Video Transcription

On Page Optimization

Hey there! Welcome back to Life Science Marketing Lab.

In this video, we’re going to be discussing On-Page Optimization. By this stage, you should have picked your page and picked the keyword that you want to target on that page. So, whatever keyword that you want to rank for with this webpage.

What I’ve done here is I’ve created a fake biotech company called Supreme Biotech. We decided to launch a catalog of ELISA kits. Here is an example of the webpage where we’re going to target those ELISA kits. We’re going to list the products or list some information about the products. We are targeting the keyword “ELISA kits”.

So, what are the best practices for optimizing your page?

Firstly, it’s placing your keyword in 4 critical locations:

  • Title Element – you can’t visually see it on your webpage, through your web browser. It’s something that’s in the back, HTML code. To see it, you need some HTML experience, so, usually, we’d ask your developer. However, most websites nowadays are built on CMSs, such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!, so it’s very easy to go and update your title element. Where you can see the title element is in the search results. For example, if this is a search result of this webpage, “ELISA Kits | Supreme Biotech” would be your title element. This text is somewhere in HTML code on your webpage. The title element is where you want your keyword.
  • Headline | H1 – your H1 tag is the biggest head tag on your webpage. It’s usually at the top of your webpage. In this case, we have placed the keyword in there.
  • On-page Content – depending on the webpage and how much content you actually have on the page, typically, you probably want about 300-500 words, depending on what type of page it is. If it is 300-500 words, you probably want a keyword in there, around three to five times. Although I wouldn’t focus too much on trying to get a keyword in there three to five times, because what you really want is for the content to look possible. If you are trying to get it in there three times, and you just can’t really fit it into the content, then don’t worry about it. If you have it in the headline and the other places, and you selected the right keyword that is actually possible for you to rank for, you’re gonna do just fine. It’s really important for it to be as natural as possible.
  • Image alt Attributes – some people call these Image alt tags. On this page, we have three images on top and one at the bottom. Let’s say that one of these depicts an ELISA kit or bovine ELISA kit. Again, your image alt tag is something that’s back in your HTML code. With most CMSs, you could go in, find your images very easily and update your alt tag. But just so you know what it looks like in HTML code, an image is usually depicted by < img src=”…/images/elisa-kit.jpg” alt=”Bourne Elisa Kit“> – the last part is alt attribute. It’s really important to get your keyword (Elisa Kit) in here as well. if you’ve got several images, getting your keyword in each one, or the alt attributes in the images is great.

Next, if possible (you don’t always have to do this):

  • Meta Description – get your keyword in there. Again, your meta description is something you can’t see on your web page, it’s in your back-end code, but you can see it in the search result. This section here is your meta description. Google doesn’t look for the keywords in your meta description. It doesn’t give that page any value for that keyword if it’s in there. Google has explicitly said that. However, it’s good for your click-through rates. When the keyword is picked up in your meta description, it’s bolded, so it’s more likely that someone is going to see that. You’re going to get the click-through because they are going to realize that the web page is more relevant to what they’re looking for. It’s a good place to put it. However, you need to see your meta description as your ad copy, so, only put it in there if it’s natural and if you really want it. If there is other stuff that you want to say in your meta description, then go ahead and say that first.
  • URL – next place is your URL address. In this case, we’ve put the keyword at the end of the URL Only put it in there if it makes sense to do that. You manufacture it when you have your web page set up and you try to optimize it for this keyword. You may not want to change the URL because you have to get involved in redirects, or that kind of stuff. You may want to avoid that.

Another best practice is to always sound natural. If you’re trying to get your keywords into all these places or mention it ten times in the content, and it doesn’t sound natural, that is going to be reflected in your user behavior data. People are gonna get to your page, they are gonna see it’s just stuffed with these keywords that don’t make sense; the content is going to lose its value, and people are going to bounce to other sites. They are probably going to see it as quite spammy. Even Google picks up if you try to spam in too many places. The Google algorithms are very clever with this kind of stuff.

On the same of trying to look natural, another thing that you can do is use modifications of your target keyword. So, if you’re trying to rank for “ELISA kits”, and you’re finding that it’s very difficult to keep on fitting in these keywords several times into your content, you can use a modification of that keyword. You can use “ELISA test kits” or “ELISA test”. Google is really good at associating those keywords together. It tends to know that these are associated keywords and that they mean similar things or the same things. If you are going to rank for ELISA kits, you’re probably going to rank for ELISA test kits. Google focuses on keyword topics, and not exact match keywords. It puts all these keywords together into a topic and ranks you for all of them. You can use modifications for that reason, but it’s also a way of sounding natural.

That’s the six places that you would put your keyword; the main point is to sound natural, as much as you can.

I’m gonna take you to my computer and give you some examples of some badly optimized web pages, and some well-optimized web pages.

This is a company called Veterinary Medical Research & Development, or VMRD. This company fairly recently reached out to us about optimizing their website. One of the pages they wanted to optimize was their test kits page. They wanted to optimize it for the keyword “ELISA kits”. This is a really good example of a poorly optimized page. As you can see, the keyword isn’t in their H1 tag – the main headline, it isn’t in the URL, it also isn’t in the title element. It is partly in the content, under ELISA, you can see it in the list of products, but the term “ELISA kit” doesn’t come up. It also isn’t contained in the meta description, but this isn’t the page about ELISA kits. It’s about testing kits in general. What I consulted them on is to break out this page into separate kits, create a page that is actually about ELISA kits, and optimize that page for that keyword. That’s why this page isn’t ranking for the term “ELISA kits”.

So, what is ranking for the term “ELISA kits”? I’ll pop that into the Google search, and if we go down to the natural search results, the first website that is ranking is Thermo Fisher Scientific. You can already see that “ELISA kits” is in their title element, in the URL and in the meta description. That’s three out of six critical places that they should have put that keyword – and they have done it. If you go to the actual page itself, you can see that “ELISA kits” is in the headline. If I do CTRL + find, you can see that ELISA kits come up several times, a lot more times than the recommended amount. However, if you read through this page, you can see that it’s completely natural. They haven’t tried to force it at all. The last place is the image alt attributes. If I check this image here, I can see the HTML code, using this tool. This is the image, in the back end code, and here is the alt tag: alt = “Human Amyloid beta 40 ELISA Kit”. So, they have placed “ELISA Kit” in their image alt attribute. And all of the images on this page are very similar. They have the keyword placed in the six locations that they should have placed it, and that is one of the reasons that they are ranking number one for that keyword.

Thanks very much for joining me, take care.