Website Must Haves (part 2)
On-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While off-page SEO is hugely important, we can’t forget about on-page SEO. This consists of placing your most important keywords within the content elements of your actual pages. These on-page elements include Headlines, Sub-headlines, Body Content, Image Tags, and Links. Often times on-page SEO is referred to as
“keyword density.”
It’s very common that businesses will do too little on-page optimization or too much (keyword stuffing). While it’s important to include your keyword as many times as necessary within a page, you don’t want to go overboard with it either. For on-page SEO done right:
Pick a primary keyword for each page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords on one page, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about. This is very common on homepages in particular, where too many keywords are used.
• Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
• Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant with the rest of your content.
• Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
• Include the keywords in the page URL and keep the URL clean.
• And lastly, write for humans first, search engines second. Always prepare your content for your audience and then look to optimize it for search. Content written in the other order won’t read naturally and your visitors will recognize it.
Title Tag & Meta Tags
While this may be the least sexiest component of SEO, it is a definite must-have. A Meta Tag is a line of code that is contained in the background of a web page. Search engines look at meta tags to learn more about what the page is about.
Meta tags don’t quite have the level of SEO importance as they used to but are still very important. Back in the day, websites abused meta tags to increase their rankings by including far too many keywords. Now search engines are smarter and give more weight to inbound links and page content for ranking instead. However, they still play an important role to an SEO strategy. Make sure to use these on all of your pages.
If you’re not a web guru, most website editors and content management systems enable you to easily edit meta tags without coding knowledge. If you don’t have an editor, you can simply open a web page file (ending in .htm, .html, .asp or .php) in Notepad or a plain text editor and the meta tags will be found near the top of the document.