January 23, 2009

5 Simple On-Page SEO Tips

Here are five quick and simple things you can do to your website within the next 30 mins to increase your natural traffic.

1) Title Tags – Ensure each title tag is unique on every page of your website. Ideally name the title tag according to the top two or three main keywords you want each page to be found for on the search engines. Many websites on the internet have still not even changed it from “Untitled”. Arguably just as bad are websites who only use the keyword “Home” for their homepage title tag instead of a targeted keyword/phrase.

The image below quickly shows us there are over 64,000,000 pages on Google UK that have not optimised their title tag properly and miss out on them ranking.

2) Link Reputation – Look over all your website navigational and content links. If they point to other pages on your website, make sure they mention where possible the actual keywords you would like the page it is linking to, to be found for. Typical things to look out for are links which say “click here” or linking back to your homepage with the word “home” instead of a relevant keyword.

3) Unique Content – Many websites suffer from duplicate content. This is simply website content that Google and the other search engines feel have already been found on the web and you are purely adding to the congestion on a search engine results page (SERP). If the same content is already out there then you are not offering anything of value to warrant your content being shown instead.

In summary, there are two types of duplicate content:

• First is having the same content as other websites. This can easily be overcome by ensuring you only write unique content and change what you currently have on your website.
• Second is having duplicate content within your own website. This typically occurs when you have little content on a given page but lots of navigational links, text heavy footer and basically the page has at least 50% content the same as your other pages. By simply removing the duplicate content (for example, by putting text heavy footer content into an image, and making sure you have more unique content per page so that over 60% of your page content is unique), you should notice a big difference.

4) URL’s indexed – Lots websites are still having a very hard time being index by Google because they use unfriendly dynamic URL’s that continuously change making it near impossible for any search engine to index the same page. Many content management systems also suffer from this so by simply ensuring your URLs are friendly can make the world of difference in getting you natural traffic. If you are having problems with dynamic urls, consider using some type of URL re-write like mod rewrite form example which the search engines can work with.

To check if your pages are indexed:

• You can check to see if a specific page is indexed by Google by using the following search command: info:domain.com. If you get the following response: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL” then that means the page URL you were entering is not currently indexed.
• To know in a quick glance which pages you have on your domain that are indexed simply put the following search command into Google: site:domain.com

5) Two links to each page – Typically e-commerce websites with product pages have a hard time being indexed or rank well at all because the item page only has a link from the parent category page linking to it. As a good rule of thumb, try and make sure each page on your website has at least two incoming links (excluding the sitemap link). Some suggestions could be to introduce a field somewhere on the same page which offers a suggestion to the user for other related products on the website and cross link to them.

There are many other elements to modify but they will be covered in following posts.

Filed under SEO