Too many people jump into SEO without truly understanding the very basic principles behind a sound website as it relates to search engine spiders/bots. While off page optimization and link building campaigns are certainly an indispensable asset to your overall SEO campaign, on-page optimization needs to be at the forefront of more minds.
What do I mean by on-page optimization? No I am not merely referring to meta keywords and keyword density (these being whole separate articles in their own right), rather I am referring to site architecture, clean source code, and proper internal linking.
Site architecture is often overlooked due to a website owner’s desire to have all pages reside in the root directory of his/her site (www.domain.com/pagename.html). A more appropriate, and search engine friendly, site architecture should contain multiple levels of paths (www.domain.com/category/pagename.html). Think of it as an outline of information and how that information needs to flow in order to make sense.
Clean source code must be one of my biggest pet peeves. While there are overabundances of source code disasters, here are some best practices to adhere to:
- External file use of CSS and javascript code.
- Properly structured title, description and header tags.
- Include target keywords contextually where it makes sense to do so.
- Internal link pages to allow spiders to better crawl and enhance the flow of link equity.
- Use strong, emphasize, and bulleted/ordered list tags (a great example is found on this Alabama social security disability attorney website).
- Cardinal rule: cater first to your visitors, and search engines second (proper on-page SEO yield these as one in the same).
While there are many elements to take into consideration when optimizing your website, the points listed above are the tip of the iceberg. I might also add that one must be sure their site is not utilizing the noindex tag by accident! Learn more about the noindex tag.
Related posts:
