On Page Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important business for improving a websites performance and interaction with both, search engines and users. SEO is mostly about making some small improvements and modifications to certain parts of a website. Although these steps might seem like incremental tasks each, when they are combined, they can have noticeable advancement on both, the site’s user experience and the performance in organic search results.
Content and keywords
Offering top quality and useful content will influence a website more than any other optimization technique. Fresh and unique content will keep your visitors comming back an bring new ones to your site. It’s important to take a second and think about relevant keywords a user might search for and which could be associated with your content. These keywords should be used in the text – but spammming must be avoided.
Content must be organized and split up to several blocks, using headlines and paragraphs. This helps users find the content they are searching for faster. Well written and structured text that is easy to follow is more likely to be linked from other resources like blog posts or social media services – helping to build the site’s reputation.
Optimizing page elements
Webpages can also be optimized by turing one’s attention to single page elements. To name the most important:
- Headeline tags: Besides structuring a text with headlines has a high impact on its readability, it helps search engines to better “understand” the content and improve the keyword association. Headlines should be strucured hierachical to underline the importance of sections. and aid the user aand bots while navigating through the content.
- Images: Search engines can not see the content of images, so it is important to tell them about. What bots can read are the image url and the alt-attributes text, which should describe the image brief and descriptitve. Cryptical names do not carry any useful information.
- Page titles: The title-tag of a website should contain an accurate title, telling visitors about the page topic. They are also usually shown in the first line of the search result. and therefore must communicate and describe the content briefly. To enable users and search engines to distingush different pages, the title must also be unique within the site.
- Meta tag: A description-meta tage gives search engines a deeper summary what the content is about. Whereas the title offers only space for a few words, the meta tag may be a sentence or even a short paragraph. Like the page title, the description must be accurate and unique.
- Nofollow links: Be aware of using the rel="nofollow" attribute with links. This attribute tells search engines that your page’s reputation and popularity should not be passed to the page behind the link. It’s used to prevent the impact of spam comments on search results and page ranking.
- Anchor text: Anchor text should speak for them self, giving users a hint what they can expect on the selected page. It isused as a key indicator for identifying the topics of the pages they it is linking to.
URL structure and site navigation
Descriptive filenames and simple directory structures for webpages improve crawling the documents by search engines. If the URL contains relevant words, it provides users and search bots with more information about the content. This also has some positive impact for visitors as they get a hint where they are on the website. Each page should also have one unique URL linking to it. Duplicate content affects the ranking of a page negatively.
As the navigation is important to make users find the desired content quickly, it gives a search engine a hint about what role a page plays in the whole sites context. A naturally flowing hierarchy makes it easier for visitors to navigate from general to more specific content. Using text links for those navigation paths makes it easier for bots crawling and understanding the site.
HTML sitemaps for users and XML Sitemaps for search engines are an easy way informing visotors about possible content and ensures that bots and users discover the pages.
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