On-Site SEO Guide for Beginners

Many people think that recent Google changes killed SEO, which is far from truth. Although Google algorithm is constantly improving, white hat SEO techniques still play major role in website rankings. In this article we shared a few tips for on-site SEO that will help your new website gain popularity and traffic.

Source Code

Source code is the code web browsers read and turn into website layouts we know and love. There are more than a few elements that can be optimized in website’s source code. These are just some of them:

Title tag– This tag is the first line you see in Google Search and it should contain one of a few keywords.

Meta name and description– page’s meta description is read by search engine crawlers and placed under title tag in search results. That’s why making attractive meta description is a good way to use search engines for effective advertising;

Content

Content is the most important part of page or blog post. When it comes to SEO there are several parameters website content needs to satisfy to add up a few points to its Google ranking. Content needs to be:

• Original – copying someone else’s content without author’s consent or a link to the original page can lead to harsh Google penalties and in some cases cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits;
• Relevant – content needs to be interesting and useful to target audience, because only this way you will make them stay on the page longer and lower down bounce rate figures;
• Well-Formatted – visitors don’t like reading badly formatted text. Reading articles without paragraphs or with tiny font size can be tiresome;
• Long enough – when it comes to articles, most SEO experts agree that longer articles are better. Each article should be at least 500 word long.
• Natural links – links and their anchor text should be natural and usable;

Keywords

Although keywords are not as big as they used to be, they are still one of the most important page rank parameters. First thing web administrators needs to do, is to decide what keywords to include on each web page. There are several Google tools that can be used for keyword research.

• Google Trends – this tool provides users with search engine statistics that can be categorized with different filters that include: countries, keywords, trends, events, etc.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – this is one of the most popular keyword research tools that is originally designed for choosing keyword lists for AdWords platform, but it can also be used for checking popularity and competition for certain keywords and creating keyword lists that can be used on websites.

Keywords need to be placed through-out page content. Most SEO experts agree that the optimal keyword density is from 1% to 3%, and adding keywords to headings (from h6 to h1) and headlines emphasizes their importance.

Images

For placing images on web pages, administrators need to receive permission from photographer. Since sometimes photographers are hard to reach, website administrators can use other ways to find photos they can use freely.

• Free or paid stock photos – there are many different free and paid stock photo resources website administrators can use for finding photos made by professionals.
• Creative Commons – different Creative Commons licenses enable website administrators to add photos to their websites for free, with mentioning the author and the name of the Creative Commons license under which photographs are protected.

Important thing for web administrators is to restrain from placing copyright content on their pages. This includes: photos, videos, sketches, info graphics, etc. Photos also need to be formatted and shrank to size that doesn’t slow down page loading.

Image alt attributes and captions, should also contain keywords, because many people use Google Images for image search and optimizing images for this tool can bring more visitors to the website.

Social Media

Social networks can be used for boosting website’s popularity and there are many different things web administrators can do to increase social network’s performance of website’s content. They can include social sharing buttons on each website page, that enable visitors to like, follow or share website’s content. “Pin It” buttons are also very useful, and they can be added to images, which than can be easily shared on Pinterest, one of the fastest growing social networks. Website content should also be linkable and shareable and contain encouragements for visitors to share and comment content on social media.

These few tips can drastically increase website’s traffic. Results can be checked on Google Analytics or any of the SEO checkers, which are very useful tools that can check website’s optimization and give advice to administrators that will help them to make their websites even more optimized and available to search engine trackers.   

Website administrators should also use off-page SEO techniques for improving their site ranking. These techniques include: running social network pages and accounts, writing website reviews, link building, Google AdWords, etc.  

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/marcusjensen/on-site-seo-guide-for-beginners/