What is SEO continued – On Page SEO

The first time round I explained the basics including:

• what SEO stands for
• what SEO companies do
• why you need SEO
• the difference between white hat and black hat
• some sources of confusion
• SEO is an ongoing process
• can you do SEO

Now we have covered these important basics I am going to discuss the techniques involved in SEO. These take up two categories: “On page” and “Off page”. The titles are pretty self explanatory and as you probably figured out yourself, on page refers to things you can change on your own website where as off page regards techniques that do not involve your own site, primarily link building. Today we will focus on “On page” SEO.

On Page SEO

Much has been written about SEO. Not a day goes by without a dozen new blog posts about the ultimate SEO techniques or a new tweak which will change your search engine results. One of the most popular resources is Aaron Wall’s SEO book. You will see this advertised on almost every blog. For beginners this is all too complicated and goes into too much detail to the point where it is overwhelming. For beginners there are a number of simple techniques, which are often no more than best practice which are key to any SEO strategy.

1. The title tags
These title tags appear at the top of every page before any content. As they are the first thing the search engine reads, and the title of the page, they should convey what will be found on the page. Some SEO experts such as Josh Spaulding regard this to be the most important on page SEO factor.

Choosing a catchy title to attract readers vs a keyword filled descriptive title is a tricky decision sometimes. It depends on your goals. In the short term the catchy title might do better, but this traffic does not last. A descriptive title including relevant keywords will rank well in search engines providing a long term constant stream of organic traffic.

2. Meta description
These no longer hold the value they once did. In the past search engines used this information to know what was on your page. If we could manually tell the search engines what was on the page then the system would be very easy to game. This is not the case so much now search algorithms are considerably more advanced and complex. Meta description has practically no influence on your rankings.

The important thing to do is write a good description of your page. This text is often displayed on the search engine results pages, and is what a user will read after your title, but before deciding to click. A well written meta description could be what convinces someone to visit your site.

3. Internal linking and navigation
It is important that search engines can navigate your pages easily. Flash or JavaScript navigation is a no no because of this. Many people favour snazzy flash designs because they look good. When no one can find your site, you will wish you went for the SEO friendly method.

Sitemaps come in two forms. XML sitemaps which you can register in Google’s webmaster tools (Familiarise yourself with these, you will keep coming back to them), and regular sitemaps to help users. The XML sitemap is a must have. It helps search engines navigate your website more easily and find new content. A regular sitemap can help your regular users navigate. These are particularly useful when the sites navigation is complicated or hard to see. If you go down the Flash site route, definitely add a sitemap.

Each page has a certain authority which can be passed on via linking, because of this it is important you link to and reference your own content. Remember to do this naturally and not just linking for the sake of SEO. This has the added benefit of showing off your other content to readers, increasing the sites overall page views and reducing the bounce rate.

4. Search Engine Friendly URLs
Originally almost all URLs were simple and easily understood as we created and named them manually. Now we tend to use database driven sites, powered by PHP. The pages are generated dynamically and have URLs which are long, do not consist of words, and are near impossible to remember.

Search engine friendly URLs are simple and clean. Wordpress and many other content management systems will do this automatically for you if you set it up. These clean URLs can take the format of your choice though most opt for a simple mydomain/article-title or mydomain/category/article-title. As we use the article title as the URL, we have relevant keywords in our URL which helps rank our page. The key is to keep them as short and simple as possible, but remember that you cannot have the same URL for two different pages.

5. Anchor text
This is used to determine keywords which are relevant to the linked page. It is important you put a little thought into this. If you want a page to rank well for the keyword “green widget” then use that keyword in the anchor text for any links to that page. The ultimate misuse of the anchor text is to use text such as “click here”, as this provides no information.

6. Accessibility and best practice
We should aim to make our websites as accessible as possible. Alt tags are important for every image. Broken links and forms should be fixed. The loading time of your page is another factor to take into account as it seems Google may start taking this into account.

Things NOT to do

Anchor text
As mentioned already, this is very important as it is weighted and ranked by search engines. Using “click here” as your anchor text gives no indication of what you are linking to.

Hiding links
This involves making links the same colour as your background, or in a div pushed off screen, or hidden in any other way. If you are found out the search engines will penalise you.

Keyword stuffing
This involves making text the same colour as the background and filling it with your keywords, or using your keywords over and over again in your title and a variety of other methods. As already mentioned, search engines do not take well to people who try to game the system.

Keyword density
Have you ever read an article that barely made sense because of the repetition of certain key words and phrases? This is the result of people attempting to write for search engines as opposed to for their readers. You will do much better in the long run if your content is actually useful to users.

Next week I shall be looking into off page SEO techniques.

Did I explain this clearly? Could anything be explained differently? Do you have any techniques I should add?