On-Site Optimization
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On-Site Optimization
One of the first steps in search engine optimization (SEO) is making sure you have a clean, well optimized website for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to index. This is where they are able to crawl through and find the information you are trying to rank for. The bots and programs that are employed by the search engines are designed to find specific information on your website's pages and other pages, directories, blogs, etc. We need to make sure that your website has the right data and information and key words, in the right places the bots are looking for. If your website is not optimized properly the search engines and their bots will miss it, which ultimately lessens your ability to rank high up in the search results.
Meta Data
One of the other initial steps in a on-site optimization plan is to look at meta data optimization for every single page of a website. There are three key areas of meta data:
H1 headers
Page titles
Descriptions
Having page titles, descriptions and Headers to reflect the different levels of importance are a big part of the back end data on the site. This information does not appear anywhere on the page for humans to see, but they are extremely important in the process of being able to have Google and the other search engines recognize your website and any products and services you offer. Having these optimized, along with having the titles descriptive in what you offer is crucial to ranking. In other words, everything needs to be accurate, including the best keywords and phrases. Everything comes together and must sound natural within all of the content written for the search engines and not allow any keyword "stuffing." Search engines are very sophisticated and can easily see when a website and pages are trying to game the system. While the content is public facing these three other areas are not, but non the less they are just as important when it comes to creating a developed SEO campaign.
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As we look a little closer, H1 headers, H2 headers and even H3 headers, are all aspects of having good meta data, but again these do not appear to the naked human eye. The main key here is to make sure you have an experienced SEO expert implement the right heading codes per webpage and have them properly identified as such for the search engines. We may recommend having some changes to certain wording in the headers to your site, to make it appear more accurately in the search engines for your products and services, including the best keywords and phrases. Again, as long as it all sounds natural.
More On-Site Optimization
When we've finished the meta data and have it optimized for the search engines, we'll look into a few other areas that will make it user-friendly for all of the search engines, this includes:
Keyword density
Alt descriptions
Content length and quality
The alt descriptions are essentially the information (text) that search engines are able to see when the scan an image on a website page. Since they can actually see the image as we humans do they have to be able to read what the image is about, in order to know how to rank it in accordance to the image. This helps generate additional text for the back end of your site and gives us more opportunities to include the right keywords, phrases and other information about your company's products and services.
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Content is also a huge part of a website's pages and optimization. The search engines, such as Google are looking to see who has the best content and that you are providing good value to people that are searching for your type of products and services. We often recommend that a page has at least 350 words but often times more content can be better if you want to out do your competitors. In some cases it may be wise to have less content simply because aesthetics of the page for a possible cleaner look, but those pages would be more of the exception than the rule. It's also very important to have unique content for each page. Having duplicate content that shows up on multiple places and pages is a red flag to the search engines. They don't like when website's plagiarize other people's work or duplicate their own content. In fact it could very well hurt your SEO rankings.
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Keywords and their density, or the number of times a certain keyword or phrase shows within your content of a specific page is one of the final parts to completing your on-page SEO. The number of times we have a keyword or phrase needs to lean more towards the minimal side of things. Having too many of the same keywords will look unnatural to the search engines and more time than not will reduce our SEO efforts. Again, the key here is to have your content flow in a natural way, never forced. This is the best way to have your page and site rank well for its content.