This post is a continuation of our March 13th blog – How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings.

Ok, so what is On-Page SEO? Simply put, it’s your metadata, keywords, images, and readability.

Let’s get into what these things mean.

A. Metadata

The 3 types of meta data that Hubspot’s Website Grader concerns itself with: Page Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords.

Page Title

It is very, very important to have a descriptive title for your site.  I can’t stress this enough.

• You should limit the length to 65 characters (including spaces) or less.
• Each page title should be unique and describe the content on the page.
• Incorporate keyword phrases into the title.
• It’s important to repeat the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag within the content of that page.  It will reinforce the message and your visitors will be more likely to stay.
• Google says it’s ok to use a divider in your title.  The pipebar “|”, arrow “>”, and hyphen “-” are acceptable.  You can use them however you wish.  ie:  OH! Media | Web Design and Development > Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Meta Description

A few rules to follow when writing your meta descriptions:

• Be descriptive but honest.  There is a fine line here, if you lie to gain traffic, the visitors will be visit and leave with a bad taste in their mouth.  This will cause poor brand association.
• Think of your meta description as an advertisement.
• As with the page title, there are limits to how much content you should have.
  • Google displays up to 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
  • Yahoo! up to 165
  • MSN up to 200+
• It’s a good idea to stick with 160 characters or less, that way you’ll be safe in all 3 search engines.

Meta Keywords

There’s debate on the internet whether meta keywords are even relevant anymore.   What we do know is that they won’t hurt your rankings, so why not have them?

Here are some rules to follow when writing them:

• Sort by most important keywords or key phrases first
• Only use the most relevant keywords for that particular page
• Don’t repeat keywords or phrases
• It’s good practice to only have 8 – 10 relevant keywords
• Use commas to separate the words and phrases
• Use both singular and plural versions of the keywords

Although doing all this work may not be relevant in the eyes of the search engines, it’s good practice for you to gather descriptive words that should be written into the content of your webpages.

B. Heading Summary

This is pretty simple.  Google loves header tags.  It’s good practice to follow these rules;

• Employ the H1 tag for page headlines
• Use H2s and H3s for sub headlines

Use them and you’ll notice a positive difference in your rankings.

C. Image Summary

Search engines can’t see images, so it’s important that you employ alt attributes on all of your images.  I’m not sure why Website Grader grades you on how many images you have,  I can’t see how that can have an impact on your rankings.  I think it’s more of a usability issue than anything.  Our report says:

Too Many Images Found.Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 18 images.

It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

This is not a real concern to us.  If you get the same message when you get your report, just disregard it.  However, do make sure that all of your images are optimized properly for the web and all have alt tags.

D. Interior Analysis

This section only shows you the other pages that Website Grader processed while creating the report.  It doesn’t give you any other relevant information.

E. Readability Level

The system analyzes your textual content and categorizes what level of education is needed to read and understand your site.  Again I’m not sure why that is relevant to search engines but Website Grader says the easier your site is to read, the more people will understand it.  That part makes sense to us.

That’s it for On-Page SEO.  We hope it helped you understand parts of your Website Grader report a little better and that it got you thinking of ways to improve your search engine rankings.

Stay tuned for our next post on Off-Page SEO.

We’ve been using Hubspot’s Website Grader for some time now and we think it’s amazing. It’s a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides you with a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. The best thing is that you don’t have to be a programmer to understand the report that it spits out for you, something our clients seem to appreciate.

It’s very simple to use, just visit the site (http://website.grader.com) plug in your website address, and optionally your competitors sites, along with your email address so they can send you the report you.  That’s it, sit back and wait 30 second for the system to analyze and grade your site.  The report will automatically display in your browser when it’s ready.

Your website report is broken down into six main sections:

1. I. On-Page SEO
2. II. Off-Page SEO
3. III. Blogosphere
4. IV. Social Mediasphere
5. V. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
6. VI. Competitive Intelligence

Over the weeks to come we will be breaking down each one of these categories and explain them in depth so that you can get the very most from this tool.  In the meantime, try it out, see how your site scores.

As always, if you have any questions, or you need to improve your website search engine rankings, just contact us, we’d love to help.