There are two types of search engine optimization, onsite and offsite. Onsite SEO techniques are things that you can do on your website to help search engines take notice. The nice thing about onsite SEO is that you control it; offsite optimization is much more difficult to pin down. When updating the look of a website consider the following onsite SEO tips:
Fresh Content
When search engine spiders crawl your website they report back to the search engine with information from your site, keywords, images, etc. Sites like Google and Yahoo like it when the spiders bring new information back. When a site is not updated and the spiders continually bring back the same information they are not happy.
With Google’s latest freshness updates it is even more important than ever to have fresh content on your website. Fresh content is now key to getting a good search engine ranking. Not only is new content important but unique content is important. The search engines are getting stricter about duplicate content. Copy and pasting old content to your blog or your website will not help you, in fact it could hurt your site. Keeping content updated and unique is one of the important elements of onsite SEO.
MetaTags
Make use of Meta tags for titles, descriptions, keywords, author, as well as images and graphics and should contain targeted keywords and phrases.
Header Tags
Header tags are used to break up text. They make it easier for the reader to find the information they are looking for and search engines use them to gather information about a webpage. Keywords should be used in the header so the search engine spiders know exactly what the topic is.
Keywords
Keywords should be used in all of your meta tags and headers but they should also be used in the content on your website. The keywords should be used naturally in the flow of the paragraph so the content makes sense to the reader. Pages that have over 10% of the words being keywords or keyword phrases are going to hurt your rankings rather than help them. You don’t want to stuff your page with keywords, this makes it difficult for a reader to understand what you’re saying and search engines don’t like it.
Internal Linking
Just as there are two types of SEO there are two types of linking, onsite and offsite. Onsite linking is called internal linking and it’s linking from your domain to somewhere else on your domain. Internal linking should be done not only in the navigation but in the content of the page as well. When you link from within the content, use keywords as the anchor text for the link. This will further help the search engines to index your site correctly for search rankings. Remember to use internal linking in the text moderately. Too many links will lower the link value each page receives.
Sitemap
An XML sitemap should be located at the bottom of your site. This will allow the search engine spiders to easily index your pages and will allow visitors to more easily navigate the pages. You can also submit this file to Google.
URL
The structure of a URL plays an important part in SEO. The URL is typically made up of seemingly random numbers and characters. To allow the URL to make more sense and be more visible for site visitors keywords should be used in the URL. These keyword rich URLs are also preferred by search engines. A short URL that has no dashes or hyphens is easiest to remember and does the best on search engines.
The best website designs are visually attractive while still incorporating all of these onsite SEO techniques. SEO strategies will help the user find your site more easily and find the information they are looking for at a glance decreasing the bounce rate and increasing your conversion rate.