All About On-Page and Off-Page Optimization Factors

Today we are going to take a look at the list of things that you should and should not do, we’ll also look at the types of things which can get you banned; and how to do SEO properly so you stay within the webmaster guideline.

As far as best practices for implementing SEO, the first thing I want to clarify is we are not going to talk about standards for SEO; that is a whole other discussion which fuels many debates. We are going to talk about the mechanics of implementing search engine optimization. I want you to understand some of the principles behind best SEO practices and also some of the details. As most SEO practitioners know, implementing search engine optimization is typically divided into on-page factors and off-page factors; and there are best practices which people put together to give you guidelines, and what you need to do to succeed in both those areas. 

The one thing to keep in mind with best SEO practices is that the list of things to do to avoid penalties and getting banned tend to be more widely applicable than the guidelines or recommendations for what you need to do to succeed, and there are some important reasons why. When you look at a list of what you do, for example, something that’s very common as hearing someone say “For you to have a successful page in Google you want the keyword density of your key phrases in your copy to be between 2 and 4%”. An important thing to remember with guidelines like that is they are usually made from averages of averages, or as some people may call it aggregates of aggregates. You have a bunch of people out there going about their business of search engine optimization and they find a pattern across what things make them successful on some of their pages. Depending on what industry you are in or what key phrases you are working with you may find different guidelines are more or less useful. So when you have one list, that’s the best practices list; that is typically comprised from a lot of other people’s averages and their experience. So you got an average of averages and it may or may not be applicable to your key phrases; when that list is given, usually, you are not provided with the key phrases that were researched to come up with those numbers. 

One of the things that is often overlooked is the title tag and how people craft their title tags. One of the best practices for a title tag is make sure your key phrase is toward the front of the title tag. Many companies will put their company name at the front of the title tag, and that’s fine, if that particular page is branding your company name; but if you are trying to target a particular key phrase with that page, you want that key phrase towards the front of the title tag for high prominence. That will give you a higher relevancy for that key phrase.

The title tag is pretty much the most powerful element on any webpage, so you don’t want to waste it by putting irrelevant words toward the front of the title tag. Think of both your title tag and your description Meta tag as a means for pulling in your visitor to improve your click through rate on the search and results page. You don’t want to slam it with a series of words, but you want your description to be compelling. When people are scanning the search results page, they are going to be looking for something that draws them in. If all they see is a string of words they are going to look somewhere else. People tend to do this with their description tag is because they think of it as being a longer keyword Meta tag. What many people don’t realize is that the description Meta tag typically does not affect your ranking.

Another important on page optimization factor is how you use your key phrase throughout your copy, what many people refer to as keyword density, so the frequency of the words with respect to all of your other content that is going to be visible to the reader. Another measurement that isn’t given much attention is proximity. The proximity of the terms in your key phrase, many believe is more important than keyword density. Let us say you have a page that has 100 words on it, and on that page the first word is dog and the last word is food, so you are going to have a 2% keyword density. 2 out of 100 words, is dog food. Say you have another page 100 words; first and second word is dog and food, same keyword density, but the proximity is very different. The one that has dog food as a phrase at the beginning will actually be viewed as more relevant than the first page which has dog at the beginning and food at the end, because the proximity between the words are smaller. It really does matter how closely together the terms are for your key phrase, keyword density alone is not a measure of relevancy, you need both keyword density and proximity.

When you are looking at keyword density values, many people will look for what’s the right keyword density value this month for Google, yahoo or msn. And that is really the wrong way to look at it. You need to figure out what the right keyword density value is based on what your competitors are doing for that particular key phrase. 

One of the things I like to say about off page optimization factors is, it’s about the quality of the link rather than the quantity of the links that is going to help you. Many people have an approach to link building that they would just go after as many links as they possibly can.

In measuring the quality of a link there are a couple of relevance factors that you need to take into account; such as the title tag of the page linking to you, the link text of the link pointing to you and also the text around the link. It is always better to have an imbedded link than one that is just off by itself. The more it is imbedded in the copy on the page, the better it is for you. When you use the text of the link, make sure the link text is descriptive. An important thing to remember is there are a lot of benefits for a site when you have pages with high page rank; but when you are talking about ranking for specific key phrases the most important page rank is the page rank of the relevant links pointing to you.