Onsite SEO

The first step of a successful SEO campaign is the optimisation of your website. There are quite a few factors which effect the onsite optimisation of your website, including:

• Title Tags - One of the most important tags on your website is the title tag. This is the part of the site which tells the search engines exactely what your website is about and shout describe the page accurately. For example, rather than having a title which reads "Company Name - Home Page" or "index", it should be themed around your targetted keywords. If you were targetting office chairs, your title tag may read "Office Chairs, Leather Chairs & Executive Chairs - Company Name". This tells the search engines that your page is about office chairs, leather chairs and executive chairs.


• Meta Tags - While not as important as they once were, these are often overlooked by many. The meta description is often used as an alternative text by the search engines as a snipped shown for your site in the results. For this reason alone you should take the time to ensure that you have a meta description which will encourage people to click through to your website, even if it has little effect on your search engine ranking.


• URLs - If you can get your keywords in your domain then that is great, however for alternative keywords and ranking internal pages as high as possible you should ensure that your site uses search engine friendly URLs. Rather than have "http://mysite.com/page67.html" or "http://anothersite.com/?p=154&s=425" it would be better for your URL's to be along the lines of "http://mysite.com/leather-chairs.html" or "http://anothersite.com/officechairs/". This helps to make it clearer to the search engines exactely what your pages are about as well.


• Internal Linking - As you will see in the offsite SEO section, links are important. The links in your own site are just as important as those coming from outside. If you link to a specific page on your site using the term "shop" then the search engines will assume that the page is about some sort of shop. If you link to that page using the phrase "office chairs", you are helping to make it clear that the page is abuot office chairs.


• Content - As you will know, any form of online marketing required a lot of written content. The more you have on your website, the better. Obviously the content should be high quality, unique and related to your website. The content should also contain the keywords and phrases that you would like your website to rank for. Obviously if you do not use the words or phrases on your site then the search engines are unlikely to be able to work out that your site should rank for those words.


• Headers - Rather than just a long chunk of text, you should have it broken up with the correct header tags, for example <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags. This highlights the most important points of the articles to the search engines.