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Top 5 On-Page SEO tips

If your looking to give yourself the best chance possible of getting found by your customers online, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a vital tool toward achieving this objective and can really make or break your online presence. There are various different ways to optimise your website to make it as search engine friendly as possible but we will go over the top five tips to consider for the design of your website.

SEO is broken into two primary groups; off-page and on-page SEO. the difference between the two is that on-page optimisation includes features that are regarding the design and structure of your website whilst off-page optimisation considers the factors that can improve your SEO via external websites and through other mediums such as social sites. We will cover the off-page activities in the near future but here are the top five on-page tips for you:

1. Choose your keywords wisely

When it comes to choosing the keywords for your website, take the time to decide upon which of these keywords are most relevant to your business and more importantly, look at it from a user perspective. If your website sells second-hand graphic novels it doesn’t necessarily mean that these words should be used as your primary keyword phrase because it is a very specific thing for a user to search and would really only gain a very limited amount of searches. Choosing the keywords ‘second hand books’ or ‘graphic novels’ just themselves would be far more effective, however, it is also important that you understand the amount of competition within using these words or phrases and tools such as Google Keywords Tool can be invaluable to finding this information out.

2. Include your keywords within your webpages

It sounds simple enough but more often than not, companies either overlook this or just try too hard to fit them in. The key is to get a perfect balance of fitting in keywords within your site and not just placing them in completely out of context. The best way to do this is through your meta data. Within the tags of your webpages you should try to place at least one of your keywords as the first few words within the page title, for example, ‘SEO Birmingham | Wow Internet‘. You can also include keywords within the meta description but although Google doesn’t take this into consideration when ranking you in the search results, it does show up in bold if the user has typed in the keywords. This is a great way to encourage click-throughs as it makes the website seem more reputable and draws the users attention to it, for example, if someone has searched for web designers Birmingham and our results show up with bold text, they are more likely to click through to the link.

3. Use XML site maps

Creating a site map for your website is very easy and there are many different free resources that will do this for you, XML-Sitemaps.com is an example of where this can be done. A site map will allow the search bots to crawl through your indexed pages much more effectively and ensure that all of your content is reachable. This simple tool will dramatically improve your SEO and can be done in a matter of minutes.

4. Use canonical URLs

When you create a new page to your website, whether it be a new blog article, an ‘about us’ page or an online newsletter, make sure that you consider how a search engine is going to be able to index the page. A webpage name like www.yourdomain.com/php?187653 is not very SEO friendly whereas www.yourdomain.com/best-new-apps would be much more keyword driven and improve the likelihood of users clicking through to your site.

5. Try to avoid using Flash or Java objects when they aren’t necessary

Flash and Java objects often look very flashy and some website love to include them in order to improve the overall aesthetics, however, this can not only lead to the webpages looking overly busy and in some cases quite tacky, but their hyperlinks cannot be seen by Google and therefore do not contribute toward search engine optimisation. A far better practise is to use either hyperlinked plain text or if you want a more aesthetically pleasing touch, you can use images and insert your keywords into the ALT attribute.

We have only touched upon a few of the processes that you can carry out in order to make your website as search engine friendly as possible but these can be used as a starting place for building a solid structure to your site, and more importantly, directing traffic to it!

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Qasim Majid About the author
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