A deeper look at on-site SEO

How to make sure your website is indexed and optimized for search engines

By Mary Hirst

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving natural listings on search engines so that

people can locate your website more easily.

There are two strands of SEO

On-page: The content, keywords, images etc that you place on your website

Off-site: The back links and social media that drive people to you

On-page optimization is the base starting point for all campaigns

Keywords are significant because search engines index them in databases and look them up again when internet

users type search terms.

Competitor analysis is one of the best ways to start identifying keywords, and keyword suggestions tools can

also be helpful.

Keywords

What your competitors are doing?

What keywords do my competitors use and to what effect?

How did they optimize these keywords?

What meta data and title tags are my competitors using?

What URL extensions did they choose?

Keyword suggestion tools can also help you identify popular key words and terms. Google insights can be used to research trends.

Choose only 4 or 5 keywords to work with. Select them by popularity search volume and relevance.

Long-tail keywords

When you start researching keywords you will notice that short phrases like “Croatia holiday” drive more traffic than long-tail keywords like

“Croatia holiday rentals in Bol”.

That said the competition for the short phrases is sometimes immense and with the best SEO in the world you may not get a high ranking. Therefore it is good practice to select some high relevance long-tail

keywords. Because they are less competitive you may be able to dominate these areas.

Content is king

Search algorithms are constantly changing but one thing remains the same. Google always places high

priority to the content on your web page. Page URLs, Titles, Heading 1 &2, and image alt tags are for

keyword placement.placement

Content selections

Strategically place the keywords in these areas of your website.

Homepage URL or secondary URLsThis is easy if you are using a content management system,

simply turn on the user friendly URLs feature and type the keywords you need.

Meta tagsThe meta data descriptions placed within the head of the web page provide information about the content of your website. The meta description will also appear in the search listings.

Content selections

The meta data description should be between 70 – 180 characters, there is no advantage in making them any longer.

There is some debate about the importance to meta keywords, but most people still insert four or five words into the meta keywords section.

There may be some pages in your website that you don’t wish the search engine to index, you can use the meta tag robot ‘no index’ command to achieve this.

Text/HTMl ratio

Out of all your code and text, aim for 25 – 70% text ideally.

You can check this score on Woorank.com

Save time on evaluation: Woorank.com

Content optimization

When you write quality content for the user, they will reward you with Facebook likes, social media bookmarks and shares and they will trust your website. This in turn

will also help your SEO efforts.

Content optimization

In the future, search engines will look at html 5 elements and semantics like <article>, <nav>, <header> <section> <figure> to evaluate what type of content you have.

Micro formats

Micro data also helps search engines identify content types and improve the display on the search engine results page. In the future they may have a bearing on SEO, learn more at www.schema.org

The importance of Social media

Put social buttons on your homepage

of 3 posts a day ideally .

Evaluation and analysis

SEO is a practice and a discipline requiring constant evaluation and tracking. Websites like: www.markosweb.com and SEO Moz pro’s on page score card, can give you a full analysis of how you are doing and they also provide useful suggestions for future improvements.

If you are new to SEO, improving your on-site strategy is the first and fastest step in the process of boosting your websites ranking.

The main skills of SEO

Be focussedBe methodical

Constantly evaluateStay up-to-date

On-site optimisation will greatly improve your web ranking and boost your natural listings.

the end.