The common belief these days, and rightly so, is that off-site linking controls the search engines. How many different sites link to yours and what text they use in that link are the strongest factors determining how your pages rank. However, I believe that we have seen some recent shifts in Google that turn up the dial for a few on-page factors. These “on-page optimizations”, or things you can do to your own site, are not as easy as adding meta-tags or some extra text in the footer.

If it were as easy as adding meta-tags, invisible to the end user, saavy webmasters would manipulate the system by stuffing the tags (as they did in the ’90s). To combat that, I believe page placement and visibility are important factors in how much relevance your on-page optimization contributes to your rankings. To put it another way, if you want to make major upgrades in your on-page relevance, you’re going to have to make it visible to the end user. These visibility factors include:

1. Title tag. The single biggest on-page factor that is the most easily modified. It should be original for each and every page on your site. The most important keywords are near the front of the tag. Don’t stuff; over 60 characters is likely a waste. Make it sound natural. OK, none of this is revolutionary in the least.
2. The second factor, and one that I believe has been raised in importance, is internal linking. Treat your internal links just as you would treat your external links. They should be keyword-rich and placed high on the page. Instead of labeling your Home button with “Home”, put your keyword or site title in there. If you have important sub-pages or extremely important product pages, try and link to them (keyword-rich) from every other page on your site. This tells the robots that the page you’re linking to internally is important and should carry weight.
3. Reduce the text fluff. If you’ve never used a robot simulator then you should try it out and see what your page looks like to the average search robot. In digging through various sites as a robot, I’ve found a few places where you can either trim the fluff or keyword stuff without much consequence — form select boxes. When you have a long list of <option> tags, the search spider cannot use the select box, but it still sees the option tags as text. What you do with them is up to you– if you need to place some keywords on every page but don’t want to clutter the page to the user, try and make them useful in a select box (going to categories of your products, for example).

And here is the trick in reverse… if you have a long list of categories in a select field, say at the top of the page, you will find that it is taking up the most valuable space on every page (the header) and it pushes your real content further down. Get rid of it with javascript! If you have javascript use document.write to spit out the options, it will be invisible to spiders, but still useful to your viewers. And you’ve done nothing illegal. I’ll demonstrate below…

An example of a category select box that takes up too much valuable space and reduces your keyword density on every page:

<select name=”category”>

<option> Aardvarks </option>
<option> Anteaters </option>
<option> Antelope </option>
<option> Bears (greatest threat to America) </option>
<option> Bumblebees </option>
<option> Cats </option>
<option> Dogs </option>
etc…

</select>

If your list is 100 items long, you are wasting space. To the search engines, your select box looks like this:

Aardvarks Anteaters Antelope Bears (greatest threat to America) Bumblebees Cats Dogs

To the robots, this looks like a meaningless keyword list without links. Reduce that waste with javascript:

<select name=”category”>

<script language=’javascript’ >
document.write(‘<option> Aardvarks </option>’);
document.write(‘<option> Anteaters </option>’);
document.write(‘<option> Antelope </option>’);
</script>

</select>

You’ve now removed an entire chunk of repeating text on every page– increasing the relevant keyword density– yet not affecting the user’s experience or doing anything wrong in the eyes of the engines!