Links to share this article in social networks
Diigo Tweet

On-Page Optimization Checklist

On-page optimization refers to the practice of making a webpage more accessible and easy to read for search engines. By following a few simple guidelines, it will be easier for search engines to match your page to incoming search queries. There are a myriad of things a search engine records when crawling your site.

By following the points outlined in this article, your pages may be included in search results more readily.

Specifically, we want certain HTML tags to highlight descriptive keywords for our site. By doing so, we enable search engines to associate our page more strongly with a set of keywords.

Domain-URL

There are several ways we can include keywords in the URL.

First, we can register a domain name containing keywords. Example: http://www.fonds-depesche.de

We can also create sub domains containing keywords. Example: http://www.hedge.fonds-depesche.de

We can create directories with keywords in them. Example:  http://www.fonds-depesche.de/fonds-nachrichten

Finally, we can use keywords in our filenames. This is especially important for information sites with lots of little pages.

The filenames of your articles should match each article's title. Be sure to replace spaces in the title with underscores or dashes.

Go through your HTML code and look for the appropriate <tags>. Follow the directions for each:

<title> Page title

Include your website or company name.

Optionally, you may include one general keyword, or your website's tagline, if you have one.

For articles, make sure the title of the article is included in the page title.

<meta> Meta Tags

Keywords tag - use a dozen or so relevant keywords. Don't go overboard! Many search engines penalize sites who try to abuse this tag.

Description tag – write a brief description of your page. For articles, the description tag should include a synopsis of the article.

<h1> Heading Tags

Heading tags represent sections of a document. Search engines typically give a little extra weight to text contained within <h*> tags.

Be sure all of your heading tags contain relevant keywords.

Not only will doing so help with SEO, using them is a good coding practice - it will make your site easier to read and edit.

<img> Images

There are a number of techniques to enable search engine crawlers to understand pictures on your website. Just remember that a crawler cannot "see" the picture. It only understands the picture in terms of what you explain in your HTML code. Use descriptive filenames.

For example, let's say we are displaying a picture of a pine tree on our website. Clearly, the filename "black_pine_tree.jpg" is much more descriptive than "img03.jpg".

Use colorful alt text. It is a shame to see so many web designers neglect to add alt text to their images. Images without alt text are still visible to humans, but lack any meaning to search engines. By adding alt text, we are giving automated visitors a description of the image.

These descriptions help get your site listed in picture search results, as well as strengthen your page's association with a given topic. We can also add a title attribute. This additional information is displayed when a user hovers the mouse over the image.

Continuing with our example of the pine tree picture, our code now looks like this:

<img src="/black_pine_tree.jpg" alt="Gorgeous old gnarled black pine tree." title="At over 60 feet tall, with a ten foot wide base, this pinus nigra is over 200 years old." />

Look at the above code. See how descriptive it is? You can almost imagine the picture without even seeing it. This is what needs to happen for search engines to pick up on your images.