5 Onsite SEO Factors You Shouldn’t Overlook
SEO is a funny old game; you can link build until you’re blue in the face, but if you haven’t got your onsite SEO in place, then link building can be a little fruitless. In this post we explore 5 of the basic onsite factors that you should look to deploy across your website to gain maximum visibility in the SERPs.
Duplication
It’s a common misconception that Google will penalise your site for containing duplicate content. Google doesn’t penalise you for duplicate content, it just doesn’t give it as much credit. This is because Google doesn’t want to index the same content twice, or more. This way it can be sure that the results it serves up from your search query are not repeated, which would in turn give you a bad user experience. Anyway, if you own a website and are a little concerned about duplication then the very least you should do is ensure there is only one version of your site on the internet. Here are 3 possible variations of your home page that Google could be indexing:
http://www.example.com/
http://example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html
If you can find versions of your website along the lines of the above examples, then you are being affected by duplication issues. You need to specify which URL is the one you want Google to see. You can do this by implementing the correct code in you web.config file / .htaccess file / httpd.ini file, depending on your website.
Page Title
Page titles play a huge role in SEO and should never be overlooked. If your current page title is ‘Home’ or worse ‘Untitled Document’, then you are doing your website a serious injustice. The title for each of your pages should tell people what’s on the page. Effective use of targeted keywords in the title is also essential for SEO. Short page titles can seem a bit spammy, so the use of themed words and stop words can work well to combine several targeted keywords. Each page should have a unique title with the current recommended limit for a page title length being 70 characters.
Page Description
Page descriptions are another onsite aspect that you should be making full use of for SEO benefit. Page descriptions (or Meta descriptions) are the informative bits of text that provide an explanation of the content on a page. They are used by search engines to display a snippet below a link in a search results page. Meta descriptions are key for a successful click-through rate and provide the perfect opportunity to tell people what exactly is on the page in regards to what they have searched for. The best descriptions will combine a couple of keywords in to a compelling description of the page. Each page should have a unique Meta description of around 156 characters.
Robots.txt
Every website should have a robots.txt file. This is the file that a search engine spider will look for to be given direction. If your robots.txt file is empty then the default behaviour for spiders is to index each page and follow your links. If your robots.txt file contains < meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” > then this will be impacting the visibility of your website in the search engine results pages.
URLs
URLs are another aspect of your website that can be optimised for maximum search engine visibility. Including the main targeted keyword for the page in its URL and locating that page as close to the root of the domain as possible will help. Also avoid using dynamic URLs that use ?, &, $, =, +, %, and other characters that have no SEO value. Also, try to avoid camel case and format each pages URL in the same manner.
Guest Post by: Dan dreams of being a dolphin trainer and swimming pool technician who treats above ground pools with Certikin along with other swimming pool chemicals like his friend Alex Harvey, he’s cool, You can find him on Twitter here @ harvey1dash8.
