The Ultimate On Site Optimisation Guide

Hey everyone, this post is going to be a guide covering all the aspects of on page optimization. If you follow all the directions mentioned in this guide, your site will be search engine optimized. Okay, so lets begin:

Domain Name

• When registering a domain name, choose one which contains the keywords you would like to target, and which accurately describes what your site is about. For example, if your site contains dessert recipes, the ideal domain would be dessertrecipes.com. However, that domain might be taken, so try to register variations of that phrase, such as dessert-recipes.com or dessert-recipes-central.com or another tld.
• Try to register a .com domain, as far as possible. However, if you want to rank in a certain country, it is a good idea to register the extension of the country. For example, if you own a hair salon in UK, you would want to target people in UK. In this case, choose a domain with an extension of .co.uk.

Page Titles

• Should be highly relevant to the page
• Should contain targeted keywords
• Should be a maximum of 65 characters long

Read more about title tags for seo.

Meta Descriptions

• Should accurately describe the content of the page
• Should be about 160 characters long.
• Should be written for HUMANS, although you should sprinkle a couple of keywords in them.

Read more about the meta description tag.

Meta Keywords Tag

• Not really important, ignored by most crawlers, so it can be avoided.
• If using it, don’t add more than 5 keywords to a page.

Robots Meta Tag

• You can use them to prevent crawlers from indexing certain pages like the sitemap etc.
• Only use these if you know what you are doing!

Before using them, read more about the robots meta tag.

Headings

• Your pages should be properly structured, and should make use of the heading tags.
• Although they can go upto h6, I only generally use the h1 and h2 and at times the h3 tag.
• Make sure that you include your keywords in the heading tags.
• There is not length limit as such, but my heading are generally 5-6 words at maximum.
• Don’t skip levels i.e. dont jump from the h1 to the h3.
• Do not use more than one H1 on a page! The H1 is meant to be used for the top level heading, and so there should be only one H1 on a page.
• However, there can be any number of h2-h6 tags on a page.

Keyword Density

• Most people have different views about keyword density and what the optimal keyword density is. My view is that as long as the content is natural and readable, and you haven’t stuffed keywords in, its alright.
• I checked my pages, and on average, my keyword density is approximately 1.5%. I am not saying that this is the optimal value, I’m just saying as long as you write naturally and include your keywords at places ( but not everywhere!),  you’ll be fine.
• Read this article to learn about seo guru’s views about keyword density, and use this tool to calculate the keyword density of a page.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

• Pick between the non www and www urls of your site, and redirect the other to it. I like to redirect the non www to the www.  Just add the following code to the .htaccess file:
  RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  Remember to Replace example.com with your domain name
• Use Clean, Search engine friendly urls which are keyword rich, rather than dynamic urls containing characters like ‘?’. I try to keep my urls as short as possible, so i don’t generally include words like for, in, if etc in them. For example, if my post is title ‘20 Awesome SEO Tools you should use’, my url would be domain.com/seo-tools or something of that sort.

Optimising Images

• Use the alt tag to describe the image, remembering to include some keywords.
• Keep the images of a reasonable size, and upload images to a seperate folder.
• use keywords in the image file name
• use keywords in the image title
• limit the number of images per page, as they increase loading time
• place relevant text in the vicinity of the image.

Miscellaneous Tips

• Sign up for a Google Account and use Google’s Webmasters Tools
• Build an XML Sitemap for your site, and submit it in Webmaster Tools.
• Put some keywords in bold and italic tags, as these are given more weight in some search engines. Don’t overdo this, and do this only if it looks natural!
• Make your your site has valid HTML and CSS.
• Check for broken links and correct them. You wouldn’t want your site to be full of 404’s!
• Always link to other relevant pages on your site!
• When linking to other pages, always use keyword rich and descriptive anchor texts, rather than anchor texts like ‘click here’.
• Make sure your content is unique. Don’t just copy content from other pages.
• Sometimes, there can be a problem of on-site duplicate content, where the same content occurs at many places in your website. This generally happens in blogs, where the same content will be on the category page, home page, archive page, author page etc. You can limit this by noindexing pages you don’t require, such as the author page for a single author blog. Also, only shows excerpts on the home page, archive pages etc.
• If possible, use a simple text based navigation rather than an image based navigation.

Tags: meta description tag, meta tags, On Page Optimisation, on page seo, title tag

Category: On Page Optimisation