Basic SEO tips: On-page optimization
- Try to place keywords in relevant places in a way that sounds natural.
- Even with easy changes, if you are not sure of what you're doing, avoid modifying the code.
- Don't expect overnight results! Give time to Search Engines to crawl your site and notice the changes.
- These are introductory guidelines to on-page optimization designed for beginners.
- For in-depth on-page optimization, we still recommend hiring a professional.
Free site AssesmentOnce you have picked your keywords and written all your content, it is time to properly optimize your pages so that Search Engine spiders will have no difficulty finding the most important information about your site when they come crawling it.
On-page optimization is not extremely difficult if you have a little knowledge of html code and a fair amount of time to dedicate to it. By applying the following recommendations, you give your site much better chances to get a decent ranking in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) organic listings.
Page titles
Along with the domain name, Page titles are the first thing Search Engine spiders will "look at" when crawling a page, which makes them one of the most important elements to optimize. The Page title of each page should be a short keyword-rich description of the page. It should be 70 characters or less (including spaces), with your most important keywords placed at the beginning of the sentence.
In the code, the Page titles appear in the
<title>San Francisco SEO, Web Marketing & site optimization consultants</title>
Meta descriptions:
The Meta description is a part of the code in the <head> section of each page. It's the short sentence that will appear below the titles of your SERP organic listings.
Even though the meta description is not not playing any part in the Search Engine spiders process to index your site, it is still very important in the sense that it's the main factor that will make people click on your SERP listing or not. As such, it should be a "thought provoking statement or question" piquing their curiosity and/or interest, inviting them to click on your link to learn more. It should be 150 characters or less, including spaces.
In the code, the Meta descriptions appear in the <head> section as such:
<meta name="description" content="dots Web Marketing helps small business owners to market their website, be competitive on Search Engines & increase traffic without spending a fortune!">
Canonical tags:
Sometimes, a page on your site can have different urls that lead to it, especially when you have a "search" function on your site. This is an issue because there is always a risk for Search Engines to consider those pages as duplicate content, and penalize your site for it. The canonical tag on each page prevents Search Engines to index the same page with different urls, thus avoiding duplicate content issues and potential penalties.
For example, both http:www.dotswebmarketing.com and http://www.dotswebmarketing.com/index.html lead to our Home page. By using the following canonical tag in the <head> section of our Home page, we tell Search Engines spiders to index only http:www.dotswebmarketing.com and disregard http://www.dotswebmarketing.com/index.html
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.dotswebmarketing.com"/>
File naming:
Proper naming of your pages filenames is important as they will become part of the url. For example instead of calling the About Us page aboutus.html, we named it san-francisco-web-marketing.html so that its url became
http://www.dotswebmarketing.com/san-francisco-web-marketing.html.
Proper naming of files within your site, like images, is important as Search Engines will index them separately. This will give your pictures a chance to appear in Google Image search results for example.
Alt. text on images:
Search Engines spiders won't see your images; they see alt. text instead. It should be a short, keyword-rich description of your image. This is a way to include more keywords to your content while avoiding keyword stuffing, which can be penalized. However, the Alt. text of an image has to describe the image; the challenge is to do so using keywords if you want to get some SEO benefits from it.
Alt. text appear in the code as such:
<img alt="keyword-rich description of the image" src="SEO-Consultant-02.jpg" height="100" width="200">
H1 tags:
Part of the code on each page, these were originally designed to easily create paragraph titles on your pages (along with H2, H3, etc.). They can still be used as such, but more importantly, they are one of the things Search Engines look at first when crawling your pages, making them ideal for keyword-rich content (unlike H2, H3, etc. which don't matter much for Search Engines anymore).
It is easy to turn a title into an H1: just add the H1 tag as in the example below. However, font style, size and colors can be modified using the CSS style sheet. You can learn more about this here.
<h1>Your title</h1>
Sitemap:
This file is a list of all the pages within your site. Having a sitemap.xml file is the best way to guarantee inclusion of all your pages in Search Engines. The easiest way to create a sitemap is to use this tool.
Then, we highly recommend submitting your sitemap in the Google Webmaster's Tools.
Also, make sure the full url to the xml sitemap is included in your robots.txt file (see below).
Page loading time:
This is the time it takes for your page to load up; the faster, the better. Pages with a lot of graphics, animations, etc… will tend to take much more time to load. Google recently made this factor a part of their algorithm determining the ranking of a page.
You can check your page's loading time using the Google Webmaster's Tools, or this other tool.
Broken internal links:
These are links on your site that originally pointed to other parts of your site (or to other websites) that no longer exist.
Having broken links is a very negative point influencing your site's ranking.
Robots.txt file:
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This file tells Search Engines which parts of your site they can and can't index on your site, preventing the timing out of Search Engines bots and making it easy to keep pages of your site private. Use of this file is vital for sites with a lot of pages.
You can get more information on how to use robots.txt file here.
If you are not sure how to use it, the easiest way is to make sure your robots,text file displays only this:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: [full sitemap url]
Just replace [full sitemap url] with the correct url to the xml sitemap. For example, on our site, it is http://www.dotswebmarketing.com/sitemap.xml
Based in San Francisco, California, dots Web Marketing is a Web Consulting & Search Engine Optimization company directly serving the San Francisco Bay Area including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward, San Mateo and Marin County. We can also work on any website in English. We have experience in website design and internet marketing, and offer website consulting, website audit, full search engine optimization packages, SEO training or coaching, making us the ideal solution when it comes to affordable website promotion and SEO for small businesses.