SEO On-site Tutorial

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing different aspects of the website in order to improve the visibility of the website. Optimization of the internal pages of a website is called on-site optimization, as opposed to off-site optimization, which is done externally.

When it comes to on-site optimization, this process involves optimization of the website structure in order to increase its performance in the search engine result pages (SERP). This process consists of a series of tasks that are focused on different elements of a website, which all together contribute to the overall website performance. Analyzing and improving these elements is the goal of on-site optimization. Those elements include:

Domains and duplicate content

Duplicate content can often be penalized by Google which is why you should fix any duplicate content you might have on your website. This includes:

– Setting preferred domain (with or without www)

– Fixing duplicate content by using redirects (This is especially advisable if you have a lot of pages with similar or almost identical content.)

The video “What is the ideal keyword density of a page?” can help you understand the concept of keyword density.

Read more here: Domains and duplicate content

Friendly URLs

Having friendly URL structure is important for both search engines and users. Search engines will find it easier to index such URLs, while these URLs are more user-friendly. Friendly URLs follow a coherent structure and thus provide information about the content that is to be found when a users access that URL. In addition, a friendly URL is much easier to share on social networks or in an email.

The friendly URLs are:

– Short

– Easy to read

– Use hyphen (-) to separate words

– Do not use capital letters in the URLs

Read more: Friendly URLs

Title and meta tags

Search engines do not see the websites as users do, so if you want to help search engines understand the content on your website, you should use title and meta tags, which include:

– Title tag

– Meta description

– Keyword tag

Read more about this topic here: Title and meta tags

Optimized headings

The headings on the page are used to indicate the more important parts of the text. Using tags such as <h1 /> or <strong /> you tell the search engines that some parts of the text are more important, and you want search engines to index that parts of the page as such. The purpose of this is to help search engine learn what your content is about, in order to be able to index it properly.

Read more here: Optimized headings

Alt codes

Search engines cannot read the content that is displayed on the images, so you have to assign alternate text that will help search engines understand what the visual content is about. Since you might use images to represent important aspects of the article or page, you need to optimize those images in order to allow search engines to understand them.

Read more here: Alt codes

Content

Having high-quality content has become the essential element of SEO. Users need to see value and original approach in your content in order for them to find it interesting and to return to your website. This will help you establish a group of loyal readers who are most likely to recommend you, by sharing your website with friends. In addition, content is an important element of link building, one of the parts of off-site optimization, as great content will earn the links on its own.

Besides providing interesting and original content, you should include keywords that are relevant to your website.

Read more here: Content

The following two points of this SEO on-site tutorial are closely related to the previous one.

Keyword density

While using keywords in the content, as well as in the title and meta tags, you have to have in mind the keyword density. You must avoid using excessive amount of keywords and increasing keyword density, as this will provide negative user experience and it might be penalized by the search engines.

Read more here: Keyword density

The video “What is the ideal keyword density of a page?” can help you understand the concept of keyword density.

Create a blog

Creating a blog allows you to implement content on your website and update it on a regular basis. Various studies confirm the importance of having a blog in terms of increasing traffic, acquiring customers and generating leads. This is why you should consider adding a blog to your website, using one of the online blogging platforms.

A blog will be a place where you can provide additional information about your company, about the products or services you offer, a place to interact with your visitors and to offer assistance to the potential customers. Allowing users to subscribe, you will be able to generate a list of emails of the people who are interested in your business, which can be used in email marketing.

Read more about creating a blog: Create a blog

Create 404 error page

Every now and then an error might occur and the page user is trying to access might not exist. In such case, you need to create an error page, i.e. the page that will load if the requested page cannot be accessed. Instead of simply showing an error, you should allow users to easily navigate back to your website, unless you do not want to lose visitors.

Read more here: Create 404 error page

The following presentation shows you how to create a custom 404 error page:

Add XML sitemap

Since search engines see websites differently than we do, they sometimes find it difficult to find all of the pages of the website, unless they are linked together. Sitemap is used to enable search engines to crawl a website easily and detect all of the pages that exist, which is why it is highly recommended to have a sitemap added to your website. Since the goal of optimization is to increase visibility, adding a sitemap will help you get the large number of your web pages indexed and thus those can appear in the search results.

Read more about sitemaps: Add XML sitemap

The presentation below can help you with creating and adding a sitemap:

HTML Code

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the markup language on the web pages. HTML file consists of HTML elements which are written as tags, in angle brackets: < >. This language is used for the search engines that are able to differentiate between different tags, and thus get the idea about the content on a specific page. HTML code should follow basic guidelines, which are usually provided by the search engines, as this code enables search engines to properly index pages.

Read more: HTML code

Broken links

Broken links are the links that point to the address that is not available and thus the users, as well as the search engine crawlers, cannot access the page the link leads to. This can have negative influence on the visibility of your website, which is why one of the SEO tasks you should be focusing on finding and fixing the broken links on your website.

Read more: Broken links

Other aspects

The final point of this SEO on-site tutorial refers to the other aspects of search engine optimization that have not been included in the previous sections. These include:

– 301 redirect

– Working with Flash and iFrames

Read more about other SEO tasks: Other aspects

Search engine optimization is a complex work that requires employing different tools and techniques in order to perform different SEO tasks, which are all part of the optimization process of a website. The goal of this list of tasks is to guide you through the optimization by focusing on aspects that are of importance for search engines when indexing content and determining ranking.

Apart from this tutorial, we would like to recommend two more SEO tutorials that can assist you in performing different SEO tasks.

The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf