More Visitors to Your Website, Onsite Optimization...
The first step towards achieving a higher ranking is through onsite optimization. Onsite optimization analyzes the text, code, and general structure of a website. The text and code on a web page are the meat a search engine web crawler consumes. Pictures and graphics are ignored. To properly analyze a website for onsite optimization, you must think of the site not only as text, but also HTML code. The text we’re interested in is in the form of keywords and textual content. The code we’re interested in is in the form of tags within the website HTML.
The URL Structure
When beginning the development of your website, select a simple URL structure. Use words that succinctly describe your website and are logical to navigate from page to page. Avoid using long, confusing, or general names (like “mainpage”, or “page2”, “page3”, etc.). In terms of content stored on the server, develop the site using a directory structure that logically builds from page to page without nesting each page too deeply. For example, avoid using a nested structure like, “page1/page2/page3/page4/page5/webpage.htm”. Develop the website with a logical URL that has a structure that uses names that relate to the content on each page.
Keywords and Key Phrases
Focus the site content on keywords and key phrases that reflect the actual body text on the page. It’s important not to develop the website containing too high a proportion of graphics, images, and flash presentations compared to the text. When a search engine crawls your site, it ignores these items. If the web crawler is unable to clearly determine the scope of your site, your site will be ranked lower than others. Pay attention to the words you’re placing on your website and select a number of keywords and key phrases that accurately reflect the concept of your website.
Now we’ll look at a basic website and dissect the basic code structure and text content to see how it can be developed for proper onsite optimization.
A website starts with the following basic HTML structure:
< html >
< head >
< title >My Homepage!< /title >
< /head >
My homepage content
< /body >
Start With the Title Tag
Onsite optimization starts with the title tag. In the HTML code for each page, enter a title that is uniquely descriptive of that page. The text should contain keywords also used within the page title tag. When a search engine lists your page in its search result, it often includes text within this title tag in its result text. When defining a title, be sure to use only brief descriptions that only contain keywords relevant to your page.
Meta Tags
The meta tag is the next important website element. The meta tag describes your website to a search engine. While the page title only uses a few words, the meta tag can be the length of an entire sentence or even a paragraph.
The meta tag is important to the text a search engine uses to describe the link a user clicks on to reach your site. Each search engine uses the content within the meta tag in its own way. Generally, the search text an user enters into a search engine is compared to your web page's meta tag content and body text. The search engine displays its search results to the user with your website link and a description of your web page placed below the link. This description is developed based on this comparison. So it’s important to relate the content in your meta tag with the title of your page and the content in the body of your page.
When entering meta data into the meta tag, write a description of the page that is informative and interesting and directly reflects the content of your page. Avoid using only keywords. This is a common mistake many web developers add to their page. Placing a laundry list of keywords does not increase ranking. Enter meta data in this way for each page on your website. If your website contains hundreds or thousands of pages, it's impractical to manually enter this data. Automatically create the meta data based on the content of each page.
The Site’s Body and General Structure
The body of your site is one of the most critical areas to focus on for SEO. How you structure and develop your website in terms of heading hierarchy, description, and body text content can have more influence on ranking than any other element on your site.
Think about the hierarchical structure of each web page in terms of headings. Each successive heading tag (h1, h2, h3, etc) has a decreasing level of importance to a search engine, yet all of these tags (h1 through h6) are important. When developing the heading structure of your page, think in terms of an outline and develop the structure based on this hierarchy. Don't use too many headings and avoid using headings as body text. Your headings should be short and descriptive of the body text that follows and each heading should logically follow the heading that precedes it.
When developing the content on your website, write content that is easy to read and understand. Correct all spelling and grammatical errors. Avoid using graphics and pictures to replace text content. For example, if your page communicates a school calendar, don’t display an image of the school calendar that also explains the days off in the image. The web crawler will ignore the image. Make sure each page contains text that explains the calendar and content related to the calendar. Always remember, the web crawler will not consume the images and graphics, only the text.
While developing the text for each page, always consider the words and phrases a user might enter into a search engine to find your website, then use those words and phrases on the page. For example, if you’re developing a web page based on your school and your school is also commonly referred to by its formal name and an acronym (“Rochester Institute of Technology” or “RIT”, for example), use both the formal name and the acronym in the body content. This maximizes the chance the search engine will list your site based on searches that contain either the formal name or the acronym.
Be careful to always develop your page content only for your intended audience, not search engines. Write as though you’re talking to whomever is reading your page, but in the back of your mind think how a search engine might see your page and how the words might also be used as words someone would use to find your page using a search engine.
Use Anchor Text
Another area of consideration is the use of anchor text. Anchor text describes for users and a web crawler what you’re linking to. Use descriptive text that relates directly to what is being linked. Do not use URLs or any portion of an HTTP address.
Images and Alt Tags
The last element to discuss is images and the proper use of the “alt” tag. It is a common mistake for webmasters to overlook the use of this tag to describe each image. The “alt” tag appears within the code as follows:
The example above shows how an image of the Smith family reunion might be placed on the family website. Beside the image tag is the “alt=” tag, which provides a description of the image. If a user hovers their mouse arrow over this image, this is the text that displays beside the mouse arrow. This text is also what a web crawler looks at when consuming the page.
When adding an alt tag, have the text in the tag reflect the body text that describes the image. Also, always maintain a relationship between the actual image file name and the alt text. Keep the alt text short and descriptive and consider placing images into logical groupings on the server. Don’t distribute images in a confusing manner across your domain. Make sure the path to each image is simple and logical.
To Utilize Onsite Optimization Techniques:
- Develop text-based web content in keywords and phrases using a specific topic.
- Choose a simple URL structure for your website.
- Use the title tag to define a descriptive title for each web page on your website.
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Use the meta tag to place relevant keywords and phrases related to your website.
- Develop the body of each page to follow keywords and phrases in the title and meta tags.
- Structure website headings properly with short, logical descriptions.
- Use descriptive and logical anchor text with all links.
- Use alt tags with all images.
