The On-Page SEO Process:
Here is the exact process needed to succeed with on-page SEO and get the rankings you need to maximize your website traffic. Be realistic about what is and is not possible, follow these steps and you will get indexed and then ranked by the search engines on the keyword phrases you have chosen.
Website Design
It all starts and ends up with your website: It needs to be designed with SEO in mind and visitors need to find compelling content or they will exit.
The homepage will set the focus but use each page carefully with content and keywords that are not only relevant but researched to access higher search volumes in other related areas.
Every page is an entry page – if you limit your efforts to your home page you will miss out on a large percentage of traffic that will be even more targeted to the browsers needs and end up converting at a higher rate.
If possible choose a domain name that contains the search phrase instead of a name, such as newyorkdental.com instead of drsmith.com. The bottom line is that the more a website is initially designed with SEO in mind the better. For more on search optimized website design click here.
Keywords
Every search begins with keywords typed into a search engine. The search results displayed are totally based on these keywords. This means optimization needs to be performed for each keyword term that you wish to be ranked on, on a PAGE by PAGE basis.
How do you decide which keyword terms? Research. Choose terms you think are relevant and relate exactly to the content on the PAGE then research the number of monthly searches. Do not confuse with the number under the search results as this is the number of pages that are indexed with the specified search term.
Each keyword phrase needs to be placed carefully, in context, within the various page elements such as tags, headlines and also the first 100 words or so of content. Do not try and fool the search engines by ‘keyword stuffing’. For more on keywords click here.
Meta Tags
Where do search engines look to see what content is on the page? Firstly TAGS then content. Tags summarize the content.
First is the title tag. This is the one that displays in the tab in your browser. From an SEO point of view this one is by far and away the most important. You have 64 characters and these are the most important characters in SEO. Make the title tag match the keywords you wish to rank on, you can even duplicate the most important keywords but do not exceed 64 characters.
Then populate your description tag – as search engines will then utilize this tag to further refine the search results. Add keywords to the keyword tags, text to the alt image tags and put each page’s headings (same keywords as title tag) in h1 tags.
Content
Content needs to be fresh, compelling and unique. Content must engage your visitors, keep them on your site for as long as possible and encourage them to return and not bounce. Do this and your content will contribute massively with your SEO results as well.
The keywords we have identified earlier need to be found in the content at an optimum density. Search engines crawlers are now very sophisticated and will need to find these keywords within the content or their usage as keywords could have a negative impact.
Content should be updated frequently and crawlers will note this too, otherwise your competitors more recent content may jump above you.
Verification
OK so you have a great site with fabulous content, all your on-page SEO is perfect. The last thing you need now is that the crawlers from the search engines can’t find you.
How do you let them know? First you need to register an account with the webmaster tools for each search engine. You will then have to verify ownership of the site by placing some unique code on a page or your host.
At this point the search engine will now know of the existence of your site and you will be in control of the submission process. You will be able to oversee the entire process and see which pages if any they have any problems with and exactly what those problems are.
Sitemap
The final step of this process is to provide each search engine with a ‘map’ of your site and each URL within the site that you wish it to crawl and index.
You will need to create an industry standard sitemap.xml or a compressed sitemap.xml.gz file and upload this file’s location to each search engine’s webmaster tools account. e.g. sitemap.
In addition you will need to create a robots.txt file to give the crawler specific instructions regarding URL’s to include, omit and the location of the sitemap file as well e.g. robots. On the one hand both the sitemap and robot files are fundamental SEO but if the previous steps have not been followed then would be of little use.
At clickoholics we make no secret of these ingredients for success and provide these services to our clients who have neither the time or resource to perform this work in house. Get ranked today
