On Site SEO Elements to Improve SERP Rank

Wondering where to begin to improve your website’s search engine optimization? Here are some basic on page SEO elements to consider adding or changing on the website.  Of course, you must consider the most important rule of all first, “Good Quality Content”.  Means your content needs to be fresh -- updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

The techniques are as follows:

Keyword Density

Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more than 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance” just make sure it is good, quality copy.

Sitemaps

It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.

 

Internal Linking

Making sure that your internal linking helps robots (and visitors!) to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots (and visitors!) more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a no follow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.

All in all, a good list of techniques to use when working on increasing the number of visitors a site gets from search engines.

 

Header Tags

 Using the html codes of H1 through H6 (header tags) is not just for making pretty, larger or bolder text. This basic website coding is what the search engine spiders or robots read when they are scanning your website.  If your site misses these elements, the spiders may read a few lines of your content, but, if they can’t figure out quickly what you have written about, they will leave and not index your site properly for the search engines.

Recently, I’ve analyzed a number of websites where header tags were non-existent.  These are great looking sites but they don’t generate much traffic because of this missing element, (amongst a host of other optimization issues).  When I come across websites that don’t have this basic element, it’s easy to determine that the site was created by someone who has excellent design and webmaster skills but are missing a basic understanding of creating a website that will perform for their client.

 

Title Tags

 Title tags are different from page titles.  They are written into the coding in the backend of your website and are not displayed on your website.  Where they do show up is in the SERPs, (search engine results pages), hyperlinked to your web page.  Write clear, compelling title tags for all of the pages on your site in order to entice people to click through to your website when searching for terms related to your product or service.

 

Meta Descriptions

Again, meta descriptions are bits of code that belong in the backend of your website, never to be displayed on your site – they are displayed in the SERP’s.  This is where you take your title tag and explain a little more of what your visitors will get by clicking your link. Remember to write comprehensively and include your keyword phrases.

 

Alt Tags

 Alt tags serve two purposes.  They started out as coding on image files in the backend of  websites and were mostly used by screen readers for people who had trouble seeing.  The screen reader tool would announce the alt tag of the image so the person listening knew that an image was displayed and what it was of.

Today, the search engine spiders also use alt tags to determine what the image is since the spiders cannot really “see” the content on your pages.  Spiders never look at your website as we would in a browser – they look at the back end coding.  So, the more information you provide to these spiders the better they can determine the relevancy of your website in the SERP’s.

 

Link Anchor Text

Link anchor text is the words that are underlined with a hyperlink to another website or another page on your website.  A lot of people are still using simple directive words such as “Click Here” or “Visit Our Website”.  While these anchor text phrases are ok once in a while, you are better off using a keyword phrase to link on.  Don’t over-optimize by always using keyword phrases as anchor text – sometimes it just won’t make sense when a visitor is reading your content.  So, mix it up – use the “Click Here” and other generic phrases when necessary, but, watch for opportunities to link those keyword phrases.

By improving your website with these simple SEO techniques, you should begin to see more traffic.  Don’t forget to have Google Analytics set up and installed in order to be able to see your improvement!

 

 

There you go!

There is so much you can do with this data if you put your mind to it.