Oh boy, on-site SEO. This is my favorite thing to do with optimizing a website for the search engines. Its fun because its the easiest (once you know what to do) and some very little edits can help your website big time. In this article I will go over everything you need to know about on-site SEO, and what you need to do and what you should not do.
Understating
You need to understand that you NEVER make a website for the search engines. Its a waste of time. Your main goal is to make a website that is worth linking to and for people worth reading. Its useless to make a website with crappy content and heavily SEO’ed so you can rank for a certain keyword…sure it works with some smaller niches, but after time the searches will catch on and you site will get penalized. You also run the risk of not getting those important natural inbound links that you need, those are very crucial in getting a website to rank for a certain keyword.
You need to understand that the searches are smarter than you think. They always seem to know if your using hidden text, or hiding text will css images, or cloaking, or even over-on-site seo. Don’t take them for being dumb, they aren’t. If you feel the force inside of you and would like to be a blackhat SEO’er than you will be spending A LOT of time figuring the searches out. Its just plain silly to try and fool the searches, you will be spending too much time figuring them out, when you could have been building great content. You should be playing there game, they are too strong to play against them.
So, when going over your on-site SEO, remember to make your website for humans, not the engines, and to never try and fool the searches. With that, lets get started.
Checklist
Here is a checklist of everything we will be going over.
1. Page title tags and descriptions
2. Duplicated content
3. Navigation
4. H1, h2, h3 tags
5. Bolding
6. Keywords on pages
7. Title tags
8. Alt tags
9. Nofollow
10. Sitemaps
11. Fast loading pages
12. Validating
Page titles and descriptions
This is very very important, thats why I put it first. Having a unique page title and meta description is a must on every page. Your keywords should both be in the title and description at least once. You also have to remember that Google bolds the keywords when users search them, so your keywords will also be bolded in both your title and description when someone searches for your keyword.
Why didn’t I mention meta keywords in this list at all? Because they are extincted! I’m am 99% sure that google, yahoo, or msn don’t care about them at all. There useless, don’t waste your time with them.
Now with the title, I always put something in front of my whole title to help get some more extra clicks from the searches, I usually add a ø or a » . That usually gets me a few extra clicks from the search results page. With the title structure, it doesn’t really matter to much, just make sure you put your keyword before your website name, so like:
Page Title - Website (works great)
Website - Page title (suckage!)
With your description, make sure to put your keywords in the description, but don’t add to many and make it look spammy. Google doesn’t give much weight to the description, they only use it to show on the search results page. So I usually make my websites title a mini-sale letter to get people to click on my website from the search results.
Duplicated content
This is simple:
Duplicated content = No good
Having the same content on your website pages is bad. You need to make sure that no 2 pages at all are the same. If you have a blog, you should really be having a “read more…” link underneath about 100 characters on your homepage and then linking to the page with your blog post (I guess I should change that on my own blog).
You want to stay away from duplicated content on your OWN website, you can and will get penalized for that, even if its just a small penalty. So, after you made your website go over it and check to make sure no articles are on the same 2 or more pages.
Navigation
This is pretty easy and straight forward. With your website navigation, you should try and use unordered list for your navigations html. Below is an example:
<ul>
<li>Homepage</li>
<li>Learn SEO</li>
<li>Contact</li>
</ul>
Obviously you need to add the links, but we will get to that later. Just make sure your navigation is using unordered list
format and use your keywords within the navigation. You also want to use the title=”” tag on your links, but we will get to that later.
H1, h2, h3 tags
You probably have been using these for a while. This is pretty basic on-site SEO. But it still works. Google loves these tags for some reason. So you should be using them!
You page title should be in the h1 at the very top of your webpage, remember to keep this slightly different than your meta page title. Your pages article should use the h2 tag. And finally, you will use the h3 for anytime you need to bold anything within your pages article.
Bolding
Bolding should be used with caution. Remember, the searches aren’t dumb (we all wish they were). You have to only bold a small amount on every page. Most of the time, I only bold a few keywords on every page. Google is pretty smart, they know when your making your page spammy for the search engines, so I recommend that you only bold when you need to. Don’t go out and bold every keyword on your page, thats bad and will get a small penalty. Just bold when you have to.
The reason why I brought bolding up on this list is because I want you guys to use bolding with caution. Only use it when you have to.
Keywords on pages
This goes right along with bolding. You don’t want to use too many keywords within your content. Don’t write the content for the spiders, write the content for the users. Don’t be adding “dogs canine k9 can run fast” in your content, when you add too many keywords like that the searches find out, and then penalize you.
Just write the pages for the users, not the search engines and you will be alright.
Title tags
This is what you want in your h2 tag (h1 would be your website title). This HAS to be different than your meta page title. You cant have the same 2 things page title and meta title on your page. Well you can, but it will help you more if both were different.
You want to make sure that your title has your keyword in it aswell as explain the page, its usually going to be the same as your URL aswell, because most people will be using wordpress for there CMS here. Remember to make it for the user and not the search engines. Also, remember not to have it be the same exact as your meta title. Follow those rules and you will be fine.
Alt tags
Alt tags could be a pain sometimes, especially since each one of your images HAS to have an alt tag. Its easy to remember to put alt tags on your main images within your website, but I find it hard to remember to put alt tags on random images such as spacers and anything within the actual layout of the website. But when you validate your website at the end of the website creation process you will be reminded to add the rest of your alt tags.
With your alt tags you want to be very descriptive. I always try to write out almost a sentence worth of a description for your image. Don’t just put your keywords within the alt tag, the spiders will catch that. Just simply write out a decent size sentence about the image.
So say you have to add an alt tag to your logo image, try:
alt=”Jon Waraas is devoted in teaching people how to make money using content websites”
Pretty simple? Also, with the random images like spacers or images within your content just add a mini description. So if you write on a spacer, it should look like:
alt=”This is a spacer”
Just keep those simple, and don’t just add random keywords in there.
Nofollow
Keep this in mind with your outbound links… you can get penalized for your outbound links to sites that are bad or non-related. So try to add the nofollow tag to all of your outbound links, but sometimes you cant, such as link exchanges, just make sure your link exchanges are very related to your website.
The nofollow tags purpose is a bit flaky. The searches say that it doesn’t pass any weight at all, however I have proven that wrong, it does pass weight, just not as much as a link without the nofollow. But generally speaking, you should add alt tags to any time a user can create content to get a link, such as blog comments or forum posts. Remember that linking to a bad site from your site will get you penalized. I typically try to add the nofollow tag to any link that is not going to one of my own websites or a link exchange. Just to be on the safe side.
Sitemaps
Every website needs one, it helps the search engine spiders crawl your website better, getting more of your websites subpages indexed. Your sitemap should be on your navigation and in your websites footer so it can be easily accessible by the search engines.
To set up your sitemap there are a few different options, if you use wordpress than just try one of the many sitemap plugins. If you don’t use wordpress than you can either make your sitemap using html or find a program on google to create sitemaps for you. I use a wordpress for all of my CMS’s now, so I use a wordpress sitemap plugin to create my websites sitemap.
If you have a huge database website than you should make a script that will “rollover” your sitemap. Basically create a script that will show 50 links on your sitemap and have it pull the data up randomly, that will help get your databases subpages indexed.
You should also make a xml sitemap and add it to your base directory on your website so that google can pick it up. Use this website to create your xml sitemap, and then simply upload it to your public_html folder. That way google can pick that sitemap and hopefully crawl your website better.
Fast loading pages
The faster a page loads, the better. If you are creating a content site and want to rank well for keywords than you HAVE to make sure that your site loads fast. That way search engine bots will be able to scan and index your website faster, and it is also said that visitors will spend less than 8 seconds waiting for a page to load before going somewhere else. So the fast loading website is beneficial to your visitors along with the search engine bots.
A few tips to get your website loading fast:
1. Use div and CSS (no html)
2. Validate your website
3. Use more content and less images
4. Stay away from scripts such as java and dhtml
5. Use smaller size images (use gif more)
6. If you use php, make sure your code is clean
Those tips are pretty basic and simple. If you follow those tips you should be able to create a fast loading website easily.
One of the main issues that makes slower loading websites are images. You want to stay away from using a lot of images on your website. The more content the better. The only images you should be using is you header image along with a few background images in your CSS. Other than that your website should consists of just words. You will also want to validate your website.
Validating
Finally, the last thing on your on-site SEO checkoff list is validating your website. Why is validating important? Well it goes right along with fast loading websites. You want to make sure your website is fast loading and has no coding errors so the spiders can easily catch everything. Validating doesn’t help increase your SEO ranking, what validating does is make sure that your website is being fully spidered and catched.
Validating also checks to see if you have all of your alt tags. So that helps you too.
Your website doesn’t have to be 100% validated, you just want to make sure that your site has all of the big coding issues fixed, so the search engines can crawl your website with ease.
If you enjoyed this blog post than I think you should subscribe to the RSS feed. That way you can learn a lot more from me and laugh some more at my really bad grammar. Again, here is the link for the RSS feed.
Random Posts
Comments are Dofollow! My thanks to you for contributing to the discussion
12 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Great post Jon, I’m trying to get into SEO a bit more myself, and so am reading tutorials all of the time.
It would be nice to see all of the SEO tutorials on the internet grouped onto one big site, it would make learning about SEO a lot easier.
Nice post Jon, I think you should also add url structure as a very important on-site SEO factor.
Validating:
Look for mistakes before posting:
Thanks fixed. I reread the post a lot, but its so long so there might be a few mistakes.
“Why didn’t I mention meta keywords in this list at all? Because they are extincted! I’m am 99% sure that google, yahoo, or msn don’t care about them at all.”
Google doesn’t need them and I don’t believe uses them either, but I’m about 90% sure MSN does. For multiple incidences, I put the exact phrase I was optimizing as a keyword and I bumped up 3-5 spots. A coincidence? Doubtful.
Just wanted to give you a heads up.
Good tips. I always put keywords in my alt tags… now i’ll try using the sentence method.
Not a bad post, you covered mostly everything.
Link structure is very important. I always use siteurl.com/category/posttitle/ with my wordpress site.
5%-7% density for keywords on a page is the recommended amount, but my site has density as high as 15% and google loves it. I wouldnt go crazy though.
Be sure to include as many variations of your keywords as possible. The more terms you can rank for the better. Look for Abbreviations of your keyword as many people searching the net are lazy. These can sometimes be the easiest to rank for.
Any SEO should have the SEO QUAKE plugin for firefox. It gives tons of info including keyword density and such.
When linking to other pages of your site, try to link it with your keywords as the linking text.
I wrote a shit load more but it had to do with finding keywords and such which is not on site seo.
This is a great list and pretty much covers mostly everything you need to do on-site.
Don’t really agree with this:
“And finally, you will use the h3 for anytime you need to bold anything within your pages article.”
A H3 as with all header tags unless changed have a natural line break in it. To use a H3 tag within normal text seems a bit spammy.
Could be wrong, might do a little research on this later.
Teege
Teege - Your right it has a break. But I wasent 100% clear in that sentence. Don’t use the h3 within the content, use it to break up the content. Like in this article, I should have used h3 for the “Fast loading pages” and “validating” in the article instead of bold. Get what im saying?
I hear you Jon although I hardly ever use the h3 tag using H1 for the main article header and h2’s for sub sections. My articles never have sub - sub sections.
BTW - Hows the new venture going?
Teege - I use h1 for the main title, then h2 for the article title, and then h2 for sections in the article.
Are you talkin about buyanswerslinks.com? Its great, put in like 50 hours this week so far into that site. I have been custom coding a new backend for bbc and bal to make it easier for my writers and I. Thanks for asking..
Nice post - basic but important stuff at the start - got an sp in the first title (reads understating).
Also links on the page can be optimised
Buyanswers looks good - nice work on the design