Top 12 Tips For On Page SEO

In the last post we discussed on whether we are hiring the right SEO. In this post we will discuss a few on-page SEO methods that can help us to rank high in search engines.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO means optimizing your webpage for search engines. On-Page SEO can be done by the webpage owner or the designer and is completely controllable.

On-Page SEO is pretty simple if we understand the concept and the things to do. It is said that 80% of the SEO depends on the off-page SEO techniques like back linking but off-page SEO is something where we do not have much control. I have seen pages rank high without any back links and good On-Page SEO.

We will take example of a web page that is selling the latest Apple iPhone 4. This is what needs to followed to have your page optimized for search engines:

The Domain Name – Having your keyword in domain always helps. The keywords in our case can be ‘iphone 4′, ‘buy iphone 4′, ‘apple iphone 4′ and ‘buy apple iphone 4′. So the best domain names for us would be buyiphone4.com, appleiphone4.com etc.
The TLD – Lot of people ignore this but it is very important to know your target customers and choose the TLD accordingly. In our case lets assume that we will sell iPhone 4 only to people in the UK, so our TLD should be .co.uk or any other UK TLD. Eg. buyiphone4.co.uk. If the site is targeting people all over then the best option is to go with .com.
The Title – Once we have our domain ready, we start building our pages. The first most important thing out here is the title tag of the page. The title needs to be relevant to the content of that page. In our case the Homepage can have a title like ‘Apple iPhone 4 UK :: Available at Good Rates‘ or maybe ‘Buy Apple iPhone 4 in UK‘. The inner pages can have title tags relevant to the content. For e.g. A page explaining the video calling feature of the iPhone 4 can have title tag as ‘Video Calling in iPhone 4‘ or ‘Apple iPhone 4 – Video Calling‘. The title tag should not be stuffed with keywords. Titles should be short and relevant to that page. Long title tags look spammy and can create a bad impression.
Meta Description – The page meta description is one of the vital areas for getting more traffic. Meta Descriptions can be one of the first impressions of your website for visitors as well as search engines. This is the text that is displayed below the title of your page in search engines. People will read this text and decide whether to visit the page or not. Having unique meta descriptions always helps. Unique meta descriptions indicates that the content on your pages is unique. In our case, the meta description for the home page can be ‘Buy Apple iPhone 4 in the UK. We sell the latest iPhone 4 along with its accessories. Shipping is free for customers n the UK‘.
Meta Keywords – All major search engines do not consider meta keywords now. Meta keywords can be a few keywords separated by comma. In our case, meta keywords will be ‘iphone4, apple, buy, uk, united kingdom, cost, accessories, pounds‘.
Alt Tags – Lot of people still forget this one of the important aspects of On-Page SEO. All images on your page need to have an alt tag. The alt tag can be a relevant term to what the image is about. Alt tags help search engine bots to know what are the images on the website. A web page with images and good alt tags can make difference in rankings. In our case the page might have iPhone 4 images so the alt tags can be ‘Apple iPhone 4, The Latest iPhone‘.
The Content – This obviously is the most important aspect of On-Page SEO. The content should be unique and well written. One should not try and stuff keywords in the content unnecessarily. The content should be created in such a way that it is helpful for people. Important keywords and key phrases should have bold or italics font. One should always try and write good content which has around 300 words. Video or picture websites should concentrate more on generating content from the users. User reviews and comments help a page in generating fresh content which is loved by search engines. The key content of the page should be above the page fold followed by rest of the content and user reviews if possible. Images and videos can be embedded in the content in a way that it does not break the flow of the content.
H Tags – H1, H2, H3… tags also play some role in SEO. A page should have one H1 tag followed by H2 and H3 tags. There is lot of debate on what kind of H tags are good for SEO but there is no correct or wrong answer for that. Google does not like spam or unnecessary highlights on a page. Hence, its better to have one H1 tag followed by a H2 and few H3s. These tags should only be used as headings.
URLs - Keyword rich URLs help pages to rank high in search engines. Almost all CMS nowadays have keyword rich URLs. This means its always advisable to have an URL like ‘buyiphone4.co.uk/fathers-day-discount‘ rather than ‘buyiphone4.co.uk/index.php?page=13‘. Search engines do look for keywords in the URL and rank them higher. One should not bother a lot about the URLs though. Especially, older websites which are doing good in search engines.
Follow and No Follow links – Search engines like Google need more pages and content in their results so that they can rate the best and rank it. Webpages need to help Google to achieve this which can be done by linking to relevant content. These links should be allowed to follow. Search engines will give you extra bonus for helping them to find new relevant content. We are the ones who tell search engines about the content and where it can fetch it from. Imagine the web without links. No websites will be crawled and all our websites will be hidden from search engines and people. Other links which are used for advertisement can use the No follow tag. Adding a relavant title tag to all links on a page helps in terms of SEO.
Sitemap - Generate a Sitemap for your website and submit it to search engines. No matter how big or small your website is, you should always generate a sitemap and submit it to search engines. This helps the search engines to finding and prioritizing all your pages.
Help, About, Contact Pages - As a webmaster, one should know that search engines do check websites manually. Every website is an online business and people expect your business to at least have a contact us page. Having pages like contact, FAQs, About, Terms etc. helps the search engines and visitors know that this is a genuine website. Such small things can give you a small edge over others in terms of SEO.

Once a page is created keeping the above points in mind, one should submit the website to Google Webmaster Central and Bing Webmaster Center. We will cover more aspects of SEO in forthcoming posts.