Upon learning the basics of SEO, let’s move forward on one of its most important aspects—on-site SEO. In the last entry, we mentioned that it is very important for your website to be indexed, and to achieve this, it is vital that the inner elements of your online page contain relevant information that search engines will find valuable. With the constant algorithm changes, it is not enough to rely to off-site optimization alone, you have to work on the SEO framework of the website itself to ensure search engine and user-friendliness.
The Importance of Onsite-SEO
Off-site SEO will not work if on-site SEO have been neglected because its elements are the very factors that signal the search engines that your website is relevant in a particular niche. Meta keywords, description, title tag, URL and website content are the primary elements that increase the websites relevance in SERPs. Other factors that also need to be given attention are website design, speed, and website navigation.
Factors of On-site SEO that Affects Search Engine Rankings
Website Content
“Content is king” may sound cliché in the SEO world, but the sentence is very true and applicable. SEO success is impossible without content because this is what primary search engines crawl to find relevant and rankable information. When we say quality and optimized content, images, videos, sound, and text should be created interesting enough to attract the attention of the online public. Insertion of keywords or phrases are essential (in case of articles), but not to the extent that it will be too dense to appear unnatural. Remember, quality articles are not all about search engines, you also have to think highly of the users so that the content you created will be worthy of their shares. Viral content in social media affects search engine ranks.
Meta-Title and Description
After content page Title or Title Tag follows as the second most important factor after web content. It is the text that describes that document appearing in the browser bar, in search engine results it is the text that appears in blue that is linkable to your website along with your website URL and description. The title of your website should be directly related to the content of the page. Web development beginners who are quite skeptic about the process can ask assistance from online marketing experts to help them. From Google Adwords Help, proper selection of key phrases, etc. it is important that you are doing things the right way.
Title Tag on the Browser Bar
Title Tag on SERP
Website URL
The uniform resource locator (URL) is the web address where your website can be found. It is located in the address bar of your browser, and a common example would be “http://www.google.com.” In doing SEO, the URLs of your website especially the subcategory folders (the inner pages) should be arranged in a category hierarchy for smart internal links. One good example of category hierarchy is “yaelconsulting.com/online-marketing-education/new-to-online-marketing/”. Inner pages of a website should also be described using appropriate meta-tags to rank in SERPs when they are looking for more specific information that your website contains.
IMG Alt Tags
Readers love images and it is one attracting factor to sustain reader’s interest. However, images should also be optimized with “alt tags” so that they will be crawled as relevant by search engines.
Alt Tag on Image
