Understanding Keyword On-Page SEO Optimization
Posted on January 28, 2010
Filed Under SEO
When you’re optimizing your pages for search engines you need to know what search engines like Google actually “see” from your pages and how to optimize your pages for multiple keywords.
Here’s a question I got from a friend and I’ll use it as an example to explain a slightly more advanced on-page SEO:
> I’m still learning how to use the brain stormer and figuring out the best pages to write. I would like to write a check list page and want to hear your thoughts about which page is best.
>
> Supply Demand Profitability
>
>
> Free Planner 1081 567 2332
>
> Wedding Planning Checklist 6069 1136 5342
>
> Free Wedding Checklist 918 59 15559
>
> Free Organizer 1101 181 6083
>
> The profitability is higher for the Free Wedding Checklist, but is it better to go with the Wedding Planning Checklist because they have a higher supply even though the profitability is less?
The profitability is a waste of time. NEVER look at profitability. This is not financial profitability. It’s just a computer number.
If the demand is not high enough, you won’t get people on your site. Your profitability can be 10000000 but so what if no ones comes to the site!
You need DEMAND. Then you need a chance to rank well. That’s LOW SUPPLY.
Second, you can optimize pages for MANY keywords, not just one. Google HAS NO IDEA for which keyword you have optimized the page. 
You probably think that because you have put your keyword in the meta keywords field, you somehow tell Google to rank your page for that keyword.
Google doesn’t look at keyword meta fields!
It doesn’t matter!
This is ONLY for your Analyze It so that it knows what is the main keyword for the article and then makes sure you include it in all places which ARE important for Google: title, first sentence, in text links, etc.
But Google sees hundreds of keywords on your page and the keywords in your title (you probably use 4 to 8 or something like that).
How does Google decide for WHICH of these hundreds of keywords to rank your page?
MOSTLY by the keywords in the title + the link text of incoming links – which can be external (from other sites) and internal (from your own site).
So you have up to 8 keywords that you can use in the title of your article and it will be “optimized” for ALL these keywords in Google’s eyes as long as you include them in the title of the article and in the link text of the incoming links.
You’ll very likely include those keywords automatically in your article a few times so I wouldn’t really worry about that.
Now – you can use this approach when you have two or three VERY SIMILAR keywords that talk about the same thing – like in the example above. You can optimize the article for most of your keywords.
You DON’T use this strategy for VERY DIFFERENT keywords like – wedding planning checklist and free wedding graphics or something like that.
When you brainstorm your niche you will find hundreds of keywords based on which you’ll write pages. But some are very similar and that where you can optimize your article for most of them and not stay stuck and wonder which one is a better one.
So in your case, you have these keywords:
Free Planner 1081 567 2332
Wedding Planning Checklist 6069 1136 5342
Free Wedding Checklist 918 59 15559
Free Organizer 1101 181 6083
And you wonder whether to optimize for Free Wedding Checklist or Wedding Planning Checklist?
BOTH!
Now it also depends whether this is a T2 or a T3 page.
If you can expand it with 5 or more articles, then you can make it a T2 page. In that case, I’d choose Wedding Planning checklist as my primary keyword and optimize the article for it, but would include free wedding checklist in the title and in the text.
Even if you do it like this: Free Wedding Planning Checklist Google can see that the keyword Free Wedding Planning Checklist is in there and you’ll rank well.
But your title can also say: Wedding Planning Checklist – Free Wedding Checklist Ideas
And you now have optimized your article for both keywords!
Sure, I would still suggest you to write a T3 page for Free Wedding Checklist and then link back to your T2 page. It will strengthen both and you might even get a double listing in Google.
As for Free Planer and Free Organizer – these are not really wedding keywords. They can be about business planning. I’d look for wedding keywords since your site is focused on this theme.
You can of course include free planner and free organizer in the article and you may well end up getting some traffic for them.
But back to the topic of this post; you don’t have to EXCLUDE other keywords from an article if you choose to optimize it for one keyword.
On the contrary, you SHOULD optimize your articles for MULTIPLE VERY SIMILAR keywords.
The key are keywords in the title and in the incoming links.
That’s what Google understands and that’s what helps you get ranked higher for a certain keyword and NOT what you put into your meta keywords field.
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14 Responses to “Understanding Keyword On-Page SEO Optimization”
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My problem is usually trying to decide which Tier 3 keywords to use. The demand is either below 500 or I can’t find supply numbers below 100.
As I am focusing on product niches, there are quite a number of specific models or products that does not come up when doing the Brainstormer from Site Built It.
Excellent, straight-to-the-point article. I’m glad I agree with most of it. I guess I’ve learned from the best
I agree with you Tomaz when you say search engines rank your pages “MOSTLY by the keywords in the title + the link text of incoming links – which can be external (from other sites) and internal (from your own site).”
If you notice high traffic, high ranking article directory sites like Hubpages, Buzzle and others do not make a complete fuss about article keyword optimization/density. They seem to focus mainly on your keyword in the title and then when you submit your article they themselves eventually do internal linking (I have seen this happening to my articles) besides encouraging you to promote your article by linking back to it (external linking).
This shows that they deeply understand what Google really uses to determine relevency of an article and rank it likewise. Obviously when a writer is writting an article based on a keyword in the title they would stay the course and naturally throw in the same keyword without knowing it time and again and a few other related ones.
Another spot on article! Thanks again for explaining how to optimize multiple keywords on a single page.
I had a question about linking to internal pages in my site. My fruit smoothie recipe page contains over 20 T3 pages linking to different types of fruit smoothies, such as blueberry smoothies and strawberry smoothies.
How do I make my T2 page easy to navigate the text links for my human visitors, but yet link to my T3 pages with their specific keywords. Like I have “apple smoothie recipes” and “banana smoothies” as keywords.
Do I need to revamp my T2 Fruit Smoothie page to mini paragraphs, each on a type of fruit, and weave in the specific keyword text links? or do I leave it as is? Currently, every keyword text link is “Smoothie Recipes” to each page.
I hope that I made sense with my question. Thanks!
Hi DaNae,
Sometime you CAN’T. It’s just too repetitive.
So you can vary your link text a little bit from that T2 page and try to use ideal link text when you link between various T3 pages.
I would also suggest you add some text content between the links – like a short description. Pure links may send the wrong signal to Google.
Another great article Tomaz – I’ve been doing exactly as you suggest weaving in multiple keywords to each page of my site.
The bit I had missed though was weaving the variants into my TITLE – oops! I think it may be worth looking over some of those pages again and checking.
Hi,
Thanks for all your info. I have been with SBI for 6 months and your blog has been a big help. I just decided to revisit my keywords and improve them, then looked at this site and found this helpful article. I really appreciate that you take the time to share your knowledge. I especially found helpful the keyword string example for the title. From it, I realized I can do so much better with keyword titles. Thanks!
HI Tomaz, back again. I took on board what you said and had a look back at some of my site pages to see what the page titles were like. Generally they were crap – waffly rubbish with my main keyword but no attempt to blend in secondary keywords. I’ve reworked a couple of them and am going to carry on improving some others.
Now just to make sure we are clear – I’m talking about the “title” box in blockbuilder, rather than the “header 1″ that appears on the page itself.
Mike,
Yes, the title is the key although in most cases my headline is the same as title. Why complicate stuff and use different titles and H1 headlines?
Hi Tomaz; First of all your blog is great thanks. I understand everything that you are saying in this post. The one thing I do not understand is say you are posting an article to Ezine Articles. Tell me what anchor text do you suggest using for this page that you just created being:”Wedding Planning Checklist – Free Wedding Checklist Ideas” and should you have this same anchor text pointing back to your homepage?
Inotherwords you are allowed 2 links in your bio but the problem I have is when you use different anchor text to your homepage and a tier 2 page when you do a backlinks check the anchor text that shows up is always whatever anchor text you used to point towards your homepage so therefore your anchor text towards your tier 2 page does not show up as the proper anchor text.
Tell me what do you suggest in this case, do you suggest using different anchor text to both your homepage and tier 2 page knowing they will both show up as the same anchor text or do you just post one link to say your tier 2 with the proper anchor text and perhaps a tier 3 page and forget about your homepage?
Shane,
ezinearticles.com doesn’t allow that many words in the anchor text. I think 5 is max. I would simply link to a T2 page which I created with the main keyword in the anchor and use a different anchor for the homepage.
In another article submitted I might link with the keyword of that T2 page back to my homepage.
But if you link internally like I suggested, there are so many variations of keywords that point to the homepage that eventually it starts to rank for many of these keywords and there not much need for external links to have those extra keywords.
As far as seo optimization- how often should you check the keywords effectiveness? I had a key word that had high potential one month, and the numbers plummeted the next month.
I assume that under potential you were looking at profitability? If you choose keywords with low demand (say under 300), then these keywords may be random.
They may not repeat often enough every month. So the next month their demand may go down and so will profitability. I choose keywords with at least 500 Value Demand…
Hello Tomaz;
Thanks For the Great Response. It is much appreciated!
Shane