In parts one and two of this five part tutorial, I discussed how to select and analyze the keywords that you should try and rank your page for. In this article Ill discuss how to format your page in such a way that the search engines know it is relevant to your chosen keywords. This process is known as on-page optimization.

Step 3: 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 isnt 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 couldnt do #1. Since competition for cat pictures was somewhat 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 didnt do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture gallery there wasnt that much text on the page. But Ill give you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot of text.

Lets 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 isnt 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 dont 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.

Thats really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said before, if the competition is light I dont 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 dont try to rank for fiercely competitive keywords I dont usually bother with all of that. I leave the ranking of really tough keywords to the serious SEO gurus, because to me its 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 yearsorry boat owners!).

No thanks. Ill rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying that effort Ill earn 10 times the advertising revenue that I would if I focused on one tough set of keywords.

Whats Next?

Once youve got your page properly optimized for your chosen keywords, its time to get to the hard part: getting in-bound links to your site. I quote hard because its not really difficult, just tedious. However, in the last part of this tutorial I will show you a tool that makes all of the work of gathering in-bound links much, much easier.