Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO is the elements of your web site pages.  They include the meta keywords and descriptions, the navigation, page titles and content, to name a few.  The importance of having a correctly formatted website should not be overlooked, as any issues here could adversely affect the rankings of your site in the search engines.

Onsite SEO is the content and structure of your website.  The importance of on-site SEO in the eyes of the search engines has declined over the last year, with off-site optimisation holding more weight.  However, it’s still vitally important to have a good foundation within your site, as you can benefit fully from any link building or other off site optimisation you may have planned.

The main components of onsite SEO are the Meta details and the textual content on the site.  Meta details are the keywords and page description.  They are not generally seen by visitors, only the search Engines.  The keywords section lists all the keywords a particular page targets, and the description is a short paragraph explaining what the page is about.  Then we come to the site content.  Again, there are two parts.  The text based content and the image tags.  The writing on your web page should contain the keywords set out in the Meta details, and the image tags ought to contain a keyword or two also.  Care should be taken not to place too many of your keywords within the content of the page, as this can harm your rankings. 

The last part of On Site SEO is the basic structure of the site and navigation.  Over complicate this, and the search engines will have a hard job of finding the actual content contained within the site.  This is not a good thing, as if the spiders cannot find the relevant info, your site will not be indexed and ranked for your keywords, and any other SEO you have done will be partially wasted.

Page Rank 

Page rank is a very complicated algorithm used by Google to display the importance and trust it places in any particular page of your site.  Page rank is a scale of 0 – 10, 10 being the highest.  Without going into unnecessary detail about how Page Rank works, basically each link you have pointing to your site will pass a certain amount of page rank to your page.  More links = more page rank.  The benefit of having a high page rank is that Google will visit your site regularly to check for new content, and place you higher in the results.

Site Structure 

Site structure is highly important in gaining a high rank in the search engines.  Although Google and the others place less importance on internal site structure than they have in the past, it is still worthwhile getting it right.  Ensuring all the required components are in place will allow your site to benefit fully from any link building efforts, and achieve the highest rankings in the search index.

Keywords 

Keywords are the most important factor in SEO.  Getting the right keywords means your site will be in the top 5 for the terms related to your business, allowing a high number of targeted visitors to find your site, and buy your product or service.  The right keywords are the ones that are highly relevant to your business, that people are actually typing in to the search engines, are somewhat uncompetitive meaning they are cost effective to rank for, and preferably are ‘buying terms’.

Keyword research is also important to find what your competitors are targeting and ranking for.  This helps when trying to beat a particular company/site.