On-Site Optimization

On-site optimization is one part of the SEO process, which involves tweaking your website to make it more likable to search engines. The other part of SEO is the off-site optimization, which will be discussed in the succeeding posts. In this post, we will outline some of the most important rules to abide by when optimizing your website for search engines.

On-site optimization covers three important areas: CONTENT, DESIGN and NAVIGATION. While it is true that there’s so much you can do to implement an on-site optimization, working on these three areas should get you well on your way to creating a search-engine friendly website.

The Content

Your content is what search engines process to determine how well it fits into their indexes. While processing, search engines consider a lot of factors like the relevance of your content to your title, the integration of keywords in your content, the density of keywords in your over-all content etc.

For this reason, it is highly recommended that you narrow down your topic to allow search engines to properly categorize your website. If your website is an “it-all” blog, search engines would be hard up at ranking your website. To test this idea, do a search in Google for the word “on-site optimization”. Most likely, the websites shown on the first result page are websites that focus on search engine optimization.

The Design

Another thing that you can do to improve your website for search engines is to make sure that your theme or template is properly coded. We have seen a bunch of websites that hardly rank well on search engines because their codes were messed up. For BloggingSetup.com, we are using Thesis Theme, the best WordPress theme in terms of SEO, flexibility and design. Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today thanks to its expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. In general, websites should use style sheets or CSS to clean up your code and remove font tags that might cause problems with search engine spiders. If you don’t know how to code your own template, it pays to hire an expert or buy templates from reliable experienced coder.

Another thing to take into account when optimizing a website is the proper use of tags (Title, Description, Meta, Alt etc.). These topics will be covered in our succeeding posts so make sure you check back for updates or subscribe to our feed.

H tags or headings have been known to increase website ranking for a while now. But is it really so? We have strong reasons to believe that h tags (mostly H1 tag) do not get you better ranking. They are, however, a great way to organize content of your page so it is not very surprising that some webmaster still think they can bring better ranking. Also, using keywords in H tags will increase your keyword density. There are a lot of website owners that complain that H tags are difficult to work with. Our advice to this is: “Don’t use them if you have no place to put them or if you don’t have much content to organize.” There are plenty of high ranking websites that don’t use H tags at all.

The Navigation

Search engine spiders crawl your website through links. It is equally important to build external links (off-site optimization) as to building internal links. One reason why some pages of your site are not included in the search engine indexes is because they never get to discover it in the first place. Probably, there are no links pointing to them from within or outside your website.

Since you can control the anchor text you use when you build internal links, why not take full advantage of it. Use relevant keywords as anchor text (instead of the usual CLICK HERE) to the pages you are linking to. This is a good strategy to boost the search engine ranking that page for specific keywords.

Building a good navigation allows your readers to jump easily from one post to another. But more importantly, linking to your web pages allow search engine spiders to properly crawl and index your pages. To better crawl your website, I recommend that you create and submit a sitemap to search engines.

Although not exhaustive in terms of the potential optimization techniques at your disposal, this outline hopefully has given you a few rules to abide by when building or revamping your site.