SEO on Page Optimisation – Top 10 Tips

SEO on Page Optimisation – Top 10 Tips
By Sam Hickson

Meta tags are one of the most important factors to consider when optimizing a website for the search engines and a lot of consideration should be used before implementing.

• “TITLE” This is the first tag to consider as this is the title that will appear in the browser window and will also be indexed as your title with the majority of search engines. In here you need to place your most important keyword at the beginning (i.e. Sea Fishing reels will be “Sea fishing reels”) and remember to keep the title short and try and avoid any stop words like “and / or/ the”. Instead use a character like the pipe symbol “|” (i.e. ). |TIP| the more words you have in your meta tags takes away the emphasis on your important keywords so keep it concise.
• “Meta name=”description”" this should be the 2nd Meta tag to display which is the description of your website and appears in your indexed listings within the majority of browsers. In here you should also include your keywords but being careful not to over use. In SEO the best practice is to write your content for the viewers and not to stuff it with keywords. Again keep it concise and to the point holding the weight on your main keywords.
• “Meta name=”keywords”" this should be your 3rd Meta tag but don’t worry too much about this Meta as the majority of the big search engines do not look at this. Start with your main keywords and end with the least important. But as before don’t make too long.

Heading Tags

Heading tagsconsist of h1, h2, h3 and so on. Most search engines read the content and pick out these headings, as they will see these to be important to your website. It is important to include your first heading as a h1 tag and place as close to the body tag as possible. As you may already of worked out you should try and place keywords into this heading and the following headings. |TIP| create headings in a hierarchy for instance h1 should come first then h2 and so on.

Content

Your homepage should include some textual content, giving you the option to show the search engines and viewers what your website is all about and to persuade the search engines to index you for your relevant category. Your content should be kept short but not too short as to make it look keyword stuffy. Make sure you highlight some keywords with the BOLD tag and place some keywords in hyperlinks, that link internally to other pages (this will strengthen your internal linking structure).

NoFollow

Nofollow links indicate to search engine spiders not to follow the link out from your website when crawling.

• The NoFollow attribute should be used on the majority of outbound links that are not relevant to your industry, thus making sure you do not give out more link juice that is needed.

Robots.TXT

Robots.txt is a file that tells the search engines what directories on your web server it should crawl and which to ignore. This enables you to aid the SE’s in successfully crawling the important content and leaving the irrelevant content uncrawled. This is helpful to SE’s and one good turn for another.

Sitemap

There is two types of sitemaps, one for your visitors and SE spiders and one for just SE Spiders. The first sitemap is one that is a page on your website that holds the links to all pages that exist on your website, just like an index page in a book. Visitors can use this to navigate and Spiders use this to follow pages in your website and again strengthens your internal linking structure. The second sitemap is a XML file that is uploaded to your web server and is used by SE’s to index as many pages in your website as possible. |TIP| Place a link to both files from your homepage in the footer to aid the SE’s in finding them.

ALT Tags

Images have an attribute called ALT, which should be used for accessibility purposes, but should also be used so the SE’s can understand what the image is as with current technologies the images on your website can not be viewed by SE Spiders but the code side can be. Again use some keywords in your ALT tags.

Web Pages

When planning the structure of your website try and include your keywords within the pages (i.e. http://123seafishing.com/shimanoreels.html)

Domain name

If you haven’t already registered your domain name then great… Register one but try and include a keyword in your domain (i.e. http://www.123seafishing.com)

Updates

Making changes to your website, be it amending pages, adding new pages etc is good practice as this keeps your visitors interested and shows the SE’s that your site is not dormant.

Thank you for reading this article and I hope you found it useful. If you wish to distribute this article i would appreciate a linkback to http://www.hatchmedia.co.uk.

Article written by Sam Hickson of hatch media web design manchester Hatch Media develop websites and perform SEO

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