So by now you should have a completely optimised homepage, and, if you followed the last lesson, a target list of links to build in the future to help improve your ranking.
In this lesson we’ll learn how to otimise our inner pages.
Using your whole site to capture many keyphrases
Good optimisation means that your whole site gets optimised – every page you have optimised represents additional search terms you can get rankings for, additional enquiries and additional sales.
How many keyphrases can you capture in total? It depends on the size of your site. Let’s say that for each page of your site you have the opportunity to capture between 1 – 4 different keyphrases (maybe a head phrase and 2-3 ‘long tail’ phrases).
When you start producing textual content for your site you’ll see the factor that limits you straight away – its the task of copywriting to capture multiple phrases – the more phrases the more difficult it is.
So taking this into consideration, and the fact that every page cannot be optimised (you wouldnt want to optimise your ‘terms and conditions’ page for example), we have a rule of thumb which says the number of phrases you can capture is about twice the number of the web pages you have; If you have a 20 page website you can capture around 40 phrases, a 50 page website means you can go on an capture around 100 keyphrases. Some ecommerce sites have 1000’s of pages – we’ll discuss this in more detail below.
The process of optimising your inner pages
Actually you know the process already its exactly the same as the process for optimising the homepage which you have already done. (repeated below). So its reasonably simple, but, if you have lots of pages, its time consuming, so we’ll want to prioritise things.
If you have the time and you have a small site, you maybe want to do this in one hit. More likely though you’ll want to do it over a period of time. For example, if you have 15 pages you want to optimise (you may decide to prioritise them in order of importance) then take 5 per month over 3 months to do the SEO work – or longer if you have more pages to do. How long you take to do it depends on your resources available and how many phrases and pages you have targeted.
So, here’s the process to go through….
1. Allocating phrases to pages.
There are two ways to do this – either you can choose the phrases first (1 to 4 max) then decide which page to use to capture them. Alternatively you can select a page to be optimised then look at your keyphrase list to decide on what the best phrases are for the page selected.
As hinted to previoulsy, until you get some good experience at doing this, try to restrict yourself to just a couple of phrases per page, at least initially.
2. Write the copy for the webpage (or change the existing copy) to capture the phrases chosen. Full details on copywriting for SEO is included in this post…SEO Copywriting
3. Optimise the title tag for this page.
Full details on how to optimise the title tag are included in this post….Title Tag Optimisation
4. Optimise the other metatags for this page. Full details on optimising these tags here… Optimising Metatags
That’s it, just wait for googlebot to come back to your site and you’ll start getting rankings for your optimisation work.
There’s a bit of fine tuning to do – not essential but ideal if you have the time …
1. Ensuring your images are ‘alt tagged’ – essentially including a keyphrase rich short sentence on each image (this helps with the SEO, accessibility AND image searches)
2.You also want to ensure links to these optimised pages (from other pages of your site) have the chosen keyphrase (s) as ‘link text’
Best of luck with it.
If you have a ecommerce and/or a database driven site here’s a supplemenatry post on optimising inner pages. Keyphrase 2
