8 ON SITE OPTIMISATION SEO STRATEGIES YOU CAN’T MISS

There seem to be a never ending list of “things to do” for SEO. What with content, social media, SEO outreach, link building, advertising and all the rest we often let the on-page side of things slide. For small businesses it is often the most confusing aspect of digital marketing. Here we look at 8 of the most important pieces of onsite optimisation you should do on your website.

1. Content Is King

Each page of your website should have at least 200 words of text. Ideally important pages should have 5 times this or more. The more text on the page compared to HTML the more search engines can understand what the page is about.

2. SEO Friendly URLs

One of the most common mistakes we see is urls that look something like these :

www.yourdomain.co.uk/category.php?c=3

Seo friendly URL’s need to have clear descriptive titles and to use hyphens (-) instead of underscored. A better URL would be :

www.yourdomain.co.uk/who-we-are/  

For additional information take a look at Search Engine Journal's article The Ultimate Guide for an SEO-Friendly URL Structure

3. Internal Link Architecture

When a link from another webpage hits your website the link juice is spread across all the links on that page. This means that the more links you have on a page the more the link juice is diffused amongst pages. It is tricky to minimise page links on ecommerce sites but try and have a well followed link structure tree. A Homepage linking to 4 pages to 40 pages is better than 1-40 pages.

4. H1 Heading

H1 headings are still important for identifying pages to search engines. You should try and include an H1 on every page of your website to identify it clearly. Bear in mind that search engines are incredibly competent at semantic understandings – so don’t try to over optimise your headings with keyword stuffing. Use a natural heading that reflects what you want to convey on the page.

For further reading have a look at The Importance Of H1 Tags For Search Engine Ranking

5. Well Structured Site-Map

A well-constructed sitemap makes it easier for search engines to index your website. If you are using Wordpress or another off the shelf Content Management System (CMS) you can install a sitemap plugin that will optimise your site-map for you.  You can create a static XML sitemap using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ However if your content is updated on a regular basis such as adding new articles to your blog for example, you might want to look at developing a dynamic sitemap generator.

6. Schema Mark Up

Schema mark-up or microdata tagging are increasingly used to identify key information on a website including products, prices, locations, brand identities, logos etc. They are easy to code in although some plugins exist to create them for you.

For further reading take a look at this article - What Is Schema Markup & How to Implement Structured Data

7. Image ALT Tags

Image ALT tags are a way for you to tell search engines what an image actually is. So rather than the generic file name jpeg123 you can create a clear description of the image (Picture of a cabbage in flower) for example. Also images with ALT tag descriptions are performing better than those that don’t have them.

If you are not sure when to use alt or title tags have a look at Search Engine Journal’s article Image Alt Text Vs. Image Title: What’s the Difference?

8. Meta-Data

Meta descriptions don’t actually affect your SEO but they do provide you an opportunity to encourage click through to your website and conversions. Meta descriptions are the 165 character descriptions below each google listing. Meta titles are the title of this description 55 character maximum. Optimising these with text that accurately describes your product, service or page will encourage visitors to click through to your website.

Take a look at Rachel Holey's article – How To Write A Killer Meta Description

Come back soon for more essential tips or contact us today if you need a hand!