4 Heavy Hitter On-page SEO Techniques
Content:
Content is always king. Write focused and detailed content on a well defined subject. Don’t diverge from your topic. You must keep it focused. Search engines want pages that are focused on a specific topic. Write with authority. Write what you know.
When writing content with you visitors n mind, be original every time. Do not rewrite from previous content. Do not copy from other sites. If you use excerpts from content from the internet, cite it and give a link to it. If you use from books or magazine, properly cite it.
The point is to stay focused on subjects your visitors would find useful.
Keywords:
So what about keywords? Some say keyword-focused content is not important like it once was. I disagree. While it is not as easy to see the results of keyword focus, this is still very important. Search engines are keyword driven. You search using keywords and the search engines still index these keywords very heavily. So why do some say it is so much less important? Because personalization techniques used by the search engines has made rankings less predictable. Less predictable does not equal less important.
When writing new content for SEO, choose relevant keywords (a small phrase is best). Use those keywords frequently, but don’t overuse or stuff them in. Use heading tags with those keywords as appropriate. Remember, your real audience are visitors, but the search engines are there to help lead visitors to you.
Again, just stay focused.
Semantics:
Semantics is a somewhat ‘behind the scenes’ techniques that provides additional meaning to pieces of content. From a frontend perspective, use headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc…). Typically these are considered different levels of importance, so use them in this way. For instance, you most important headline should use the <h1> tag. Logical. That said, search engines use these less than they used to. They can infer intent just from the focus of your content. The reason for this is that many have inappropriately used these tags for unethical SEO purposes. But used properly, they can still be effective while giving some structure to your writing.
So if old HTML/XHTML tags like headlines are on the way out, what else is there. Well, until HTML 5 becomes prevalent on the desktop, XHTML offers some relief. XHTML is currently the most widely available modern markup language for browsers and is almost universally functional. XHTML uses structures called Divs and Spans. These are like sections of content. Styles can be applied very specifically to these sections. An added benefit of this structure is that you can use the otherwise content-meaningless attributes of these tags to your benefit.
Divs and Spans use identifiers. These are the id and class identifiers. An id is a very specific sort of name for a piece of content and is often used for very specific instructions behind the scenes in code. The class identifier is kind of a group name. It, too, is used for specific functionality or styling, but you can also use it semantically. For instance, if you are citing a quote from legislation on your page, you could enclose this content in a div that uses the class=”statute” identifier. Search Engines are smart enough to pick up on this. This class can also then have styling that is specific to statutes as you see fit and any time you use this class, the styling is automatically picked up and used consistently across your website.
Class and Id identifiers don’t get as much attention as the new HTML 5 semantic tags do, but they can still be used quite effectively.
Page Title and Meta information:
The most effective thing you can do is to set an appropriate page title. Titles are contained in the header section of a webpage. They are enclosed with tags that read like this: <title>Your Title Here</title>. Most page editors have a field for you to enter this information including those found in most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla.
Another of the tags found in the header of a page that draws attention is the Meta Description. While this page information is not going to improve your rank, it will allow you to control what Google or the other search engines say about the page on their results. Write something short and sweet that tells searchers what this page is about. If you leave the description blank, search engines will randomly draw text from the content on the page. This is something you have control of, so don’t skip it.
Once upon a time the Meta Keywords tag was a good place to tell search engine what keywords you are optimizing for. Unethical SEO practitioners abused this to the point where search engines put no known value in its content. While it can’t hurt you to put a comma separated list of your keywords here, don’t expect to get any points for it.
Wrapping Up:
Well, there you have it. Four big on-page techniques to improve your page rank on search engines. Whole book are written on the aspects of on-page recommendations for SEO, so don’t expect that you have done everything by following these tips. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I will try to discuss more techniques here on the blog. In the meantime, happy optimizing.
