SEO Series – Onpage and Offpage Optimization

Second in this special SEO series by SEO consulting firm, Net Minds, this takes a look at the optimization process. You might want to read the author’s introduction to SEO if you have not.

Before you start the optimization process it is always advisable to take a look at the current state of your site (SEO-wise). This is what SEO firms call the “Site Audit”. Let’s start with the critical stuff. Ever tried something on the fast track? Got a couple of links from linkfarms and other “bad neighbourhood” sites before? Did some spamming? Sold links and got PR punishment from Google? Site sandboxed or even out of the index? If some of these cases or similar ones have happened, it might be best to start with a fresh domain, website and hosting.

Getting Your Onsite Structure Right

Luckily, most sites don’t have such a rather “dark” history. The first step then is to get your onsite structure straight. “Onsite” basically refers to all structural elements and site copy of your website. In our experience a well done onsite optimization can contribute as much as 30-40% to a site’s ranking success. The most important point is to make your site crawlable for the search engines.

Although Flash is also being indexed for a while now, the golden rule is to use as little of it as possible. We advise not to use frames. There should be a proper HTML structure, sticking to the W3C standards. The site copy should include your desired keywords in the right density. The keyword or -phrase should appear in the title tag of the website, URL (try to use search engine friendly URLs; the best is to have your keywords feature in the domain name as well). Write the respective headlines of your main site and subsites in H2 or H1 format and place the keyword/phrase within the text.

If you’re looking at Yahoo Search, the main difference is that you should fill up all the metatags and metadescription fields. For ranking with Yahoo this meta data is still important, whereas Google almost neglects it.

In the context of Singapore it is interesting that you can still get a good number of generic domains which contain your keyword. Running a health insurance business? health-insurance-singapore.com.sg would be perfect. Selling cars? Get buy-car.com.sg. The days are long gone when these generic keyword domains were still available on a .com extension.

A clean internal linking structure and sitemap is quite an important point as well. If possible, don’t use flash buttons or java script for your internal navigation. Ideal are plain text links which have the keyword as anchor text. Link from your articles to other relevant articles – so you make sure that the search engines will find all your content and hopefully index it as well. The image tags are also an important point. You’ll especially benefit from Google’s image search in terms of traffic by giving your images relevant image tags (e.g. don’t use “23kd.jpg” but “iphone-3g.jpg”).

Offpage Optimization

In offpage optimization it’s all about links, links and links. More precisely – backlinks, and quality ones please! Devise an elaborate plan for getting links from sites, of which quality, authority, frequency and topical relevance of the linking page. It’s best if you get backlinks from sites which deal with the same topic as your site.

The links should be ideally placed in the main (center) part of the site (e.g. within a blog post); the right or left blocks are second choices. You find a lot of paid links in the footer of many sites, so try to avoid being placed there. Since you want to get top rankings for your site on google.com.sg, try to get as many links as possible from sites which are hosted in Singapore (Singaporean IP).

A very powerful ranking factor is the linktext of your incoming links. It is important that the keyword for which you want to rank is included in most of your linktexts. Make sure that you link to the correct page on your site. That means you should choose a page where you have relevant content for that keyword on. e.g. linktext is “buy car singapore” link to www.yoursite.com.sg/buy-car-singapore/. On that page the title tag, headline and the content should include the keyword “buy car”. Use different link texts on different sites, otherwise it will look unnatural (e.g. have 3-4 sites using “buy car”, a couple more with “buy car Singapore”, some more “www.yoursite.com.sg”).

It all comes down to making it look natural. Get links in a consistent manner (e.g. if you currently have 5 links and suddenly add 15 in a single week this will look unnatural to Google and can possibly sandbox you). Add them consistently over a continuous period of time.

In the next article we’ll look at some effective strategies to get backlinks to your site.

About the Author

René Linden graduated with a business degree from Nuertingen University in Germany. He has had a passion for all things web-related since his early youth. At the age of 19, he started his first e-commerce store in 2003 which got acquired 2 years later. He has since been involved in several web start-ups and as an independent SEO consultant in Germany. Rene is heading the SEO practice of Singapore-based Web Development and SEO Consulting firm Net Minds.

Image courtesy of Alberto Mari.

Comments