ON PAGE OPTIMISATION

There are a number of specific steps that can be taken with regard to ‘on page SEO’, i.e. with regard to the web pages themselves (as opposed to ‘off page SEO’, which concerns submitting your site to online directories, establishing linking partnerships, setting up a presence on Facebook, etc.).

Keywords and Key Phrases

Establish the most relevant keywords and phrases for your business that a user would need when searching for your site in a search engine. It is important to be specific with keywords, e.g. ‘Italian loafers’, rather than ‘European shoes’. Adding the exact geographical location of a business, e.g. ‘Surrey’, is also more beneficial rather than stating simply the ‘south of England’.

Competition Analysis

Analyse competitors by looking at the structure of their sites and the way in which they have been optimised for keywords, coded their HTML, etc.

Optimisation Analysis

Analyse your existing site for specific keywords and phrases and establish what improvements can be made. This will include optimizing the following:

Domain Name

If you haven’t done so already, choosing an appropriate domain name for your website will significantly affect the number of visitors to your site.

Title Tag

The title tag is the line of information which appears as a headline displayed in blue link text on the search engine results page. Essentially, it is a distilled strap line or snippet of the entire page. The title tag should be between 50-80 characters long (including spaces), with a maximum of three keyword repeats, positioned at the front of the tag. Each page should have a unique title tag.

Description Meta Tag

The description meta tag is the information which appears beneath the title tag on the search engine results page. It should not exceed 250 characters, including spaces, and should be written as a sentence. The most important description words should appear at the beginning of the tag.

Keywords Meta Tag

The keywords meta tag should not exceed 1024 characters, including spaces. The most important keywords should appear at the beginning of the tag. It is important to bear in mind that plurals and common misspellings must also be entered in the meta keywords to ensure maximum coverage.

Page Content

For best results, each page ideally has at least 200 words of copy. It should contain most of the page’s keywords, weighted towards the top of the first paragraph. Copy should be unique and well written (most search engines use lexical algorithms along with other types) and thus should embody the journalist’s inverted pyramid structure.

It is important to remember, however, that most people do not read the words on a screen, they merely scan them, so don’t fill pages with acres of text. Keep information succinct, presented in small digestible chunks.

Header Tags

The most important keywords should appear in the major headings of the page, preferably the h1 and h2 tags. Not only does this make for search engine friendly copy but using headings again breaks up the text to make it more readable for humans.

Links

Because the web is a network of hyperlinks, search engines pay great importance to the anchor text of a link. Keywords should therefore be included as much as possible in the link itself and the text immediately surrounding the link. “Click here” is a wasted opportunity!

Href Title Tags

The title of a link is an added chance to optimise a page for the search engine.

Alt Tags

Alt tags (used to identify images and used for accessibility) must be written in sentences, since they are the information used by screen readers. Use two to three of the page’s keywords for maximum optimisation.

Sitemap and Robots Files

Create a sitemap file (an index of all the pages of the site) and a robots.txt file (a file that instructs the search engine of which pages to index and which to avoid) and add them to the search engines.

Correct Semantic Structure

Overview of the site’s architecture in terms of its content (valid (x)HTML), presentation (valid cascading style sheets (CSS)) and functionality (valid JavaScript, ASP, etc.) and how it can be improved, thus making the page more search engine friendly.

Site Maintenance

In order for Google to know that your site is live, regular copy changes and site updates are required; this may be achieved by copy rewrites, adding additional text within a footer, inserting breadcrumbs (a sequence of words indicating on which page a user is in terms of the rest of the site), fixing broken links, missing text and images.

So what’s the next step?

Call Ardent Search Engine Optimisation Specialists, Surrey today on 01483 267 915 for a chat with one of our SEO advisors and discover how quickly the search can be over for your business.

See our Contact Us page for further information.