The world of SEO has evolved a lot in recent years. Gone are the days when bulk backlink submission and black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing and hidden text were enough to improve rankings. Today, Google’s ranking algorithms are far more sophisticated and webmasters must work much harder in order to ensure that their websites rank as well as possible. The best rankings are achieved by a combination of on-site and off-site SEO.The subject of off-site SEO is well-understood. Most webmasters are well aware of the importance of link building, social media and content marketing. On-site SEO, however, is less well understood, even though it accounts for as much as 25% of your SEO score.
What is On Site SEO?
On-site SEO is the practice of improving the layout, markup, content and performance of your website in order to rank better in the search engines. On-site SEO can mean anything from using better title tags and meta descriptions, to making your site more mobile friendly to avoid Google penalties. Let’s take a look at some of the most important optimisations, one by one.
Title Tags
The title tag is an essential attribute for SEO. Title tags have existed since the earliest versions of HTML, and search engines still rely on them today. Title tags are used not just to show Google what the most important keywords on your pages are, but also to make your site more enticing to prospective visitors. The title tag will appear above your site’s description in the search results as a clickable hyperlink.
You can include 60 characters in the title tag. If your titles are longer than this then the search engine will truncate the title, and show an ellipsis at the end to indicate that the full title is not being shown. You should try to start your title tag with the keywords that are most important to your site. You should also include your brand name and a compelling headline that makes it clear what the page is about and why people should read it.
It can be difficult to fit all of that into 60 characters, but with practice you will learn to make short, punchy and eye-catching headlines. It is worth taking the time to make your headlines as appealing as possible because they are the first thing that people see in the SERPs. A good headline will dramatically improve your CTR.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is not as important as it once was, but it is still something to think about. You should aim to have a meta description that is around 150-155 characters in length. Every page on your site should have a unique meta description. Google does not always use the description – it will often pull content from the page that contains the keywords that the user searched for, and show that content to help the searcher see the context in which the keywords appear.
Google’s own Matt Cutts does not use meta descriptions on his site any more, but given that it is easy to add meta descriptions to your site using the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, or a similar SEO plugin for other popular content management systems, it makes sense to add meta descriptions to your site anyway. Even if Google does not use them as often as it once did, other search engines still do display meta descriptions on a regular basis. It is handy to have control over exactly what appears under your title.
Keywords
There are two things to consider with keywords – density and placement. You need to have your most important keywords appear enough times, in the right places, for the search engines to decide that they are important. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule for how many times your keywords should appear. Google recommends a keyword density of 1-2%, but Yahoo recommends a keyword density of 3%. Going above the recommended keyword density by a small amount will probably not do too much harm, but if you go above it by too much you could get penalized for keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing is a black-hat tactic that used to be effective, but Google’s algorithms have become a lot better at parsing website copy and understanding whether the copy is human readable or whether it was created purely to impress the search engines. Other search engines are lagging behind in terms of their ability to rate the quality of copy but they are still hard to fool with keyword stuffing.
While keyword density is important, there’s no need to use word count and a calculator to track your keywords to a precise level. Simply write high quality copy that your human visitors will find useful and let nature (or Google’s algorithm) take its course. If you are hiring writers, choose them based on their ability to write engaging articles rather than their knowledge of SEO writing. The art of SEO writing is nowhere near as valuable as it once was.
While the density of your keywords is no longer a make-or-break issue, the prominence and the placement of your keywords is important. It is a good idea to have your main keywords in not just the title tag of your website but also the H1 tag. If you can, in a natural-looking fashion, have the keywords appear in bold as well somewhere on the page this will help to emphasize them too.
The placement of your keywords in relation to each other matters. If two of your keywords or keyphrases are very close to each other (just a word or two apart) then this will make them appear to be significant in relation to each other. Giving your keywords this kind of context is an important ranking tool.
Outbound Links
The importance of incoming links is well understood, but did you know that outbound links are important too? Outbound links act as a vote of confidence from your site towards the sites that you are linking to. You should try to have only a handful of outbound links per page and make sure that the anchor text is keyword rich, and that the links are relevant to your site’s subject matter.
Linking to low quality, spammy or unrelated sites can seriously harm your brand, as can linking to too many websites from a single page. However, Google understands that webmasters can’t always control the number of links on a page. For example, if you accept comments and allow users to submit their link alongside their username then you could end up with a lot of links on a page that has a lot of comments. You can control how much those links affect your rankings by using the nofollow attribute.
By default, all links are dofollow – this means that when Google sees them, it will follow the link and index the page that it leads to. Adding nofollow to a link tells Google that you don’t want that link to be indexed via your site – you are not vouching for its quality. Nofollow links do not pass page rank to the target page. The only value that they have for the webmaster on the receiving end of the link is that they could be a potential source of human traffic.
Images
Did you know that properly maintained and used images can be a useful SEO tool? Taking a moment to optimize your images can greatly improve your rankings in the search engines. One of the simplest improvements that you can make is to fill out the alt text on all of your images. A few years ago, alt text was used extensively because that text appears in the place of images when people are browsing with images turned off. Today, fewer people use it because most people have high bandwidth connections so the idea of someone not seeing every image on a page seems alien.
However, alt text is still valuable – firstly, it is the text that is read out by screen readers, so if you care about making your site accessible to the visually impaired, you should use it. Secondly, Google looks at the keywords in your image file name and in the alt text and uses that to rank images for Google Image search, as well as to guess what your page is about in general.
In addition to alt text, images can have a title attribute. This is another attribute that is often overlooked. The title attribute is the attribute that contains the text that appears when a user holds their mouse cursor over your image. If you make the tool-tip text both descriptive and keyword rich then it could help to improve your rankings. The title tag does not carry as much weight for rankings as the alt tag, but every little helps, and since this tag is so often overlooked it could help to give you an edge over your competitors.
The image file name can help to improve your rankings too. There is some debate over exactly how much image file names matter, but it does not take long to rename a file before you upload it. Taking a moment to rename a digital camera image from the cryptic mess of letters and numbers that the camera uses by default to something more descriptive will make your site easier to maintain too, so even if the ranking benefit is minimal it makes sense to try to use descriptive file names.
The Sitemap
The humble sitemap is one of the most important forms of on-site SEO in terms of getting Google and other search engines to index your site on a regular basis. A sitemap contains a list of every page on your website, along with guidance for search engines as to how often those pages are likely to be updated. Google and Bing both use sitemaps to help them find all the pages on a website, and also to get an idea of when to re-crawl old pages.
If you are using WordPress or any other popular content management system you can generate a sitemap automatically using a plugin. You can then either simply link to the sitemap from your homepage, or, alternatively, manually tell the search engines about the sitemap using Google Webmaster tools or the Bing equivalent of the service. Once you have added your sitemap, the search engine will parse it periodically to find out whether you have added new content.
Adding a sitemap is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your content is being checked by the search engines on a regular basis. Once your sitemap plugin is configured, the search engines will check your site regularly.
Your URLs
Another major on-site SEO factor that can have a significant impact on your rankings is your URL slug. The URL slug is the exact address of your website. It can be difficult to optimize your URL slugs, especially if you have a lot of content, but it is well worth doing since URL slugs appear underneath your result in the search engine results page and the keywords that appear in them are important.
The URL slug that you use should, ideally, reflect the content of the page. If it does not then some users may be put off from visiting the page because they are confused or because they suspect that you are doing a “bait and switch” with your content. URL slugs should be human readable because people like to be able to glance at the URL and guess what the content will be. While it’s true that search engines can now index URLs with parameters in them (ones with ampersands and question marks after the end of the URL path), that doesn’t mean that you should use them.
There is no excuse for having difficult to read URLs these days. This is especially true if you use WordPress, Joomla or any other popular CMS. Most content management systems have a feature called “Permalinks” built in to them by default. Permalinks make it easy to create human readable, simple and keyword rich URLs based on the title of your articles. This means that you can simply write your article and have a good URL generated for you without having to do any work yourself.
If you have not been using human readable URL slugs up to now, try to start using them for all of your new articles. You may not want to update all of your old content, especially if you have a lot of incoming links pointing to your older, less SEO friendly URLs. However, if you can use redirects to point the old URLs to the new ones you should do so. In the long term, the ranking and traffic benefits of having attractive URL slugs will pay off.
Internal Links
One final thing to consider is internal links. Internal linking is something that can help to improve the discoverability of your pages (although a sitemap should have already covered that task), and it can also add context to your content. You will not get a huge amount of Page Rank benefit from internal links, but it is still worth cross-linking your content, both for SEO purposes and to help humans discover related articles.
One thing that people often overlook is the anchor text that is used for internal links. If you use a “Read More” link at the bottom of every article excerpt, you might want to set that link to nofollow so that Google doesn’t think that “Read More” is a keyword for that article. In addition, if the structure of your site means that there may be more than one path to a page, you may want to set the actual headline link to the main version of the page to be the canonical link so that Google knows that this link is the most important one.
These simple improvements will make sure that Google understands the layout of your site and that you don’t get penalized unnecessarily for duplicate content or un-natural looking anchor texts.
Auditing Your Website
Why On-Site SEO Matters
Many webmasters, especially those whose websites are performing OK at the moment, think that on-site SEO is no longer an important thing. They assume that because their websites are ranking on the front page right now, they always will, and they believe that because Google’s algorithm is fairly sophisticated now and it can cope with missing meta tags and cluttered javascript, there is no need to tidy up their websites.
While those webmasters may be getting away with having less than ideal markup and content for the moment, they run the risk of losing their rankings in the next Google algorithm update. In addition, if another website comes along that is competing in the same niche and that website has better on-site SEO, it could quickly gain a competitive advantage. On-site SEO is simple, does not take long to do, and will provide lasting benefits.
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