On-site search engine optimization is at the core of SEO. It’s the bare minimum needed in order for your website to appear in the organic search results for Google, Bing Yahoo and other search engines. From there, getting to the top of page one takes additional planning and effort.
On-page SEO and on-site SEO is how Google can tell what the web page and the website are about. With Google’s new Hummingbird update, microdata markup (schema.org) will be increasingly important.
Step 1: The Title Tag
The title tag is the most important tag in all of your SEO efforts. It’s tells Google the topic of the page — and in turn, your site. The title should have as much of your keyword towards the front of the tag as possible.
Different pages on your site should have different title tags. Do not have the same title tag throughout your entire website. If you do, you waste each individual page’s potential to rank for unique keywords.
Step 2: Meta Description
The meta description tag doesn’t actually help your site rank higher. It tells Google what to display beneath the title and URL in your page’s search listing. This can help you get more clicks from Google by writing a description that will appeal to your audience.
Each page on your site can have a different meta description. You definitely want to write the meta description for your home page and the popular pages on your site yourself. For the pages on your site that aren’t too popular, Google will just take an excerpt from your website and use that as your meta description.
Step 3: Meta Keywords
Meta keywords tags tell Google what keywords you think your site is relevant for. It doesn’t bear much weight as far as helping you rank goes, but it can really help Google figure out what your site is about. It takes just a minute to do them and is good SEO practice in general.
Step 4: URL Structure
Generally, you want your URL to contain your keyword as much as possible. Neveruse just the post ID or the date as your URL. Also avoid cryptic URLs that contain data that no human being can read.
If you want to use just your post title as your URL for example, this is how you’d do it in WordPress’ “Permalinks” settings.
Step 5: Image Alt Tags
Optimizing alt tags won’t single-handedly help you rank, but it is an important factor for your on-page SEO.
Give the images on your site good alt tags. Make sure the filenames are meaningful and make sure that your alt tags are descriptive. In WordPress, you can change the alt tag of images by using the HTML view in the text editor (if the image is already placed in your post) or by editing the image data in the Media Center.
Step 6: Noindex Non-Content Pages
You should noindex your non-content pages: category pages, archives, etc. On most blogs, category and archive pages are mostly duplicate content so you definitely want to noindex them.
Step 7: Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the most crucial factors for SEO.
Strategic interlinking can can make a big impact, and since Google’s Penguin update, it’s important to vary anchor text.
Plugins like “Related Posts” may be useful for recommending similar content to site visitors, but are no longer recommended for SEO.
Step 8: Have a Robots.txt
A robots.txt just tells search engines where to go and where not to go. This is a good way to disallow search engine spiders from going where they’re not supposed to.
This can help you keep the areas you don’t want from ranking out of the search engines. For example, you probably don’t want the paid areas of your site indexed and shown in the Google search engines.
Step 9: Low Ad to Content Ratio
One factor that’s become more prominent since the Google Panda and Panda 2.0 updates is the ad to content ratio on your website. As the name suggests, the idea is to avoid stuffing your site with ads.
Google knows that great websites tend to only have a few ads on their pages. On the other hand, people who focus too much on milking their visitors for as much cash as possible tend to produce lower quality content.
So, therefore, pages with more ads tend to rank lower. Of course, you do need to make money – Just limit your ads to one or two per page, rather than spamming ads all over the place.
Step 10: Regular, Fresh, High Quality Content
Finally, it all comes down to content and content quality. Google is looking to promote websites with high quality content.
Produce fresh content as often as possible. The more fresh content you have, the higher your chances of ranking.
These are the most important on-site factors to pay attention to in search engine optimization. Get your on-site optimization right before you try and topple your competition.