1.
URL Structure
Including search engine friendly URLs
for each of your pages is highly suggested, as these bring well crawling. Smaller
URLs seem to perform better in search engine results; however that is not the
only factor.
URLs that include targeted keywords also
perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence.
For example site.com/keyword would perform better than
site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.
2.
Page Titles
Your page titles are one and only of the
most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should
have its own exclusive title, which contains the main keywords for that page.
For example, you could write a blog post
about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally
important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title,
perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.
This way, whenever someone searches for
Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of
showing up because you have included those keywords.
3.
Meta Descriptions
Many people forget to include Meta
descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to
include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search
results when your page is listed.
For example, if we continue to use the
‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page
would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This informal chocolate
cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouthwatering, chocolatey cake ever
made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, while
containing a number of specific keywords.
4.
Meta Tags
For each of your pages, you can include
a set of keywords in the form of Meta tags. These should be all the appropriate
keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.
I use a Word Press plug-in on my sites
called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my Meta tag
keywords, Meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts
before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page
HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.
5.
Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)
When writing your articles, you should
break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier
for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2,
H3, H4, etc. tags are used.
Generally H1 tags are reserved for your
main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used
throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to
determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headiness
are more useful than common ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in
the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many
crawlers to differentiate important content.
6.
Image SEO
Using images within your content is a
great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring portions
of text. You can utilize these images to help improve your site SEO.
All your uploaded images have titles, so
treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can
help people find your site when searching on Google Images.
You can also include Alt Text and
Descriptions for your images, making them even more suitable with SEO.
7.
Keyword Density
Including appropriate keywords
throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out
what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse
keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site existence
banned from search engines.
To avoid this, try to keep your keyword
density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden
your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing,
without risk of being banned.
8.
Internal Linking
People often think that the only links
that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these
are not the only important links!
Placing links to your other website
pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly, internal links
can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much
easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your
content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the
search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy
of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the
Google PageRank of your pages.
There are a number of dissimilar methods
that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being;
content links and stable navigation links.
For bloggers, content links are very
useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article
posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example,
this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also
find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘useful. Perhaps other people
are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.
Note
:
These 8 techniques are objective some of
the ways that you can progress your on-page SEO. Any one used self-sufficiently
of the others won’t make much difference to your site ranking, however when
used together, they can help to improve your site traffic.
They will help to get your pages working
healthier, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine
spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will
build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.