While off-page factors are the core of today’s seo, we should remember that well optimised and well written webpages will be more likely to appear high in SERP’s (search engine results pages) than the non-optimized competition. The following list is only a sketch of the most important on-page factors.
Our man Kris C in the seo hot-seat brings you an occasional series to compliment our website work here at RKO.
1. – Domain name
When You consider a new domain name for your website it’s good practice to choose it with a connection to the keywords you want to target. Yahoo pays significant attention to domain names when ranking pages. For Google it is a less significant factor but it’s still easier to rank when you have some of your keywords in the domain name. Besides, when somebody is looking for a keyword that is in your name it will get ‘bolded’, increasing its exposure and CTR (Click Thru Rate).
2. – Page titles
You should create titles individually for each page. Don’t include only your company name here. Think about 2 or 3 keywords that are most relevant to your page and put them into the title tag or provided field if you’re using a cms. Be sure to give the greatest prominence to your main keyword. Think about your title tag like a heading in a newspaper – it should be catchy, this will improve your CTR.
3. – Headings structure
Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by Google, or any other search engine, than regular page text. They should be used wisely to improve the page’s optimisation. If you are not trying to rank well for a keyword, do not put it into an H1 tag. It’s best to use the H1 tag only once per page – in the page or post title, this will allow search engines to understand what the page is about. Tags from H2 to H6 can be used more than once but consider this to be reasonable.
4. – Unique content
You must make sure all of your pages contain unique content. If your page contains only or mostly duplicated content you are risking not being included in Google search results, or worse, de-indexation!
5. – That’s it!
Part 2 next….!
Posted by Kris C
