ARTICLE
Amongst the multitude of things you can do to increase traffic to your site, one of the more understated aspects in Onsite SEO Optimization. While many site owners do want to build search-engine friendly sites, it’s easy to get carried away incorporating all kinds of fancy elements like flash elements, dynamic image menus etc. Let’s take a look at two of the most important factors that you should consider when it comes to onsite SEO.
1) Design
While you are building a site for people, there are things that you can do to make your site search-engine friendly from a design point of view. For instance, how is the site organized? Is the site’s structure easy to understand?
Are all the images accompanied by relevant ‘alt’ tags? Do you have the right header tags on each page that highlight what your content is about? Is there a sitemap? Are your text links keyword rich (avoid links like -‘click here’ and ‘Find out more’)? Is your site’s navigation structure mirrored at the bottom of the page in text?
It’s best to avoid trying to jazz up your site a lot, so only use flash videos when you need them. Don’t create a site that’s entirely made in Flash. It’s also a good idea to avoid splash pages since they don’t carry any content that search engines can actually view. The use of cascading style sheets (CSS) not only makes it easy for you to make changes later on, it’s also good for SEO.
2) Content
Have you done proper research into what content people are searching for in that particular area. Hopefully you’ve done the basic research and have built keyword-rich pages around the most popular phrases and keywords being searched for. This ensures a good stream of traffic to your site, since it has content that people are actively looking for, provided the onsite SEO is good too, so that your site appears high in search results.
Let’s take a look at how you can make your site more search-engine friendly with respect to the content.
Firstly give your site a strong focus around a particular topic. Don’t try to be all things and cover every possible area in that topic. For instance, if you’re creating a site around ‘golf equipment’ don’t try to include everything about golf there. Golf vacation courses, golf handicaps, golfing tips etc. are all subjects that are best suited for individual sites. Keeping a narrow focus lets search engines classify your site more accurately, allowing it to surface higher in the results for related searches.
Secondly make sure that the first paragraph of any page is keyword-rich and contains the same keyword as the header that precedes it. It’s also important to have enough content on the page, which flows naturally and reads well. Don’t stuff the page with keywords but also don’t forget to mention them a couple of times. You want to have content that’s at least 300 words or more. Also ensure that every page is optimized correctly in terms of title tags, header tags, Meta description tags etc.
Proper onsite SEO can deliver truckloads of traffic to your site, provided you’ve thought through and planned out every aspect of the design and content well ahead of time. This ensures that you have a site that search engines love to rank for the keywords and phrases people are searching for.
