When you’re building a website, you will employ many different aspects of SEO into your production. On-site techniques are those that are performed directly on your site, including content, and other elements that are explicitly yours to control. Off-site SEO includes things like link building and other tools that you use away from your website to increase SEO rankings. If you’re trying to build a successful website through on-site SEO, here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Content is everything. You can have a great SEO company working for you, the ability to pay for all kinds of ads and other things, and still fail if your website content is not up to par.
- Sitemaps are critical. You have a static one for your users, generally, but you should also have an XML sitemap for search engine spiders to find all the pages of your website.
- You can change your URL, and you should. Focus on a keyword friendly URL like http://mybusiness.com/productname instead of http://mybusiness.com/product_?=54129. If people can see what they’re clicking on, they trust it more.
- Meta tags can tell everything about your website to search engine crawlers. Title tags give a description for search results, and are generally the first thing users see. Never keyword stuff meta tags or title tags. Provide useful, relevant content every time.
- Index images by using Image Alt tags. This is a short description of the image itself that is useful to search engine spiders and users alike. Otherwise, images will usually be overlooked.
- Use Robots.txt file to tell search crawlers which pages to index and which to skip. You don’t need your feedback page or internal search page indexed because that’s a waste of space, for example. Also, make sure that you don’t duplicate content or domains so that you’re not taking up space or attracting to two different sites unknowingly.
- Stay away from graphic-text. As mentioned above, search engines can’t crawl images, and if your headline is a clipart or designed graphic, you’re not going to get the notice that you would if you had a keyword-rich text headline.
- Internal links are the bones of your site. Make sure that you have a good structure in place for your internal links so that the site flows easily and without skipping any pages.
With these techniques in mind, it should be easy for you to create a website that is spot-on with SEO and other tools that will make it a more effective website and give you a more successful position within the search results.
