In this post I am going to talk about on site optimization which is also known as on page optimization. I am assuming that you have already read part one, part two and part three of my Wordpress SEO series and have done the following:

1) Chosen one or two keyword phrases for the home page of your blog

2) Made a list of less competitive keywords to use whenever you make a blog post.

First I am going to talk about optimizing your blog home page.

When you optimize the main page of your blog you will need to ensure that you mention your main keywords in specific places including:

1) The TITLE tag of your home page – this is the text that will be displayed in the title bar of your browser and is one of the most important places for SEO. If you are using Wordpress and have installed All in One SEO pack it is very easy to add your keywords to your TITLE. Just click on “Setting” in the WP admin panel and click on “All in One SEO”. You will see a field called “Home Title”. Just put your main keywords in here and then click the update button. If you have more than one keyword phrase you can separate each phrase with a “|” character.

2) The META description of your home page – often this description is what people will see as a summary of your site when the search in Google so make sure it is descriptive and entices people to click on your website. Keep the description to a couple of sentences and include each of your keywords once. You can update your description via the All in One SEO Pack settings as described in 1).

3) The META keywords of your home page – many people wrongly assume that this is an important factor in SEO, but actually it isn’t. In the past this tag has been overused and abused therefore the majority of search engines simply ignore it. For completeness you can include your main keywords in here if you wish, but keep it to a minimum. A list of 5 or 6 phrases is much better than a list of 20 phrases. You can update your description via the All in One SEO Pack settings as described in 1).

4) In the alt attributes of images on your home page – there should be an alt attribute for every image on your page and it should contain a short description of your image. When you hover your pointer over an image on a web page you will see the alt text and these are heavily used by software that reads web pages for blind people. You can add your keywords to the alt text of some of the images on your home page but don’t overdo it. Adding your keywords to 2-3 images is usually enough.

5) Throughout the body text of your home page – it is very important that you mention your main keyword phrase(s) throughout the body of your home page. If your site is setup like a typical blog this can be more difficult as your home page will always be changing and your latest blog post will show first. To get round this problem you can either add your keyword phrases to some of the static parts of your page e.g. an introductory paragraph if you have one, some of the widgets within your home page, or you can edit the theme to add your keywords to the home page in various places. Alternatively you could setup your blog so that you have a static front page with snippets of the latest posts. If you do this you can easily include your keywords throughout the static part of your page. Again, don’t over do this. Less than 5% density is best.

6) In the H1 or H2 tags on your home page – If you have a main heading on your home page you will want to ensure that it contains your keywords. The H1 tag is ideal for this, but if you don’t have an H1 tag you can put your keywords in the H2 tag. Normally this will involve updating your theme and since every theme is different I am not going to go into detailed instructions in this post.

Next, the easier part. How to optimize your blog posts.

A lot of people just concentrate on the optimization of their home page and this is a huge mistake. If you target very low competition keyword phrases and base each blog post around a different keyword phrase you can easily multiply the traffic to your website. You should use the list of low competition phrases that you compiled earlier and every time you make a blog post do the following:

1) Put your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post.

2) Mention your keyword phrase 2-3 times throughout the body of your blog post.

3) Ensure that the permalink contains your keyword phrase (URL of your post)

4) Ensure that you have All in one SEO Pack set up so that the Post Title format is set to %post_title% | %blog_title% if you want your Title to contain both the blog post title and the blog title OR just %post_title% if you want to make the title contain only the post title. This will only work if you have put your keywords in the blog title.

That’s it! If you take the time to do on site optimization by optimizing your home page and each blog post  for your keywords your chances of getting lots of traffic from the search engines will be much higher.

Look out for the final part of this series very soon where I will talk about off site optimization.