On-page SEO Techniques

On-page SEO is anything that you do to your site files themselves in order to rank better in the search engines. This differs from off-page SEO, which is primarily concerned with gaining links to your site from other sites.

No type of SEO is more important than the other. You need both on-page and off-page SEO to rank well, the best on-page SEO isn't going to get you anywhere without good incoming links. And the best incoming links in the world can't help you if your site is crawler poison. However, there is an upper limit you can reach with your on-page optimization where you time will be then better spent on off-page optimizations.

Fundamentals of on-page SEO Techniques.

Title & Meta Tags

The single most influential piece of Marketing on your site is your title tag. Reaching back to the article on choosing a domain (link), by using keywords in your site name you can easily ensure that they will appear in your domain, many of your incoming links, and in your title tag, all of which is extremely important.

Meta Tags have a somewhat controversial past. In the 90's they were the main criteria for search engine rankings, however because they were so easily abused by webmasters they were all but dropped from use. However for years many refused to believe this and the SEO world was divided into two camps, those who believed meta tags were still a major factor, and those who didn't. Now though I think mostly everyone has finally come around to accept that meta tags are one of the least important aspects of optimizing your site.

Creating Search Engine Accessible HTML

The markup on your site should be clean, clear, and as limited as possible. Pull open the source code of a page on your site and check out how it looks, if it is a mess of HTML code you might want to trim that down or switch to a lighter markup specification such as with CSS. Again, here we worry about density and extraneous code could potentially hurt your keyword density.

Spiders Read

Spiders read your source code from top to bottom, and content placed at the top tends to be given more credence than content at the bottom. Additionally some crawlers may stop reading pages after so many kilobytes. So you really need to prioritize your content.

ALT & TITLE Attributes

Two key accessibility features that are part of the HTML specification are ALT attributes for images and TITLE attributes for links. The ALT attribute is meant to provide a description of an image for the blind or those with images turned off in their browser. The TITLE attribute is meant to provide a description of the linked-to page to give the browser more information before they click the link.

Frames, Javascript, Flash, & Forms

FRAMES

HTML frames were once a really good technology for controlling page downloads. When people were connection at 9600 baud it was a pain to have to reload the header, menu, or footer, on every page load. Frames fixed this problem. However, since then bandwidth has increased, and there are better technologies that accomplish the same thing. Server side includes & other server side scripting platforms provide the same maintenance benefits to the webmaster. And things such as external CSS files provide the same bandwidth savings to the browser.

JAVASCRIPT & DHTML

As the capabilities of HTML & CSS have increased the use of Javascript & DHTML have decreased to an extent, and that is a good thing. However you still need to be aware of issues with these technologies.

Search engines do not read javascript, and so yes, you could block content from being crawled by printing it with javascript much like I mentioned with the use of iframes. The problem with javascript though comes when people use it for content they do want crawled.

USAGE OF FLASH

Like javascript, Flash is another technology that search engines cannot crawl. There have been strides made, and there exists a way now for search engines to crawl links placed within Flash files, but not all do and the content, which tends to be mostly graphic based, still does not get crawled.

Your site homepage is the highest weighted part of your site in most cases, and if all that is there is some Flash welcome movie then you have almost no spiderable content, ranking for any keyword will be extremely difficult.

FORMS

Forms are necessary for allowing browsers to interact with web pages, but like with other technologies search engines do not fully support them. Specifically a search engine will never submit a form on your site. So, if the only way to reach your content is through submitting a form, a search engine will not reach that content.

This can be used to your advantage. If you have a link you do not want a search engine to follow, making the navigation form based and then dressing up the form submit "button" to look like a link with CSS is certainly an option.

Headers Tags, Fonts, & Sizes

Heading tags, specifically <H1>, can be used to denote important content on your site, however just like with your title tag you must think in percentages.

Use H1 for the on-page title (such as the article title at the top of this page). Use H2 for secondary content sections, H3 for tertiary ones, and so on down the line just as you would if you were making an outline.

Keywords & Writing Effective Content

The one of the biggest factors in your search engine ranking is going to be your keywords, or what words appear on your pages. Choosing the right keywords is vitally important, While search engines once used to rely on keywords found in your meta tags to rank your page they now have more sophisticated software that analyzes the text on your page and not only checks for keywords or phrases, but also checks that they are in a proper form and not just repeated over and over again.

Keyword volume or density is still important though, and so you must try to include both your main keywords (the ones you most hope to rank well one) prominently, as well as as many minor keyword as you can.

SQUEEZING MINOR KEYWORDS

One easy way to make sure you always get your major and minor keywords on your site is to use a boilerplate sentence or two as a site description. Typically you can find these in the footer of a site along with a copyright statement.

Wrap-Up & Further Reading

On-page optimization is, in a way, less important than off-page optimization. Or, less time consuming in the long run at least. The reason is that your on-page optimization can only be so good, whereas there is no upper limit on the number of quality incoming links you can find. So follow the tips presented in this and my other articles, however if you've done it all and still are not making progress start instead to focus on the off-page factors instead of overtly stressing yourself out over your on-page optimizations.

The one on-page topic I did not heavily cover in this article is menu optimization, internal site linking, and or site architecture. This very important topic is deserving of it's own article and so can be found here: Site Architecture: Optimizing your Internal Links

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION CHECKLIST:

• Descriptive literal title tag that includes your keywords.


• Descriptive literal meta description tag that includes your keywords and entices clicks from readers


• Meta keywords tag that includes your main keywords, minor keywords, misspellings, and words you may wish to target but that are not commonly found in your content. Don't stress out too much when making it.


• Clean, coherent, HTML or CSS markup with as little markup coding as possible, externally included files for CSS definitions. Fast loading, accessible, and compatible.


• Source code formatted so your most important menu items are read first.


• Descriptive literal ALT & TITLE attributes for images & anchor tags (links) that include your keywords.


• No use of frames for public content you want search engines to see.


• Conservative use of javascript, do not use it to display important content.


• Conservative use of Flash as an option for viewing your site, never a requirement.


• Normal HTML based navigation alternatives if form based navigation must be used.


• Descriptive literal heading tags (h1, etc) that include your keywords with good density and are used properly to sectionalize content.


• Effectively keyword rich content that is descriptive, literal, and goes into great detail.


• A fully optimized and accessible menu.