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SEO 101 - On-Page Optimization

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SEO 101 : On-Page Optimization


On page SEO 101
SEO, or search engine optimization looks very technical and complicated to a lay person, but it does not have to be so. If you are a small business owner, freelancer, webmaster or blogger, it is quite important to understand the basics of SEO. Whether you hire an SEO Company or SEO consultant or do it in-house, it is necessary to understand basics of SEO to ensure success of your campaign.

The objective of  setting up a website is to attract traffic from people who may be interested in your services or information you provide in your blog, and to convert them to buy your product, sign up for newsletter, fill up form, download whitepapers to simply spend time browsing your site. To get web traffic, your site should rank high, preferably in the first page, when a prospect searches by typing in words in a search engine.  Well, simply put, SEO is the art and science of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in organic search results. By organic is meant un-sponsored or unpaid search results presented by the search engine when user types in ‘keywords’ in the search box.

Keyword Research

Why is Keyword research necessary?
Keyword research is the first step in SEO and creates the foundation for your online presence.  People use different words to search for information on internet. Your site should potentially rank high for all search terms that prospective customers may employ. Optimizing for all keywords is not feasible, hence we need to shortlist keywords which have high traffic potential.

There are many tools for Keyword research, some free and others paid.  Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool  is free and easy to use.  In Adwords keyword tool, you should select “Exact Match” so that you can estimate  how many monthly searches are performed using that specific keyword (or phrase). Broad match will show search terms in which your keywords appear in any order and may contain other words; so the results will show high search volume, which may not make for a good opportunity, since search terms may, for example, include ‘free’, or ‘training’ which you do not provide.

Tools should be used along with competitive analysis, to uncover high traffic keywords your competitors may be using.

Content

Search Engines are looking for fresh, authority content in your niche. So are your visitors. Are the pages well written ? You should create compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but motivates visitors to share the information. Without quality, original content, your site does not have chance to rank high.

Freshness : Are pages fresh and  about trending topics? Freshness of content is now a ranking factor in Google.

Overall Word Count

The amount of words you have on a web page will depend on topic and intent.  Content with less than 250 words is generally not recommended. Web pages with information would require  at least 450 words, especially when you are trying to optimize on keywords.

Title Tag

Every page of your website should have unique content. The title tag should be specific for every page of your website. The title tag  should have the  most important or competitive keyword/phrase  at the beginning followed by the secondary keywords.

Meta Description

The meta description is  not used for rankings by search engines, yet it  is an important place to use the target keywords since search results present snippet from meta description with search term in bold. Compelling description helps boost click-through rate, thus increasing the traffic.  Click-through is another factor in ranking.

Heading Tag

In the body of your page content, make sure you use  H1 tag as the headline of the page. The heading should have the targeted keyword term/phrase.  Other tags - H2/H3/H4 – carry little SEO value.
Image Alt Tag
The use of a graphic image/photo/illustration on important keyword-targeted pages with the term/phrase employed in the alt attribute of the img tag is highly recommended.

Site Architecture


Can search engines easily "crawl" pages on site? Do not bury pages under search forms.  Googlebot will not fill form and submit it to reach those pages

Navigation

Text navigation is preferred  over JavaScript navigation, since spiders may not read the script to crawl. Never use flash navigation, since spiders cannot read flash. 
Site Navigation – Your most important pages, the ones with the more competitive and challenging  keyword term/phrase should be higher in a site's internal architecture : it should take no more than 3 clicks  from the home page to reach that URL.

Number of Internal Links

More linked-to pages tend to get  higher rankings. Hence, for your most important & competitive keywords, you should link to these pages from a greater number/percentage of pages on the  site.
Loading speed : Does site load quickly? Time to load is a small factor in ranking, and visitors do not like pages that take time to load

Static Pages Vs Dynamic Pages

Complex, dynamic URLs could pose a problem.  Google has stated that it can crawl dynamic URLs and understand its structure. You do not need to use mod_rewrite or ISAPI_rewrite to convert to static URLs. However, we recommend not to use more than 3 query parameters, and to avoid session ids. Latter creates multiple URLs with duplicate content, and the engine will index only one of them.

Rel="Canonical" 

If your site is large and more complex, use the canonical URL tag to prevent any potential duplicates from  unintentional, appended URL strings from creating a problem for the engines and splitting up potential link juice.

URL

Shorter URLs tend to perform better. Thus avoid overly long URLs
Keyword Location – Use the targeted keyword for the page in the URL.  Keep  the keyword(s)  closer to  domain name. Hence http://www.ananya-seo-services.com/SEO-Pricing-Packages.php is better than http://www.ananya-seo-services.com/html/pricing-seo.php

Word Separators - Hyphens are the preferred  keyword separators in URLs, despite  claims by engines that underscores will be given equal credit.

Number of Keyword Repetitions

There is no ideal number of times a keyword term/phrase should be used on the page. Use keywords and its variations in a natural way, and avoid keyword stuffing. Use 2-3 times  on short pages, and 4-6 on longer ones.

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