On-page optimisation in an age of links
An interesting post by Brian over at SEOMoz got me thinking about the importance of on-page optimisation. Couple of years ago as Google’s trust in what other people had to say about you increased, traditional on-page factors seemed less relevant. A lot could be achieved by a an anchor text focussed link campaign with content relegated to search term coverage and not much else. But over the last few years, Google has clearly turned up that authority knob to the point, where a site with trust and established authority can not be easily faked by your average link campaign. True authority has to be gained through useful content that generates natural links.
The massive impact to link equity from social networks has also reduced the impact of manual link campaigns. Sending a few link requests and purchasing links can not compete with the volumes offered by social networks (rel=nofollow or not).
For me this doesn’t all equate to a return to on-page factors like keyword-density and h1 tags, but good content and optimising for the user is more important than ever.
As broadband adoption takes off in a big way (BT just reached 10M customers in the UK and plan to upgrade their lines to offer 24MB next year), we’re heading towards zero second penalties for switching from one site to another, and if you haven’t sorted out your creative on the search results and usability on the site, you’ll be missing out on a whole load of customers.
Brian at SEOMoz argues that usability and designing pages for conversion has partly been driven by PPC campaigns where conversion has always been the holy grail. With the release of Google Website Optimiser and AB testing on creative, there really shouldn’t be any reason for bad creative or unusable page design.
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