Improving your On-page SEO
On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. It also involves optimizing your website’s page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.
In this post, we’ll take a look at each of these areas and how you can optimize these areas to help position your web site higher in search engine rankings.
Page Title Attributes
The attributes that we will examine in this section are the main title of your web page (the text displayed at the very top of the browser window), the description and the meta keywords. These attributes are set in the <HEAD> section of each web page in the following tags:
<title>Your Web Page Title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your web site description”>
<meta name=keywords” content=”Your selected keywords”>
Although these are not that important to the Google search bots, they do help other web search engines and directories determine the value of your content. If these other search engines and directories value your content, this will also help boost your Google page rankings.
The Title is the most important attribute there is for two reasons. First, the title is the one piece of information that describes what the page is about. It is the default title your browser and book-marking sites will automatically use when people save your site for future use. Second, it is what search engines use to determine what your website is all about. Compared to everything else on your page, the title gets the most weight from the search engines.
The description is an abstract or a summary of your web page. It is crucial that the important words and terms about your site be crafted into the description. Another use of the description is that currently Yahoo! (and possibly other engines) use this description when your site is returned on a given search term, and it has to show a small summary of your site below the title.
The meta-keywords provide a set of key terms or words that describe your web page. Originally, the keywords element was a key element towards determining the context of a web page. It was a quick way for the search engine to understand what a web page was about. But, as people started abusing this feature by stuffing words into the meta-keywords element that had nothing to do with the web page’s content, the importance of the meta-keywords element has been greatly reduced. Although this information is still a contributing factor, search engines no longer look at this information as the definitive way to understand web page context.
Headings
Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use heading tags ( <h1>, <h2>, etc.) in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers segment the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a web page and determine what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help the search engines understand what the web page is about.The Item in the <h1> tag is usually the headline of the Web Page. The lower ranked headings ( <h2, <h3> and so on …) are used in the same manner as you might identify outline levels of a document. For instance, the title of this post is a <h3> tag while the sub-titles, like the one at the top of this section on headings, is a <h4>.
Identifying Images
Images are a great way to enhance a website from the visitor’s perspective. But search engine crawlers cannot see these images, even though they understand that an image exists because of the HTML tag in which it is contained. If you have lots of images on your website that contain textual content within the image itself, this text will not be seen by the crawlers.
HTML helps address this issue by allowing you to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for visitors or web crawlers that cannot view the images. This alt attribute also adds weight to determining the content on your web pages.
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