The SEO Series: The Components of "On-Page" SEO
(By Todd Bossler)
As I discussed in a previous blog post, there are two types of search engine optimization (SEO)--"on-page" and "off-page." In this post, I'd like to delve into the individual components of "off-page" SEO, what they are and how they're used.
1.) Page Title
Page titles are one of the most important SEO factors. Page titles are the text you see at the top of you browser window when viewing a web page. They are also the title of the page that is presented in search engines.
Page titles can be found and edited in your site’s HTML. The text that is surrounded with the <title> tag is your page’s title. The following are guidelines for coming up with good page titles:
Include keywords that are relevant to your business. Think along the lines of someone searching for your service using a search engine. Think of the words that get to the core of your service.
Make your page titles less than 70 characters long. Longer page titles will not be seen in your web browser or in a Google search results. Also, if you make your page title too long, it will dilute the importance of the keywords included.
Put the best keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
Make it readable and understandable for job seekers or clients. It needs to make sense.
Put your company name at the end of the page title. This will link the keywords to your company name in the people’s mind.
Use different page titles for each page within your website. Why? Because each page is an opportunity to target different keywords and the page titles should be consistent with the content on the page.
2.) Meta Description
Meta data or tags is the text seen as the description of a site in a Google search. These words attract a searcher’s attention, and indicate if a search result is relevant or not.
Meta tags do not directly influence the search engine rankings as they use to. Nevertheless, it’s a good practice to include keywords in your meta description.
3.) Headings
If a piece of text appears bigger or more prominent than the other text on a page, it’s probably part of a heading. You can verify this by checking the HTML code of your website, and seeing if the text has an <h1>, <h2>…<h6> tag surrounding it. Text in the headings is more likely to be read by search engines as keywords than text in the rest of the page.
To get a better ranking in search engines, make sure that the web page headings contain all (or the most important) keywords that are relevant for that page or the paragraph below the heading. If the same keywords are repeated in the paragraph following the heading, the page will certainly get a boost in ranking.
4.) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
HTML is the back end code of your website that the search engines read, interpret, and then uses to display your web pages. Search engines extract relevant information from your HTML code, such as keywords. The more HTML code you have compared to the HTML keywords can dilute the relevance the keywords. That’s where CSS comes in.
CSS, on the other hand, holds a template for the layout of your page. In CSS, you define how headings, links, and other visual elements of the page and text should look.
Bottom line: Use CSS. It helps with the relevance your keywords that you want search engines to read.
5.) Images and Pictures
Images on a web page can definitely enhance the user experience. However, when using images and pictures, please keep the following in mind:
Don’t use images excessively. More pictures mean that your page takes longer to load, which has a negative impact of the user experience and search engine optimization.
Associate text with pictures. Search engines do not ‘read’ images; they only read text. If you’re going to add pictures, make there is ALT text, which is an HTML attribute that can be added to pictures so the search engines replace those images with the associated text.
Included keywords in your image file name. This will help draw in relevant traffic from image searches. Make sure to separate the different keywords in the file name with a dash (-).
6.) Domain Information
Search engine rankings favor sites that are registered for a longer period of time. Longer domain registration time periods indicate a commitment to the site, which has been found that the site is less likely to be considered a spammer site. Therefore, extend your website registration for a very small fee a year to get an SEO boost.
7.) URL Structure
The URL of a web page is its web address. For example, Top Echelon’s Big Biller Recruiting Software URL is http://topechelon.com/Big-Biller-recruiting-software. The URL structure of a website is about how the different URLs connect with each other.
Unfortunately, improving your URL structure is one of the more difficult aspects of on-page website optimization. The methods of fixing these issues depend entirely on the back-end parts of your website, such as your content management system or programming framework. Nevertheless, if you have a competent developer by your side, having him or her tackle these issues can significantly improve your SEO. Your best approach might be to hand your developer the following list.
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