Chapter 5: Design and On Page Optimization – The Building Blocks

A good SEO campaign is built on a strong technical foundation. This means that your basic website structure and on-page SEO elements are optimized. Your design, with a specific focus on your computer and mobile user experiences, also plays an important role. It’s easy to get lost in the world of social media marketing and content development and forget that unless the core components are in place, all the external or more advanced work that you do could be for naught.

The Difference between On-Page and Off-Page Optimization

Before moving forward, it’s helpful to define the difference between on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is what happens from an SEO perspective on your website itself. This includes how your structure your website, how you label your URLs, managing your metadata, and the on-page content. Off-page optimization are the activities that you do on the rest of the internet to promote your site, such as link building and social media promotion. Invest the time at the beginning to structure your on-page content so that your off-page promotion has a maximum effect.

Which Elements of On-Page Optimization Matter in 2014

On-page optimization is less sexy that off-page factors, so it often gets short shrift in SEO conversations. A large percentage of on-page optimization is structural and technical, and it doesn’t feel like it yields immediate results. However, knowing which factors of on-page optimization really have an impact in 2014 can help you focus and get the best results possible with your content and web efforts.

• Frequently updated content: Your website’s content and frequency with which you update it still plays a big role in how well your site ranks. One of the simplest ways to accomplish this is via a regularly updated blog. The ideal strategy would be to update daily, but create and commit a schedule you can stick to.
• Google authorship integration: Integrating Google Authorship into how you promote your site makes major difference. It leverage’s Google’s interest in using the tool to identify authors, curate their content, and direct more authority to credible authors in specific niche. It also have off-page benefits in the form of Authorship Markup, which ensures that your Google Plus headshot appears next to your content in search results.
• Heading tags: The way that you utilize heading tags in your content also plays an important role in how that context is indexed. Each page should have an H1 tag that includes your keyword, as well as H2 tags. Keyword usage should be natural, but present.
• Title tags: Title tags remain critical for two reasons. If they’re on message and include your core concepts, title tags help you get ranked for appropriate content. But writing for search engines isn’t enough: title tags are what appears in search results. Title tags must be enticing with a clear call to action to get searchers to click and read more.
• Local marketing elements: If your business has a geographic component, your on-page elements are critical. These include local maps, contact details, and integration with data sources such as FourSquare.
• Alt tags: The alt tags that you use on your images play an important role in your SEO and your accessibility strategy. Alt tags are used to help visually impaired users navigate websites. They also help determine what your images are for, and give your site a chance to rank in Google Image Search.

The Elements of a Good User Experience

The other component of a successful on-page strategy is your design and overall user experience strategy. How easy is it for users to find what they’re looking for on your site? At times, it can feel that SEO concerns, artistic vision, and user experience place conflicting demands on how you organize and design your site. When you add the increasing focus on brand and professional design, it’s clear that website owners are asking for significant returns on a single website design. There are a number of areas that you should focus on your design so that it supports your SEO goals, rather than detracts from them:

• Clean and easy to navigate: An overall clean and easy to navigate site that makes it simple for users to complete their objectives is important for SEO. This is particularly true in the case of manual reviews, when a cluttered or unprofessional design can cause your site to lose rankings.
• Minimal or unobtrusive advertising: Advertising is another factor that has a potentially negative impact on the visitor experience. There’s no problem with having advertising or monetization components on your site, but it should be value first and then advertising. This is true of your design, as well as your content. Your design needs to balance both of these elements.
• Mobile responsive design: The introduction of Google Hummingbird has placed an increasing focus on mobile design. How does your website look when it’s viewed on a tablet or a smartphone? Is it optimized for the wide range of mobile devices on the market, including Apple devices and a variety of Android devices? Your site’s mobile performance now has an impact on your site’s ranking. Sites functioning on mobile devices is going to be a very large ranking factor and game changer. Currently this doesn’t impact your search rankings but should significantly impact it in the very near future.
• Use mouse-overs: If your design is beautiful and image driven, you may be thinking this comes as the cost of SEO optimization. But techniques such as the mouse-over enable you to blend graphic usage with alt text that appears when someone puts the cursor over that part of the site. This allows you to show details such as “10% off” or other calls to action to the user, and also makes these facts indexable by search engines.

Managing your site’s design from both a brand-building and SEO perspective can be challenging. But investments in these technical elements set your site up for future success. Once you’ve wrapped your head around these concepts, it’s time to take a closer look at your audience and strategies and tools for getting to know them. Strong audience knowledge will form the foundation for all the tools that we explore later in the book.