On-Page vs. Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

I’m quite excited to do my first post here at SEODubai.Org. And I would like to thank Jon for inviting me over to contribute.

So instead of covering the basics of search engine optimization, I would like to go a little bit technical. Last month I did a comparison of a couple of pages of one of the most competitive client websites that we have. Luckily, my big boss gives me the versatility to test out both on-page and off-page strategies and implement which suit best.

So here are the given facts for this particular website:

• Domain and website are 2 years old
• The website offers services to different parts of the world
• We’ve established pages by location serving an industry
• We are targeting the following keyphrases
  • Location Industry
  • Industry in Location

I won’t be disclosing any keywords that we are targeting by my client or the services they offer in their website, so I’ll be having industry (ex. Finance, jobs, shopping) and location (Dubai, London, Ney York) as examples. When I say [location industry], just imagine keyword combinations like London finance, or when you read [Industry in Location], you can imagine Jobs in Dubai or Shopping in New York. The point is we’re now targeting highly competitive keywords.

So let’s take a look at page behaviors in terms of rankings with the following on-page vs. off-page factors:

*Click to see a bigger image. Rankings were taken on Oct. 14th, 2009

Most of the data are pretty much self-explanatory except for keyword density. Keyword density is the percentage of the number of times a keyword / keyphrase appears divided by total number of words in a page copy. So for example if the keyphrase “SEO Dubai” comes up 3 times in this blog post and you have a total of 630 words, keyword density should be:

3 / 630 = 0.008333 x 100 = 0.83 % Keyword Density

Here are some important observations:

1. While the common trend now is to go for long tail keywords (3-4 word keywords), well I would say depending on the resources that you have, you can always target highly competitive keywords. Location1 Industry keyword had over 90 million competitors (now that’s rat race if you’ll ask me). We did not appear anywhere in the top 200 results back in August 2009. But when we decided to make a bold move to target a huge keyword we were able to make Location1 Page enter the page 2-3 Google SERP’s after 2 months of quality link building.
2. Location2 and Location3 page however is a very different story. These pages were uploaded recently. All it had were text book on-page optimization (Page title, meta description, Alt Image Tags, etc.). Approximately 1 ½ – 2 months after, without any external link building efforts, Location2 entered page 2-3 of the Google SERPs while Location3 entered page1-2 of the results.

So what now? These tests were conducted to find out the best possible combination of off-page and on-page efforts to better your rankings, gain traffic, and eventually gain conversion for your website. Although results may differ for each website (and sometimes environment), there are some basics which would apply

Here are my conclusions:

1. The tests just confirmed that keywords in page title, domain, URL, and meta description (forget about meta keywords, they don’t matter no more!) are still significant ranking factors. They have carried a huge weight in rankings ever since 2007 and they still have that punching power up until now.
2. Surprisingly, keywords in Image Alt Texts do have a high correlation just as what Rand Fishkin has explained in SMX Advanced 2009.
3. If you’re competing for high-volume traffic, low competition keywords, you can go a long way with text book on-page optimization as evidently shown by our Location2 and Location3 pages which have 0 inbound links but have ranked significantly for their targeted keywords.
4. If you’re working on your link building campaigns, be sure to concentrate on both quantity and quality. Make sure that your links acquire the correct (most of the times exact) combination of keywords on your anchor texts. SEOMOz has ranked 2nd and 3rd – link popularity and anchor text of external links in the top ranking factors of 2009.
5. Search engines may somehow favor static (html) over dynamic (aspx) pages. However, search engines have now gotten better in indexing and ranking dynamic pages. You can read more about this argument on Static Pages vs. Dynamic Pages, Which is Better for SEO.

So there you have it. It pays to keep a close eye on your optimization efforts. Remember that what may work for one website may not necessarily be effective for the other website. Don’t be too obsessed with rankings though, because rankings will always just be a part of your important KPI’s. Pay attention to traffic, rankings, and most of all conversions of your website. Test, observe, modify (if necessary), implement (if proven effective) and repeat the process.