On Page SEO

Glen Allsopp / 5 Comments / June 14th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

This is part 4 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about On Page SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation as Im sure you know if you are already reading this blog. On Page SEO is basically the changes you can make to your site to make more Search Engine & User friendly; so lets dive right in.

Titles

Titles are extremely important for many factors, firstly they are a key tag to tell search engines and users what a site or particular webpage is about. The key is to keeping these unique for all pages of your site and trying to keep them actually relevant to what the page is about so if you do rank for the term on search engines you are getting targetted traffic and not completely random traffic to your site (who wants that?). Keep it unique, short and sweet. Put your brand name in their on the homepage but I personally remove it for this blog on content pages.

Meta Keywords & Descriptions

These carry little importance compared to how they used too. Gone are the days where you ranked for whatever keywords were in your meta keywords. Although they are of little importance, they should be added as dont forget; descriptions are the content that searchers see when your website appears on the search results. Try to make the text interesting and inviting so that people click through from the search engines onto your website.

Linking Structure

Theres many reasons why its a good idea to have a good linking structure throughout your site. Firstly it helps the flow of PageRank (linklove) spread throughout your website. Secondly it allows pages of your site that may be ‘deeper’ in terms of levels than other pages to be found and spidered, therefore indexed and another potential traffic point for your website. The easiest way to link to all the pages on your site is to create a sitemap, if you have more than 100 links / pages on your site then try to have a couple of these and use them as ‘index’ pages.

301 Redirect / Robots.txt

Try not to have too many versions of the same page, such as a normal version and a print version. Its better to block of the one that you probably wouldnt want to rank (the print version I assume) by adding a rule to your robots.txt file so theres no duplicate content issues within your site. Next I would recommend re-directing the non-www version of your site to the www version. This is something I do with all my sites and all my clients as I truly believe it works well and helps links spread throughout the site better; dont forget that you can set your preferred version in Webmaster Central.

Have it finished

I hate seeing pages that have ‘under construction’ on them, imagine having a few of these pages then remember that they are all going to have the same content. Dont setup or ‘link’ to pages that arent finished, have little content or are under construction. This could be the same saying for having friendly-URL’s so instead of having /page1.htm you could have /on-page-seo.htm. This adds more keywords to the site and can tell both users and search engines what a page is about before they even visit it.

Get these things in place and you are on your way to having setup a well optimised website. What are you waiting for?

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