On-page factors are those portions of your website that you can control as a webmaster. They are the elements that comprise your entire site – the layout of your pages, the images that you use, the wording of your content, and so on. If you want to do well in search engine rankings, you should know how to tweak those on-page factors in such a way that search engines will be pleased with your website.
Focus on text and not on images to communicate with spiders.
This is where purely design-oriented websites fail. Because they wish to have full control of the typefaces, layout of page elements, and overall appearance of their web pages, aesthetic-focused webmasters build their entire website using mainly images of words and not actual text. While design is important in attracting and retaining human visitors, the overuse of images is something that search engine crawlers do not appreciate. This is because they cannot read the text nor interpret the subjects contained in the images. In addition, if you’re using image-based navigation, search engine spiders won’t be able to determine whether the picture you chose is relevant to the web page that it’s pointing to. Remember, targeted keywords rank in search engines in the form of text and not as photos of text.
Include your targeted keywords in your title tags.
The words contained in between the title tags get displayed on tabs of web browsers, plus they serve as your website’s title in search engine results pages. The title tag is a very important tag so you should maximize its 64-character length. Your page titles should be brief yet should provide both human visitors and search engine crawlers a good idea what your site is all about. In order to do this, you should include most, if not all, of your targeted keywords but make sure that you write natural copy.
Don’t ever leave the title of your page blank. Otherwise, it will appear as “Untitled.” Consider yourself lucky if search engine crawlers are able to understand the connection between your company name and your website when indexing it. Also, it’s not a good idea to just make your page title the same for all pages in your website. Your page title should be able to tell everyone what it is about and it should be inviting enough for users to click through.
Don’t overuse italics, bolds, and large font sizes.
It’s a known fact that search engines give more importance to content that is intended by the website owner to stand out. However, take care not to overuse this technique when coding your website. Search engines might mistake it for spam and you might get slapped with penalties.
Don’t underestimate the power of internal links.
Links are the only pathways by which search engines crawlers go around your website. Many people who are oblivious to this fact risk not having most of their site’s pages indexed. You would want to have internal links in your content and not just in the bottom and side navigation bars. But again, do not go overboard. Don’t get tempted to fill your pages with too many links pointing to other pages in your website.
Create big sites instead of small ones.
Survey results have shown that bigger websites (i.e. those with more than 100 web pages of content) have a tendency to rank better in search engine results pages compared to smaller sites. It seems that it’s better to continuously update and add more content to an existing website (just make sure that the content is related to the site) rather than build a separate and smaller website targeting a new set of keywords.
Update your website’s content on a regular basis.
If possible, do this daily. Search engines are fond of websites that get updated frequently. Picture this as something akin to providing more food for search engine spiders to feed on and index. One of the best SEO strategies that you can ever implement is the daily addition of a minimum of one high-quality web page with content targeting a specific keyword and containing a text link pointing to another page from your website. While this practice may be hard and time-consuming, you’ll find that it’s definitely worth it in the long run. Examples of content that you can add regularly are blog posts, articles, how-to guides, product/service page, and so on. The key is to create something good for search engine crawlers to consume and for human visitors to read.