On Page Optimization – A Complete Walkthrough

Getting a good ranking in a search engine hasn’t been the easiest thing for many. Search engines are getting more smarter & intelligent everyday, so now it takes more than just good content to top your competitors.

On page optimization is one of the very first step of SEO which every webmaster should look into. It probably won’t even take you an hour to learn and implement some of these on-page optimization techniques. But you may ask me, why it is so important? – Well literally speaking, if you can do proper on-page optimization for your website you can not only rank well in a search engine but also can increase the overall readability of your website for your visitors.

1. Title Optimization

A site’s title tag is by far the most important website optimization element. A title tag should be short but descriptive enough for your visitors to identify you and your business. Title tag is the first thing that is shown & indexed by the search engines. So naturally it is given a very high importance – out of thousands results that a searcher sees, your site’s title has to be appealing enough for him to want to find out more information. 

2. Meta Tags Optimization

A site’s Meta tags may not be as important as it used to be before, however I feel that Meta Description is something you can’t just ignore. A site’s Meta description should contain a brief description of your website focusing on the areas and services that your business is specialized in. This small piece of text can be considered as a selling snippet, if a searcher finds it appealing he is likely to click and go inside your page to find out more information. But if your Meta Description is too generic and isn’t written too well then there is a good chance that your site will simply be ignored.

Website structure accessibility

3.Website structure accessibility – inaccessible navigation are a real headache when it comes to SEO. A navigation wrapped in java script is bad and a menu made from Flash is worse. Now I bet you are thinking “JavaScript makes a website more user friendly because it creates things like drop down menus helping the user to make better sense of the page options.” This might be true, but we need to balance usability with search engine friendly. Firstly, we shouldn’t forget that a slick looking menu/navigation bar could render a website unusable on certain devices and in certain browsers (try switching off JavaScript or Flash) but from a strictly SEO perspective it could mean that pages deep within your site aren’t being indexed because the only links to them are from a menu wrapped in code that the spiders can’t decipher.

Considered use of JavaScript

4.Considered use of JavaScript – following on from the point above…whatever Google says, there is clear evidence that the search engine struggles to handle java script. Reams and reams of unreadable code could mean Google bot heads somewhere else rather than crawling any deeper into your site. It might also be causing other issues like crawl errors and damaging your website’s crawl rate neither of which are good
things!

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Robots.txt file

5.Robots.txt file – a good starting point for robots.txt best practice is this guide from SEOmoz. It is always worthwhile ensuring a robots.txt file doesn’t contain any unwanted directions for the search bots, even if you haven’t added anything, someone or something working on the site before might have.

XML Sitemap

6.XML Sitemap – fairly common practice nowadays but still worth a mention. An XML sitemap should always be available. It helps make the search engines aware of all the pages on your website and increases the likelihood of faster inclusion in the index for newer pages.

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