ON-SITE SEO: Week #5 of the 26-Week Digital Marketing Plan [Edition 3.0]

In this book I will be writing about the 12 key considerations of on-site SEO and why they are so important for your business.

1. Efficient and valid code

This was covered partially in ‘website framework’ our last book but in this book we will go a little more in depth here. It is very important to know that your code is not spitting out too many files and loading everything in the order it should.

2. Keyword Rich Navigation

That is your internal linking structure. If you are linking to another page on your website you need to be linking to it with a keyword phrase in the right form and in the correct manner to get the most ‘link juice’.

3. Keywords in URLs

Website URLs should have keyphrases included in them, but not overly aggressively. Only certain words are needed here which we will discuss later how to judge, and even do it automatically in this book.

4. Page Title Format

Your page title format is what is first seen when your page gets picked up by Google (It is the blue underlined text). The composition of the page title format is very important and needs to be done properly to get ranked well.

5. Meta-description format

This is underneath your title on the search results and should be 160 characters or less. These need to be unique, different for each page and should also contain certain keywords and long tail keyphrases you might be targeting. This book will be going over several different ways to format this to the optimum standard.

6. Good Use of Heading Tags

Heading tags are those within a documents source code. These tell the ‘bots’ that crawl your website, how important a certain heading is and if formatted correctly can point them in the right direction.

7. Proper Use Of The ALT attribute

The ALT attribute is a very little used bit of code that is used on images in your site. Effectively telling the bots what the image is about. If these are properly used they could end up being a whole other source of traffic for you.

8. Rich Snippets

These are a more recent addition to the SEO world. These are extra bits of code that can be added to your site to tell the search engines that a particular piece of content is there.
For instance if you have a phone number on your site, you could have a bit of code that let’s them know this. This goes for addresses and other bits of specific information that needs to be highlighted.

9. No-Follow Attribute

This was popular quite a few years ago but still has relevance today. This is a way of telling search engines not to give any ‘juice’ to a particular link. This is how to tell the search engines what are the important links and the not so important links. There are a few details needed here so I will show you how to determine this for your links.

10. Good Canonicalization

This word in layman’s terms is concerning URLs and the correct URL for a page. Canonicalization is an internal content duplication issue which is created when the same page or content can be accessed from different URLs.
For example if a page has multiple search paths from links all over the web the search engines will be confused. The original and most authoritative URL should be declared. I will explain exactly how to not let this happen by showing the search engines which is the canonical version.

11. Hreflang tags (If needed)

These are tags that you use if you are targeting international customers. These show search engines your headings in different languages and countries that you are targeting. (For instance you could separate between the UK and USA)

12. Using Google Webmaster Tools

You need to submit your website to Google webmaster tools and learn how to use it. I will show you exactly how this program can make your life a lot easier when it comes to your webmaster duties.