The Beginner’s Guide to Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This beginner’s guide to Onsite SEO will focus on optimizing your site for search engines in order to drive traffic to your website. This article will not address external SEO practices. Although some of this content is arguable by many, I feel this is a very good basic foundation.

I find it easiest to start at the top of a website and work down in making sure I have targeted the most important aspects of my website’s construction. As SEO is ever changing, my intent is to update this article as necessary.

So let’s get started on your way to creating a site that has the potential to be a top ranked site!

Domain Name – www…

Short and descriptive is best! Short meaning the fewest possible words. Descriptive meaning to have your most important keywords or keyword phrase in your domain to help improve search engine placement. With the shortage of short descriptive .com’s available a creative solution is to use hyphens. If you do want to use a hyphen, one hyphen is best. If it were available, which it isn’t, an example of a short descriptive domain name for a birdhouse manufacturer would be www.birdhouses.com.

Title

Recommended length is 6 to 12 words or approx 65 characters including spaces. You should spend considerable time planning your site’s page titles because they are CRITICAL for SEO. Not only does the title of a page appear at the top of the browser’s window, it is most often used as the site’s descriptive text on a search engine’s result page (SERP). This is the place to insert keywords and phrases as well as branding/business name. If you are using a click-through-rates program (CTR), writing a compelling title may increase your click success rate. Use the most prominent keywords at the beginning of a title with your business name or location towards the end. There will be more on keyword prominence later in this article.

In the example below, I did a google search for the phrase, “Victorian Birdhouses for Sale”. Take a look at a few of the titles. See if you can figure out which ones would generate the most click-through-rates.

In my opinion, the two with arrows are the first two entries I would click on. They clearly show me a title in which I am specifically searching for. This shows you how important a unique title is for each page of your website as well. Since many of the other results above are just a bunch of keyword phrases tossed in like a stale salad, I would be less likely to click on those.

Meta Tags

The only relevant meta is the description. The description meta serves a few purposes. Firstly, in some search engines it can be found below the clickable title on a search engine results page (SERP). Therefore a well written description will help with click throughs. The description also helps describe the contents of a page to some search engines and also prominently displays targeted keywords to aid searchers in finding content. See example below.

Heading Tags H1

The insertion of a well written html h1 tag will help with SEO. Many experts rank the h1 tag to be one of the most important pieces of onsite SEO. H1’s should have unique content and not be duplicates of the title or meta description. If you are one of the few experts that sees no benefits to the h1, keep in mind it still aids in usability. H2 through H6 tags have less importance for onsite SEO.

Page Links

Including keywords or phrases in your internal links is relevant in SEO. An anchor link such as http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian-birdhouses.html is better than http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian.html. The best link would be http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian+birdhouses.html. Avoid underscores such as http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian_birdhouses.html because at the end of the day, hyphens and plus signs are better.

Links on your site including your navigation should be written in html and styled in css and given descriptive wording. Using images in navigation is a waste of important SEO real estate since most sites have their navigation at the top of the page. A beneficial navigation would look like this

Home | Victorian Birdhouses | Farmhouse Birdhouses | Contemporary Birdhouses
vs.
Home | Victorian | Farmhouse | Contemporary

Pay attention to dynamically produced URL’s. Whenever it is possible create shorter URL’s with keyword phrases using an .htaccess file.

Coding

Sites designed with xhtml and external css will reap rewards versus sites that are bogged down in tables and internal css. Sites designed in tables almost never use headings such as the h1, h2, h3 and lose an enormous amount of SEO benefits. Another important factor to hand coding your site is that you can code your site in the order that most benefits it SEO-wise. Meaning if your navigation is not keyword rich and you want it to be the last thing the spider reads, then code it that way.

Another important factor in having all your css in an external style sheet rather than inline with tables is that search engines base some of the ranking on Code to Content. If you have a site filled with messy code, (see example) keyword density and keyword emphasis is lost or reduced due to the enormous amount of code required.

Example:

<table width=&quot;99%&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; align=&quot;center&quot; cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot;>
<tr>
    <td><p class=&quot;style1&quot;>Welcome to birdhouses.com where we have a large inventory of handmade birdhouses that are sure to suit all bird lovers.</p><p class=&quot;style2&quot;> From contemporary, victorian, farmhouse, to space age designs in all colors and sizes</p><p class=&quot;style2&quot;>Please <a href=&quot;http://www.birdhouses.com/clearance.html&quot;>shop our catalog</a> as well as our clearance page.  We know your birds will love them! </p></td>
</tr>
</table>

With all of the css linked externally, look how much less code is required which in turns increases your keyword density and improves SEO.

<h1>Welcome to birdhouses.com where we have a large inventory of handmade birdhouses that are sure to suit all bird lovers.</h1>
<p>From contemporary, victorian, farmhouse, to space age designs in all colors and sizes. </p>
<p>Please <a href=&quot;http://www.birdhouses.com/shop.html&quot;>shop our catalog</a> as well as our <a href=&quot;http://www.birdhouses.com/clearance.html&quot;>clearance page</a>. We know your birds will love them!</p>

That’s 1/3 less code for the same exact outcome.

Page Content

Writing the best, unique content for your site is the most important aspect of SEO. Yes all the other elements above and below are important, but the key to remaining highly ranked can only be achieved by writing content that educates, informs, creates humor or creates interest therefore bringing visitors back over and over again. Repeat traffic is what builds lasting SEO results.

Keywords

Using keywords and keyword phases are important SEO factors, however should only be used where it makes sense to the reader. Also consider:

• Keyword density: Density refers to the ratio of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words on a web page. The safe ratio is 2-8%.
• Keyword prominence: Prominence is how close to the beginning of an area that a keyword lies within. An example is the use of the word Victorian at the beginning of a title.

The use of for bold text and for italics has little relevance but can aid in readability. Limit the amount of flash, images and videos to absolutely what is necessary since search engines require text and these elements are non-text based. Use alt tags for images, flash and videos. Again, since search engines cannot read text that is placed on images, inside flash or in videos, it’s somewhat important to use descriptive keywords in alt tags.