If you want your site to rank highly in Google search results, correct On-Page SEO is a must.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) beginners often make the mistake of collecting as many backlinks as possible for their website while ignoring On-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO is the foundation of all successful SEO strategies. Good On-Page optimization will also accelerate Google’s indexing of your website.
The optimization process is not difficult and begins with the following steps:
- An SEO friendly website design. Ensure your website template is SEO compliant.
- Create a unique meta title and meta description for each page of the website. Always use different titles and descriptions for each page – Google will downgrade pages on having a duplicate metadata.
- Whenever you add a new article to the website, update your sitemap to let Google know that there are new pages on your website that needs to be crawled. An up to date sitemap will also facilitate a faster indexing by Google of your website.
- Register your website on Google Webmaster Tools and add the Google site verification and Google analytic code.
- Enable the meta robots setting on your website.
- Don’t load keyword strings in your website page content. This is called keyword stuffing and violates Google’s Terms of Service. Doing so will result in Google downgrading your website page rank. Keyword stuffing can sometimes yield an improvement in page rank, but any such result is only temporary. As soon as Google identifies the practice, the page will fall from the rankings.
- Always create original content for your site. Don’t copy other website articles because Google will identify this and penalise your website page ranking, just as it does for keyword stuffing. Google rewards quality original content providers. Copying content from a highly ranked website will never result in a similar rank – quite the opposite in fact!
- Occasionally run a link checker over your site. Broken links have a negative impact on page rank. So find and fix them as quickly as possible.
- Regularly update your website content. Google regards new and updated content as important as original content, so keeping your site fresh and original will always result in better search engine rankings.
- Check your website page load speed. Everybody wants a quick response to a query and Google’s no exception! If all other benchmarks are equal, the page that loads fastest gets the highest ranking.
- Proper use of the Google Plus Authorship facility on your website can increase your site’s credibility and rank. It will also allow the integration of your content across all Google products, increasing your exposure to other users of Google products and making it easy for people to find your article and other content published by you.
Once you’ve completed On-Page SEO for all your website pages, further search engine rank improvement can be accomplished by off-page SEO techniques. We’ll be examining the off-page SEO in forthcoming Webkos blog articles.
