It is safe to say that SEO can be split under many sub categories, the two main
ones being On Page SEO and Off Page SEO.
Google, the no.1 Search Engine in the world, having somewhere around 70% of the
market share is often regarded as an Off-Page Factor search engine.
Even though Off-Page Factors play a very important role in ranking for keywords, it is a mistake that SEOS
and webmasters have started to ignore the On-Page Factors, saying they are no
longer important.
If you search for “Click Here” in google which site will show in first in the
SERPS? It’s the Adobe PDF Reader Download Page.
Why is this? If
you go to the page and try to search for the key phrase “Click Here” it’s not
even listed on the page and yet it is ranked no.1 for the search term. Since the
page has thousands of llinks from webmasters with links on their site saying
something like, Click Here to Download PDF Reader, the page will rank for it.
This can be both positive and negative. Before Google Killed it, for some time
the Whie House Website was ranking no.1 for they keyphrase “miserable failure”.
It doesn’t mean the white house wasn’t ranking for the key phrases it wanted to
rank for, it was ranking for more.
You can always control On Page SEO, You can’t always Control Off Page SEO.
Here is a list of 20 On Page SEO Factors you need to look out for
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Keyword in Domain
There has been speculation about whether this is a factor or not. It is
!
If your site is called http://Weekly-Offers-Online.com, non SEOs are
going to link to you by your domain name, so what is the domain going to be
optimized for? Yes you guessed it “Weekly Offers Online”.
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File Naming
File Names Should Be Relevant.
Don’t call your home page “Home” unless you are
selling homes.
Make Sure that all keywords in the url are necessary.
Make sure you use dashes instead of underscores.
Weekly-Offers-Online = Weekly Offers Online
Weekly_Offers_Online = WeeklyOffersOnline
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Title Tag
All Title Tags should be related to the page.
Your Site’s Title should grab attention.
When your site is listing in a Search
Engine Listing, the title plays an important factor in your Click Through Rate.
It has to be selected from 10 other similar pages.
You shouldn’t have duplicate title tags.
Your title tag is not there to display your company name only.
Under no circumstances should you leave your Title Tag Blank.
Leaving
out your web site Title is similar to publishing a newspaper without a headline.
Make sure you put keywords here, do not over stuff and test out different tags
for maximum effort
There are 2 factors you need to take into consideration.
Prominence = How far to the left your keyword is
Proximity = How often is your keyword shown in your title.
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Description Tag
The Description Tag does not hold much weight for Ranking Purposes.
However
search engines uses it as a “snippet” of text that the search engines post from
your page in any given search query.
A good page description will increase your
Click Through Rate and your Description Tag should work hand in hand
with your Title Tag.
However, it’s important to note that the snippet
the engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher typed into the engine.
Sometimes search engines like Google will choose the snippet text for you and
will completely ignore the description tag.
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Body Copy/Text
Everything is tied in together so make sure that the body is relevant to the
title and the description tags.
Make sure you also put your keywords here,
however do not over do it and make sure that the text is still readable by a
human.
Your keywords should add up to not more than 20% of your body copy. The
percentage is only by testing. Each topic has it’s threshold.
For instance on a
Poker Related Website more than 15% is most likely to be considered spam, this
is only from experience and I have no other sources to justify it.
Proximity and Prominence also plays an important part. The closer the key phrase
is to the left, the better it is.
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Headings
Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than
regular body copy.
So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall
keyword theme.
For instance do not put your blog post date within an H1 tag,
because you’re NOT trying to rank in the search engines for a date.
Use only 1 <H1> Tag per page, this will make it easier for search engines to
understand the theme of the page.
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Avoiding Canonicalization Errors of your URL
You may be hurting your ranking abilities without even knowing it.
Canonicalisation errors occurs when a website is able to be accessed via both
www.website.com and website.com, in severe cases this can cause the search
engines to effectively index 2 identical copies of your site.
Worse than that
would be if you use also linked to the home page in different combinations
throughout your website:
- www.website.com
- website.com
- website.com/index.html
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DO use different anchor text for the same page.
DON’T use different URLs for the same page.
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Validate Your Code and Feeds
Use http://validator.w3.org/ for to validate my
websites and http://feedvalidator.org/ for my Feeds
(RSS1,RSS2 and Atom) to make they are crawlable by spiders.
Spiders have become
highly efficient in assessing code and can get by certain html errors, however
cleaner code make happier spiders and happier spiders give us better rankings.
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XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are a way of communicating to Google and
other search engines the page structure of your site, how often page content is
updated, and when new content is added to the site.
Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:
1.) All site pages are crawled and indexed.
2.) Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
3.) New site pages are quickly indexed.
You can create your Xml Sitemap http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
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Good Fresh Content
Pages that you update frequently are crawled more frequently
by bots, especially Googlebot. This is especially true for new websites.
This is
because a new website usually don’t have a lot of trust and links pointing to
it, therefore there are a few other ways for Google to know that your website
has been updated.
As you might have figured out, following these points is not just about good
SEO, it’s about good website design and development.
There are websites who rank
without having any SEOs working on them just because of this factor, however if
you have a good website and you know Search Engine Optimization, than you will
most definately have more edge over your competitors.
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Create a Robots.txt file
The robots.txt
file is a form of communication between visiting robots (spiders) that index
the content of your web site pages.
Every search engine has a spider, Google has
one and so do Yahoo!, Msn and Ask. It is a program that visits your
website and takes information to be analyzed later by the search engines.
For those spiders that obey the file, it provides a map for what they can, and
cannot index. The robots.txt file resides in your root directory.
In this file you can tell the spiders not to index certain files or directories.
Without it spiders will crawl every page found, even those you don’t want
including your private login directory, image, css and javascript files etc.
This may expose folders you don’t want to be seen publicly and take unnecessary
bandwith.
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Hosting
Get a good hosting provider. There are hundreds
of website who offer unlimited space for $9 and this may be good to start off
with and minimize cost, however if you want good rankings and astound reputation
get a decent server.
These kind of websites will host hundreds and
sometimes thousands of websites on the same server and IP Address. If
there are spam sites, they might get black listed and if Google blacklists the
entire server than guess what? You can will loose your chance of ranking or
maybe not even getting indexed.
One obvious reason to get a decent hosting is speed. Your users will not
enjoy a slow loading website. If it takes more than 5 seconds to load, they
might even bounce. Google doesn’t like slow websites either and you may be
penalized.
Also avoid having your blog or website hosted publicly like Wordpress.com and
Blogger.com. These services are not bad, however they are NOT YOUR
blog.
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Optimize Your Images
Search Engine Spiders DO NOT see images.
They see only text, however we can also optimize our images for seo.
Size Does Matter - Make sure that your images are not too large
so forget about using images from your camera. All images should be 200Kb or
smaller. Preferably images should be between 1K and 35K. Use them according to
your needs, if you have a thumbnail for your image, do not use the large image
and resize it through html code
Quantity - Avoid having your site bloated with a lot of images,
like with any other tool in your arsenal, use them wisely. Avoid having images
for your menu or your title tags.
Use Alt and Title Tags- Alt and Title tags say what the image
is about, and when an image is used as a link you can consider them as anchor
text.
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Site age
Web sites are like wine, the older they are he idea the better
for SEO they get.
The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy
(they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped
up and might be spam and soon disappear.
There is not much you can do about this
except wait and buy your domain for more than 2 years of more.
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Be Certain that All Links Are Valid
You will be penalized if your site is not linked properly.
Too many dead
links will not look good to your visitors and neither will it to bots, they
don’t like wasting time and resources.
If you have Google Webmaster Tools
(which you should) you will notice that Google starts complaining if it notices
dead links.
The larger a website gets, the harder it is to know if there are
dead links, especially if you are linking externally
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And there is much more...
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