On Page Optimisation

On page (or on site) SEO refers to anything that you do to your own website in order to improve it’s position in the search engine rankings.

There are many, many on page SEO factors and all of them are constantly changing, as search engines modify their algorithms to ensure they’re providing users with the most relevant and up-to-date information.

However, all on page SEO falls into two categories – site structure and content. Here’s some information on both of those categories and how Big Bang can help you improve your on page SEO.

Site Structure

Having a sound SEO site structure in place refers to a long, long list of factors, including:

URLs – Search engines will look at the URLs of the pages within your website for clues about what the content is about. So if you have a page that’s all about dog sunglasses for example, you’d want a URL something like:

• yourdomain.com/dog-sunglasses

The reason being that search engines can take a quick look at this address and immediately recognise that this particular page is about dog sunglasses, and include that page in their rankings when people search for information about dog sunglasses.

However, this basic rule of having simple, SEO friendly URLs is often overlooked, most of the time with disastrous results. Some websites for example have gobbledygook URLs like:

• yourdomain.com/22jlk=?!Fs324ewws.php

…And obviously, search engines can’t possibly gain any insight into what a web page is about by looking at this.

Not quite as bad but still far from perfect are URLs that are just too long. For example:

• yourdomain.com/a-page-that-has-lots-of-information-about-dog-sunglasses

Search engines don’t want to have to look for the important parts of a URL and having unnecessary long ones dilutes their effectiveness.

So always try and keep your URLs as concise and relevant as possible to achieve maximum SEO return.

Navigation – The navigation and menus you have on your website hold great importance when it comes to SEO.

Search engines know that people use their navigation to direct people to the most important pages on their website, so they’re more likely to rank the pages highly that appear somewhere within the navigation.

There are lots of complex and detailed ways you can get the most out of your navigation when it comes to SEO, but the bottom line is, make sure you link to your most important content wherever possible, whether that be in your menus or from other pages on your website.

Titles – In the same way that URLs need to be relevant and to the point, titles need to be given just as much attention.

Whatever your content is about, make sure you think long and hard about the most relevant, concise and targeted title you can give it. You’ll be rewarded with higher rankings in the search engines for a wide variety of keywords.

Meta Tags – Meta tags are little snippets of code you can add to every page of your website to give the search engines clues about what your site is about. Although it’s widely speculated that search engines place very little value on these tags, they’re still worth taking the time to add.

Getting Starting

In an ideal world, people would always structure their websites with SEO in mind, right from the start. Unfortunately though, this is far from what actually happens and all too often people get the fundamentals completely wrong.

So when starting a new SEO campaign, the first thing many websites have to do is fix all of these issues before they can start coming up with new ideas.

Content

Content really is king when it comes to the search engines. It’s imperative if you want to do well in the rankings, that you provide high quality, relevant content to users.

So when you’re adding new content or editing existing content to ensure its SEO friendly, what things should you be looking at?

Keywords – If you want a particular page to appear in the search engine rankings when people search for ‘dog sunglasses’ then you need to make sure you include that phrase in the content, preferably a few times. This lets the search engines know what that page is about and ensures that they include it in their listings for relevant searches.

However, make sure you don’t over do things and repeat the phrase over and over again unnecessarily. Search engines are smart enough to spot this and will likely penalise you for trying to pull the wool over their eyes, or even ban you because they think you’re spamming.

The key is to write as naturally as you would if you weren’t writing with SEO in mind. Try and come up with clever ways to include your target keywords in the text without seeming like you’re doing it deliberately.

Another tip is to make sure you target a range of related phrases and not just one. For example if you’re targeting ‘dog sunglasses’ you might also include phrases like:

• sunglasses for dogs
• blue dog sunglasses
• sunglasses for big dogs
• small dog sunglasses

Good keyword research beforehand will give you ideas about different phrases you can use for a particular piece of content. And by targeting a range of keywords, you’ll appear for a wider variety of searches and therefore get more traffic from the search engines overall.

Internal Linking – You don’t just have to use menus on your website to point search engines and visitors towards your other pages.

You should include links within the content from one page to other places on your site.

For example, on your page about dog sunglasses you might also mention that you sell cat sunglasses and link to that page.

By knitting your website together in this way and linking to related content, search engines will appreciate what you’re trying to do and rank your pages higher in their listings.

You can also include links to other websites within your content. Although this isn’t always a great idea as it sends people away from your own website, search engines appreciate the fact that you’re doing it to help users find information and will therefore look at your pages more favourably.

Big Bang On Page SEO

As you can see there are all kinds of little tweaks and changes you should constantly be looking to make to your website. This page has only covered a small number of them.

But doing even a small percentage of these modifications can be incredibly difficult, not to mention time consuming.

And often, the systems simply aren’t in place for changes to be easily made making the whole SEO process far more difficult to even start, let alone maintain.

Big Bang have both the SEO knowledge and technical expertise to quickly get the on page factors on your website working properly and significantly improve your rankings in the search engine listings.

So if you’d like to discuss how Big Bang can transform your website into an SEO powerhouse, please feel free to contact us today for more information.