On-Page Optimization

There are two kinds of search engine optimization: on-page and off-page. On-page optimization is the stuff you do to your actual web page that will help it get ranked. Off-page optimization means stuff that isn’t on the page that affects your ranking (namely, in-bound links). Both are important. For Yahoo and MSN, on-page is more important than it is for Google. Google relies more heavily on links than the other big two, though Yahoo and MSN also weight links heavily.

In this case, I wanted to optimize the home page of the feline photos blog for the phrase “cat pictures”. This is how I normally do this:

1. Make sure the domain name contains the keywords.
2. Make the title of the page my exact keywords I am targeting, capitalized appropriately.
3. Make the very first text on the page the keywords in an H1 (header) tag.
4. Put an introductory paragraph that uses the keywords right after the H1 tag.
5. If I have a lot of text on the page, break it up with H2 tags that contain variations of my keywords.

Unfortunately, catpictures.blogspot.com was not available, so I couldn’t do
 #1. Since competition for “cat pictures” was light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.

Also, I didn’t do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture gallery there wasn’t that much text on the page. But I’ll give you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot of text.

Let’s say that I have an article on pontoon boats that I want to rank for the phrase “pontoon boats”. This is what I would do for the on-page optimization: Try and get a domain name with the words “pontoon boats” in it (www.pontoonboats.com would be perfect). If there isn’t anything available, then setup a subdomain for it (pontoonboats.mydomain.com).

Make the page title “Pontoon Boats”, put the H1 tag at the beginning of the text as “Pontoon Boats”, then break up the article with H2 subheadings like “Maintaining Pontoon Boats”, “Pontoon Boats for Fishing”, “Are Pontoon Boats Fast?”, etc. You don’t want your subheadings to be exactly your keywords like the main H1 heading and the title, but you want the subheadings to contain your keywords. That’s really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said before, if the competition is light I don’t always do all five of those things.

There are other things that search engine marketers focus on and spend a lot of time with (things like keyword density and image alt tag density, etc.), but since I don’t try to rank for fiercely competitive keywords I don’t usually bother with all of that. I leave the ranking of really tough keywords to the SEO gurus, because to me it’s just too much dang work.

To me, ranking for really competitive keywords is like owning a boat: it requires far too much time, money and effort to maintain to be worth the end result (going to the lake three times a year–sorry boat owners!).

No thanks. I’ll rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying that effort I’ll earn 10 times the AdSense.

Step 4 : How Getting Links Work:

Now I’m ready to start getting in-bound links. In-bound links serve two purposes:

1. If it’s a new site, they will get your site crawled by the search engines and put into the index.

2. They will help a site rank well if the link text contains the keywords you’re targeting.

There’s a couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use one of them.

1. You can pay other sites to link to you.

2. You can swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.

When I’m actively trying to get links, I only do number two. I’m told that number one works better than number two because one-way links are more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but I’ll tell you why I don’t care.

First, though, a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link back to the other site.

The search engines value one-way links more highly because they figure it’s not just “artificial” link trading going on, but that somebody has given you a real live “vote” for your site without you asking for it–the greatest compliment.

Yes, one way links are more valuable. But I don’t care. Why not? First of all, as I said before, I don’t go after fiercely competitive keywords, so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to link to your site with one way links, and you won’t have to pay for those!

If you decide to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need to take to do it right:

1. Do a search at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to rank for.

2. Go to each page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.

3. Once you’ve emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see if they will link to you, too.

If it sounds like an enormous amount of work, that’s because it is. Well, it is if you do it all manually. But if you know me at all, you know that I hate to do things manually. I guess that’s the programmer in me coming out–I want to automate everything.

So how do I automate the process? How do I drive dozens or hundreds of in-bound links into my site without writing a manual email to thousands of webmasters? That brings me to the last

section of this tutorial.