Great On-Page SEO Techniques

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

Now, SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.

Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.

On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously. I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

6. Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

8. Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!