How To Improve Search Engine Rankings Using On Page Search Engine Optimization
On Page Search Engine Optimization
There are two types of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques: on-page and off-page SEO. With On-Page SEO, you are in full control of all the techniques and methods you can use on your own sites. With off-page SEO, you’ll try some techniques to get other site owners to refer to your site, which will help your site rank well. Page elements include the page title, page metadata, headers, breadcrumb, image alt tag, body text, and internal links. I will discuss how to optimize each of them in this article.
Choose a domain name
Search Engines (SEs) look for keywords in URLs. For example, if you have a website with a domain name “how-to-become-a-vegetarian.com” and someone searches for “how to become a vegetarian”, SE sees how-to-become-a-vegetarian as a match. However, if you have a website with a domain name “howtobecomeavegetarian.com”, they are seen as part of the same word, not the individual words as individual words. So putting keywords in the domain name and separating them with hyphens provides a small benefit. A domain name should be short, easy to spell, and easy to remember. You should get the dot com version of a domain name as it is easy for people to remember.
Submitting your website URL to search engines
You can add your website to the indexes of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. You can add your website URL to Google through Google Webmaster Tools and add your website URL to Yahoo through Site Explorer.
However, submitting your website’s URL via one of the above methods is ineffective and sometimes takes quite a while to add to search engine indexes. I’ll show you a better way to get your website URL into search engine indexes in another article on off-page optimization.
Page title
The title tag is the first element in the head area of your site, followed by the Meta Description and the Meta Keyword Tags. The title tag appears on the search results page, so it could entice readers to visit your page if they find what they’re looking for in the title of the search results page. The title tag is one of the most important components that search engines are concerned with. Search bots read page titles and use that information to determine what the pages are about. If your title tag has keywords that other competing websites don’t, you’ll have a good chance of ranking higher in search results. the title should only contain your main keywords or keyword phrases. You must limit 3 keywords or keyword phrases in the title tag. Do not use irrelevant words like “a, and, or, as, the” as they are ignored by search engines.
Do not repeat the same keyword in your title more than twice. For example, if you choose vegetarian as your main keyword, you could have “how to become a vegan and vegan shop and low fat vegan recipes” in your title tag. You’d better replace “and” with “|” character like the following: titlehow to become a vegetarian | vegetarian shop | Low Fat Vegetarian Recipes/Title You can find out how many pages have similar words in the title to yours by typing the following phrase into a Google search: allintitle:”your title words” Keep your page title short. Most search engines display around 60 characters in the listing title. So, to get your message across, include important keywords towards the beginning of your title, and make sure the first 60 characters of your title form the whole picture. You can combine keywords to save space. You must write unique titles for each page. Use mixed case, titles with the first letters capitalized. Include your organization’s name in the page title.
meta description tag
The meta description tag describes the content of your site and gives search engines a summary of what your site is about. For example: The description text and title text described above will appear as a summary of a website in the search result returned by a search engine.
When there is no HTML content on the page, such as an all-Flash site or someone searches for your site using your URL but no keywords, your meta description tag will be displayed. If Google finds all the keywords or keyword phrases you entered in the query in the description tag, it will use the description text. If Google finds only some of the keywords in the description and some in the body text, it will use part of each. You can place the description tag below the title tag as shown below:
meta keyword tag
Google has ignored the meta keyword tag, so there is no point in arguing about this tag.
body page
This is the main content of your site. You need to have good content to attract viewers. The page body can include the breadcrumb, header tags, body text, image alt tag, and internal links.
Navigation with breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb is usually the first text that appears in the body of your page and is therefore a good place to put your keywords and key phrases.
header tag
The header tag is an important element of on-page SEO. We encourage you to use the h1 and h2 heading tags as much as possible on your page. Heading tags are also great for dividing the content of your pages into sections that are easy to read. Putting keywords in headers is useful in search engine optimization because you are telling a search engine that those keywords are so important that they appear in the header text.
text body
You might consider placing your main keywords in the text of your pages. However, don’t just include a list of keywords on your pages without any quality content, as the search engine is smart enough to filter those pages. You can analyze the keywords on your page using the free Keyword Density Analyzer tool at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density. Use bold and italic tags to highlight your keywords on the page. This helps both human readers and search engines to easily see the key text. Do not use the underline tag on your page, as underline is normally used for hyperlink. You should limit around 300-500 words on each page and consider using more sections or categories if you want to write more than 500 words, as your readers may get tired and barely read a long page.
Image alt tag
If you put images on your websites, you should include an alt tag for each image to help Google learn more about what your image is about. For example:
Creation of internal links
Links on your pages help search robots find other pages on your site. Putting keywords in the links will tell search bots about the pages the links are pointing to and also about the page containing the links. You should always use keyword-rich anchor text in your links instead of images. When creating pages within your site, create links on the page to other pages, and create links back from other pages to the page you are creating, using the keywords in your title tag. I’ll talk about inbound links or backlinks to your site in my next article on off-page optimization.