And your brand new website is ready! But, that’s just 50% of the job done. Just launching your website isn’t enough, people must be able to find your website and hopefully do what you want them to do- purchase, subscribe etc.
There are two aspects to any successful search engine optimisation campaign-
- On-page optimisations
- Off-page optimisations
On page optimisations means optimising your website to make it convenient for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to search and rank your website. Google has given guidelines about how a website can be optimised to rank higher and that’s just what on page optimisations are. Simple examples would be proper H1, H2 tags, faster site loading speed, no broken links etc.
Off page optimisations can simply be called ‘marketing’ optimisations like high-quality back-links to your website, social signals etc.
Yes, this all can be overwhelming. I recommend you hire a pro to handle SEO of your website. But, of course, you should know the basics. Here’s a simple list of 17 things to consider when working on the on-page SEO of your website:
1. Title tags- Make sure all your website pages have optimised and unique title tags.
2. Meta descriptions- Meta descriptions essentially help search engines identify what the page is about. Include the right keywords here.
3. Keywords density- Have your most important keywords included in the content of the page with a density of 2-4%. Make sure to include the keywords in genuine content. Unnecessary keywords stuffing is a serious no-no!
4. Robots.txt file- This essentially is a file that tells search engines what to crawl and what to not.
5. Sitemap- A sitemap helps search engines know how many pages should be crawled and just makes the job easier for them (which they love!).
6. Broken links- Internal or external broken links are not good for SEO. Make sure you check your website regularly for any broken connections.
7. SEO friendly links- To make your URLs SEO friendly, include the content keywords in the links with no spaces or underscores.
8. Image Alt tags- Search engines can’t really ‘see’ the image. Image Alt tags are the descriptions about the image which help search engines understand what the image is about.
9. Favicon- Favicon is that small icon you see on the tab of your web browser. It’s like your logo- you must have one.
10. JavaScript errors- This is technical stuff, but simply saying- JS errors are the errors in coding. They may prevent your visitors from seeing the website properly, so you must fix them.
11. Social media- Social media is important. Your website should be connected to major social networks i.e. you should have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc.
12. Site loading speed- Many things can affect the loading speed of your website like HTML size, server configuration, http requests etc. Aim for a loading time under 5 seconds.
13. Flash objects- Flash technology is now outdated as the new HTML 5 technology is here. Using an outdated technology is not a good sign for rapidly changing SEO scenario.
14. Mobile responsiveness- Yes, it matters. Google now considers mobile responsiveness of your website as a ranking factor for mobile searches.
15. Inline CSS- Again, technical stuff. Having inline CSS may affect style sheets. Simply move your inline CSS rules to an external file.
16. HTML size- A heavy HTML page may take a lot of time to load which is not good. Hence, is is wise to keep the HTML code size of the web page under 35 KB.
17. Plain-text emails- Having a plain-text email on a web page is not recommended as spammers can collect that email to spam you. But I think you shouldn’t worry about this until your website is real famous. Which I hope it’ll be soon 🙂
So, these were the relatively important factors to consider when you are working on the on-page SEO of the website. But remember that there are many more factors. To be ahead of your competitors, you should track down every single thing and optimise it.
Help Google, Yahoo and Bing help people reach you.
Ved for you
