work in

most cases, Meta robots is generally the best option as it keeps the pages out of the

search engine indexes while allowing their links to pass value to other pages.

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Meta robots (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt because it

keeps the given URL out of the search engine results (noindex) and allows all of the links

on the page to send link value (follow). robots.txt files are useful but should be used

sparingly and only if a Meta robots tag is not an option.

Step I

1. Following is the format of the “noindex, follow” tag in head section of a page

which you want not to be indexed by search engines and consequently will not

be the part of SERPs but still pass the link juice that is Ranking power to flow

through it to other pages:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">


Validate: QA, Designated SEO Eng’r

Parameter-Driven URLs

The search engines have been very clear on this. Their crawlers can parse and crawl

parameter-driven URLs, but it is more difficult and often leads to duplicate content

issues. This is backed up by SEOmoz correlation data, which showed that pages with

static URLs tend to rank higher.

Step I

• Example:

www.example.com/product?param=1&param=2

It is recommended that whenever possible the parameterized URLs shall be avoided

and only used when absolute necessity like when we use them for our telephone

tracking for paid campaigns.


Validate: Designated SEO Eng’r

Footer Links

Footer links are hyperlinks that are included at the bottom of webpages and frequently

spammed as they are not as important to user experience as other more prominent

links on a page. Therefore, Use footer links sparingly. Recommended figure is no more

than 25 relevant internal navigational links. This number is not a hard limit and it is

important to be mindful of intent when choosing keywords.

When the number of links in the footer increases significantly, however, and the anchor

text starts to look a little too “optimized” then there are many examples of Google

penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that magically lifted upon removal of

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footer links stuffed with keywords. Manipulative links in footers are easily detected

algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

Step I

1. It is recommended that Footer links shall be carefully planned and implemented

based on above discussion.

Responsibility: SEO Lead


Considering the Panda 2 updates and new focus of Google to deliver best search

experience to its users, followings are some of new metrics which would play a crucial

role in ranking a particular page of the website:

Use of CSS rather than Nested tables for page layout

Step I

1. The CSS shall be used rather than nested tables for webpages layout


Validate: Designer

Metrics like Bounce rate, Page Views, Average Time on Page, Page

Views/Visit

Step I

1. We need to check the bounce rate, Page Views, Average Time on Page, Page

Views/Visit of each important page of the site and pinpoint the reason why a

particular person is bouncing back to SERPs for looking for something which he

did not find on our site on this page or was put off and did not care to explore

our site any further.

2. There could be many reasons but most of the time it is either less relevant

information available on the page or the presentation of the information is not in

optimal format which is easily consumable.

3. Before even analyzing the bounce rate we need to critically check our entire site

for the factors discussed in the previous point.

Step II

1. Following is the possible way to check for the relative completeness of the

content:

a. Get the keywords list for which page stands for and write down the

possible questions one can think of around them and try to answer them

in the content developed.

b. For existing pages go through the same exercise and figure out what is un-

answered there and get it added.

2. The second thing is presentation of the information on the page which has a

great potential either to engage visitor or send him elsewhere looking for the

same content present on that page.

Step III

1. This step answers the problems discussed so far and would be quite helpful in

increasing the page’s Search Engine and User friendliness and help improve the

readability factor to great extent.

a. Make more paragraphs and break them up with headings

i. It’s hard to read long, uninterrupted text.

• If your paragraph is more than 4-5 lines long, consider breaking

it into multiple paragraphs. You may feel the phantom stare of

your 6th grade English teacher, but Ms. Ewing wasn’t lecturing

on writing web-friendly copy. On your site, more paragraphs are

a good thing.

• Add headings to clearly categorize your content and create

another visual break. Your headings should provide the user

with a high-level outline of the content on your page.

• There’s an SEO benefit to using logical headings as well. From

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:

b. Create Lists

i. People love bulleted or numbered lists because:

• They’re shorter than paragraphs. (Translation: Faster to read.)

• They take less work to digest. (Translation: Easier to read.)

• They’re another great tactic to create visual interest on a page.

(Translation: More likely to be read.)

c. Internal Linking and Correct Formatting

• Internal Links - Links provide another opportunity for visual

variation and can serve as calls to action to draw your users to other important information on your site.

• Bold and italics - Use these for emphasis, but use them sparingly.

Lines and lines of bold content lose its punch.

d. Help! I’m drowning in a sea of text!

i. Some SEO Leads will tell you to reduce your copy as much

as possible to keep all of your text appearing “above the

fold” or above the cut-off of the browser window where a

user would have to scroll to see more. While I agree it’s

important to keep your copy crisp and concise (with good

grammar and spelling, too, of course), you can’t always cut

your content down to 200 or 300 words.

2. Consider the screenshot below that compares a page of text with no

enhancements and that same text with imagery, headings and bold text.

Though the page with the extra elements is actually longer, it’s the superior

sample. You don’t need to worry about readers drowning in a sea of too much

text if you make that copy readable.

By adding additional elements to a page, your copy, even lengthy copy, can still be

readable, attractive and highly informative.

Responsibility: Content Writer


Documents

On-Page Optimization Framework