On-Page SEO is the science of optimizing the contents of a website so it becomes friendlier to the search engines. This technique includes the optimization of texts, images, tags, URL structure, internal links, and headers. For example, selecting the proper ALT tag keyword for an image.
10 Important Components of Optimization
Page Title (H1 tags) – should contain the website name, the title of the page that is being viewed and relevant keywords.
Meta tags (Keywords & Description) – While the Keyword tag is not as important as it used to be, it doesn’t hurt to include it. Keywords should be relevant, descriptive, and as unique as possible while still trying to be appropriate to the content of the web page. Stop words (words not registered by search engines) should not be used. The Description should include most of the keywords and use additional words that are associated with user searches. The Description tag makes it possible for you to specify the description of your page. This is what searchers see when your site comes up in the SERPs.
ALT Tags – Images should have ALT tags attached to them, so they are user-friendly towards the visually impaired and the percentage of users who have the images display turned off in their browser. Also, doing this makes it possible for the website being found in the SERPs of image searches, in addition to text searches.
URL And File Structure – The names of each file should be relevant and adhere to consistent file naming conventions in order to improve file management. The hierarchy of files should be kept to a minimum and should be organized so that all files are located in easy-to-find folders. This is important to search engines – as spiders will be able to efficiently crawl through the directories with ease.
Navigational links – There should be links on every top-level page to get to all other top-level pages of the website. All second-level pages should have links to all other pages of the website. Make sure the navigation links are text-based so search engine spiders can ‘read’ them. The internal links should use keyword anchor text and keyword file names. This cross-linking of pages assists the spiders in navigating efficiently throughout the website.
Headings and Body – Headings such as H2, and H3 should contain keywords, and the Body text should contain the right amount of keywords as well. Don’t use too many keywords – as this will hurt your website! You want to use just the right amount, to make the search engines happy and rank your site well. Affordable SEO Services are hard to find, especially if you are a small business on a limited budget. Our search engine optimization company is trying to help those small business owners by providing the “grunt work” at a reasonable price. Of course… you can always do it yourself and save a little money for advertising! But, keep us in mind if you decide to look for outside assistance.
Keyword Density – Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to overall words used in the website content. A good rule of thumb is to have a keyword density of about 2%, up to 2.5% max. Any more than that and you risk being penalized for keyword “stuffing”.
HTML sitemap – All websites should have an HTML sitemap. Why? Because it helps search engines navigate your site, and it helps human visitors find information on your site more efficiently.
Unique Content – This is perhaps the single most important factor in determining your page rank. If you have a page with plagiarized content, the search engines discover it very easily and will penalize the site for it. As you’ve already heard before… “content is king!”
Proper HTML and CSS validation – This is the process of validating, or making sure your webpage is written in proper code. If the page is not valid the search engines may have trouble reading your page, or may skip it entirely!
On-Page search engine optimization is possibly the most important part of the process of SEO. With the recent popularity of social media, this importance has declined somewhat… but it is still hugely critical to page rank. Social media, backlinks, and other Off-Page SEO factors are becoming more and more important to the ranking of a web page because search engines equate popularity with relevance.
Other Important Ranking Factors
Off-page SEO includes all the things you do “offline” to help your website achieve good search engine rankings. Off-page optimization does not involve any optimization with the contents of the webpage – instead, it is other “offline” factors that affect your website’s ranking. For example – building quality backlinks to improve the page rank of your website is a type of Off-Page optimization. Getting mentioned in FaceBook, or another social media site is another example.
Basically, the more mentions and links you can get, the better the search engines like your site.
Leave a Reply