Intro to Onpage SEO - Part Two

2014-11-25T20:16:00.002-08:00

This part of the ONPAGE SEO process is, in my opinion, the easier of the two tasks. This is because your work is confined into the <HEAD> section of your webpage. So, unlike improving content and layout optimization, it only focuses on the top of your page. This does not mean that it is not an important step, because it is the first thing a search engine sees when crawling your page.

METATAGS

It is amazing how many webpages still do not have proper meta tags set up. Meta tags are vital because they allow your browser to understand your page. Meta tags can be for a description of your site, what keywords are used, who the author was, when to redirect to a different site and a variety of other tags. To keep things basic, we will talk about the Description, Keyword and Robot metatags. For a more in depth look at MetaTags, in particular the ones that google likes, check this out!.

DESCRIPTION METATAG

The Description Metatag is most useful for the short description it gives in search engine results. The next time you do a search, check out the “description” of the link below it. This is where the description meta tag comes into play.

KEYWORDS METATAG

The Keyword Metatag was originally designed to allow search engines to see what your site was about. However, Google DOES NOT use it for ranking a page on their search engine results page. So, it is not a “sure fire way” to increase your page ranking. CONTENT with “keywords” that people search for is a great way to increase your page ranking, that is of course in conjunction with every other step included in this article as well.

ROBOT METATAG

The Robot Metatag is very useful because you can choose if you want your webpage, or its links followed. Sometimes a page doesn’t need to be, or you may not want it to be, submitted to search engines .

In this case, a Robot Metatag such as <meta name= “robots” content= “noindex, nofollow”> would be used. The search engines would ignore that page and not follow any links leading from it. This is just a sample of the many things a robot metatag can accomplish. Want more information on this? Check out what google has to say about it.

TITLE

Having a valid page title allows search engines and visitors to know exactly what your page is all about. Having your company name as your page title is ok, but unless a potential visitor is looking for your company in particular, it is better to have a description of what you do . For example “SEO for small businesses” is better for me than “GetAWebsite315.com” would be for companies looking for SEO.

This has been a basic overview of ONPAGE SEO. This should give you a great start in laying out your SEO PLAN. Our next set of articles will be on OFFPAGE SEO, which gets a bit more involved but tries to keep it easy to understand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geta Web Presence provides small businesses and organizations with web presence creation and management services. For a larger list of what we do, check out our main site by clicking here.

Intro to Onpage SEO- Part One

2014-11-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

Onpage SEO is designed to make your page easier for Search Engines to find your content and easier for your page visitors to navigate and find content. While it can at first seem like a daunting task to accomplish, you can help increase your organic search engine results by making sure your navigation, layout and header information is the best it can be. In part one of this article we will focus on Navigation and Layout of your webpage.

The task of making your page easy to navigate is one of the most important steps of Onpage SEO because a page that is cluttered or uneasy on the eyes makes users want to get off your page quickly. Below are the things you should avoid doing to help optimize your page:

OVERCROWDING

It makes for a bad experience at Venues and on your webpage. The ideal webpage is EASY to navigate and not distracting to page visitors. If it is cumbersome to get information off of your page, your visitor will leave.

IMPROPER FORMATTING

No one wants to get sick looking at fonts and color changing every other word. It may be good for some media types such as print for a kids book, but most website visitors are more interested in your content than font color. You can still use different fonts and colors to highlight important information, but use them sparingly.

USE OF DEAD LINKS

Having great content with links that lead to relevant information is great way to help boost your ranking on Search Engines. But when those links are dead (do not go to a valid page anymore) it does not look good for you. It is like giving a great review and sending a referral to a business that is no longer in business. It makes you look silly and makes the person referred a little skeptical about your content. So, keep an eye on your links and make sure they are alive.

OLD CONTENT

Visitors are coming to your page to get information they haven't seen before. They want to know why what you offer is better than what your competitors offer. The best example is Widget A company webpage offering the "latest and greatest widget" but hasn't updated their site since 2010. What may have been the "latest and greatest widget" has been replaced, most likely a few dozen times. So, even though your company may still offer the best widget, keep the information current.

* UPDATE 11/26/2014: Check out this great infographic about CONTENT on helping you create new content that ranks well on search engines.

IMAGES

This is one of the most overlooked parts of ONPAGE SEO. You use images to show off your products, services or to make people laugh at your dog smiling. However, what you don't know is that an option with images called an "ALT TAG" can have positive results on your page ranking. For instance, realtors have pictures of houses on their website. With the use of the 'ALT TAG' the realtor could add '3 bedroom Miami Florida' and have an extra input for someone searching for that type of house. This also helps the images show up under 'images' on the search engines. One last tip about images is, the larger the image, the longer it takes to load. Not that one images adds a huge amount of time to the loading process, but dozens or hundreds in a gallery could.

CONCLUSION

This is a very basic overview of the navigation & layout aspect of ONPAGE SEO covering not overcrowding your webpage, properly formatting it, eliminating dead links, keeping content fresh and proper use of images. This should give you a nice place to start with your ONPAGE SEO plan, but don't miss the next part of the article about optimizing the header section of your webpage and why it is so important. If you are already overwhelmed and would rather have someone else take over this process, we'd love to have you as a client. Visit our main website for more detail about the services we provide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geta Web Presence provides small businesses and organizations with web presence creation and management services. For a larger list of what we do, check out our main site by clicking here.