On-Site optimization
On-site Optimization also known as on-page optimization is the process of analysing and amending a website so that it is optimized against a set of keyword phrases. Your Website’s architecture, layout, and design can significantly impact your search engine results. The basic items to consider fall into three categories: design, navigation and content.
Design – Ideally, your Web site should be built from the ground up with all your keywords in mind and with consideration of SEO best practices. If you consider SEO early then it is easier although still not impossible if your website is already in existence.
Your website designers must either have or work with someone that has deep SEO skills. The previous stage of keyword analysis should have returned very focused keyword phrases relating to what the website’s audience is actually searching for. This will then dictate the overall site information architecture and content.
Some high level SEO best practices should include:
- Avoid search engine “non-viewable” content, e.g. flash, splash pages.
- Use cascading style sheets (CSS) for layout, enabling a cleaner HTML file.
- Use header tags (i.e. H1, H2, H3) to provide structure.
- Comply with W3C guidelines (HTML and CSS). Place in your contract that all deliverables must validate against the standards.
- Page speed. Pages should load fast and implement caches to speed up page display speeds.
Navigation – A website’s navigation plays an important role in a visitors experience and in the search engines ability to value your site’s content. Nowadays the navigation menu is not important to tell the search engine of your pages as most sites use XML sitemaps to communicate changes but it does provide valuable information as to how important a page is within the site’s architecture. For all menus remember:
- For button menus us the alternative text (or an alt tag) to tell the search engine the context of the button.
- For text links the text describing the link [anchor text] must match the target pages keyword phrases.
- Use the header and footer. The footer should be used to hold the standard items like contact-us, terms, privacy policy etc and leave the top for site content.
- Don’t hide the menu through complex coding, e.g. javascript, it must be visible to a search engine.
Content – Each page has a keyword phrase to target against and this should be used for the focus of the page content. The page must be seen to describe the topic not just the keyword phrase so use synonyms and alternative ways to describe your topic. But, remember don’t just write a page for the search engines as it is the visitors that will read and buy products or services based on what you say and not the search engines.
Thus, On-Site Optimization is the process to design, develop and refine each page on your website against a clearly researched set of keyword phrases. This process never ends as you should constantly measure your progress and adjust to keep ahead of the competition.
If you do a search for tools to help, you will find endless packages ranging from FREE to monthly subscriptions. At Help2SEO we swear by two tools which sit at either end of the market. The first, Traffic Travis although primarily a keyword research tool does have options to help optimize a page against a given keyword phrase. This does give a basic score but at the price of FREE is still a good starting point. The other tool we use is SEOENG which is a tool that crawls your site like a search engine robot and analyses each page giving very detailed reports on what may be causing you a problem. The below box will provide you with a free report that gives you an idea of what it can do:
