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Step 3: Conduct Your On-page Optimization

Once you have the foundations laid for your SEO campaign, the next step is to develop your on-site or on-page SEO. The objective of on-page SEO is to clearly signal to the search engines that this page is all about a specific keyword, or in other words that this page is highly relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

On page optimization involves strategically using the keyword in those places that the search engines are looking for it. There are a lot of misconceptions about where and how keywords should be used. However, experienced SEO experts know that keywords should be use in the following places:

The URL – Most eCommerce sites dynamically generate URLs that do not contain keywords, but rather category ID numbers and Product ID numbers. An optimized site should have URLs that look something like this: www.mysite.com/michelin-snow-tires.

The Title Tag – Each page has a Meta title and the keyword should be used in the Meta title towards the beginning of the Title.

The H1 and H2 Tags – These are the on-page headings of each web page, and usually correspond to cascading style sheets or CSS. Keywords should always be used in the H1 and H2 tags.

The body copy – keywords should not be repeated over and over in the body copy. Just a few times is enough. Having the keywords toward the beginning and the end is good, and using bolds, bullets and italics for the keyword is also helpful. “Stuffing” keywords unnaturally into the body copy does not increase rankings, and it could get you kicked off the search engines.

Images – Using the keywords in the image names (i.e. Michelin-snow-tires.jpg) and in the alternative text that appears when the mouse hovers over an image also helps the search engines understand what the page is about.