On-Page SEO refers to the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques that improve the quality of a web page. The On-Page SEO methods typically involve editing the page content, bettering the code and perfecting the URLs and navigation to make it search engine friendly.
These page specific SEO techniques ensure that search engines can easily find and index your quality web pages. It in turn results in improved search engine ranking and higher internet exposure.
Benefits of On-Page SEO
All the On-Page SEO methods on a whole benefit a web-page in the following areas:
Relevant Content – Relevant content makes sure your website is search indexed for the most appropriate keywords. This improves the ranking in search results for these key phrases. Highly informative content can attract more readers who readily share it with friends. This enhances the visibility of the web pages further.
Clear Code - Cleaning up the HTML code benefit in the form of easy indexing. Clear page code results in clean web pages that make it easier for web crawlers to index your web pages. This also involves restricting crawling of non-search friendly pages (say, user generated pages like search results or just author profile pages).
Search Engine Friendliness - Making the web-pages search friendly (Clear URL and better layout) indexes all the relevant pages in your website. More indexed pages results in more visitors from search engines.
Let us now see how to exploit the benefits of On-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO Methods
The On-Page SEO steps typically make the web pages clear and precise so that the search engine bots love crawling them. The page specific SEO methods are categorically: web page content modification, web page code revision and navigation improvisation techniques.
Web page Content Modification - The web page content modification mainly involves adding relevant information to the web pages. Apart from content building, it also incorporates keyword analysis and rewriting the text to include the relevant keywords (called as keyword stuffing).
Emphasis on styling (bold, italics, underline) of the important data ensures that the scanning of content is easy for both human readers and also the search engines. Incorporating relevant heading and subheadings further enhances the scanning.
The content specific On-Page SEO methods also include providing relevant anchor texts to the contextual links. Moreover giving proper descriptions for the images enclosed in the content adds to the relevancy of the web page.
Web page Code Revision - These generally involve clearing the code, to emphasis the relevant content and approve easy crawling for the search engine spiders.
The content of meta description tag and title are the primary factors that talks (to the search bots) on what the web page is all about. It is a wise SEO practice to ensure that title and meta description tag contains the relevant details about the corresponding web-page.
The robots.txt file contains instructions for the search engine bots to crawl the pages of a site. Modifying this text file is a must do SEO technique to ensure that only the desired pages are read by the bots.
Search engine recommends excluding unwanted web pages from crawling. You have to include a “no-follow” attribute to such pages. This typically involves user specific web pages like the log in pages (say shopping carts) and the search results pages. Indexing of user generated search-pages is termed as search spam and this can result in banning your site from indexing further.
Navigational Improvements – A proper navigation ensures that all the desired pages are easily accessible to the readers. Clear layout makes a website loved by the search engine bots.
Always include a sitemap in your web site that links to every single webpage in your site. This makes sure that the search engine bots scan all the desired pages, even if there is no direct link from the root. In additional to a regular sitemap, it is recommended to use a search engine friendly XML sitemap for faster indexing.
Apart from this, the URLs of every page must include relevant anchor texts rather than numbers or session ids. URL normalization techniques ensure that the web page URL follows the search engine recommendations of a proper URL format. Always try to avoid deep links that links far away from the root.
Cross-linking the relevant web pages within a site improves the visibility of the individual web pages. As part of SEO you should use proper URL redirection methods to assign the ranking weight to single webpage though it is accessible via multiple URLs.
Apart from these ethical On-Page SEO techniques a few unethical SEO practices do exist.
Unethical On-Page SEO Practices
To manipulate the search engine ranking many webmasters rely on unethical On-Page SEO practices like:
Hidden Texts – Hidden texts exponentially enhance keyword stuffing. Repeating keyword text colored as the back ground shade (camouflaged, thus hidden from the user) fools search engine.
Another way of hiding text is to use negative div tags and stuffing it with keywords. This will not be visible to the human readers but search engines surely can read them.
Duplicate content - Duplicate content occurs when a website contains the same content in different web pages. The duplicate content can trick search engine that the website host high amount of relevant information. Also repeating the same paragraph or sentence multiple times in the same web page is an unethical SEO method.
Cloaking - This is the method of presenting different web pages for the same query depending on who requested it (either a human visitor or a search engine bot).
The unethical SEO methods might sound easy. Surely, search engines do not recommend these methods. If the search engine detects of the deception your web site will be banned from indexing and ranking.
On-Page SEO is doing the right steps to improve the quality of your web page. Higher the number of such quality pages on your site, the better will be the online exposure that your site enjoys.
Following steps should be strictly followed while doing on page optimization for a website or web page:-
- Keyword research and Analysis
- Optimization of title tags of all important pages
- Optimization of other Meta tags (Description etc…)
- Optimization of header tags H1, H2, and H3
- Analysis of bold tag
- Optimizing JavaScript and CSS codes
- Optimization of non index able attributes like Frames
- Optimizing HTML Source Code
- Image optimization
- Hyperlink Optimization
- Optimizing internal linking structure (Navigation)
- Optimization of external Links
- Broken links analysis & correction
- W3c Validation
- Creation & Optimization of HTML Site Map
- Creation, Optimization & Submission of Yahoo (TEXT) Site Map
- Creation, Optimization & Submission of Google (XML) Site Map
- Website architectural correction
- Content Optimization
- Canonicalization error correction
- Google Analytics Setup
- Google Webmaster setup
