There is plenty of emphasis in link building when it comes to SEO, with this regarded by the masses as the technique that will propel websites to the top of the search engines. However, in the midst of all of the guest post requests and other link opportunities, a lot of webmasters are tending to forget the on-site factors that can also influence a site’s ranking.
Of course, if you have the budget to employ a full website marketing team (whether this is via a white label SEO service or through their own SEO department), you generally needn’t worry about trivial matters and they will be taken care for you. However, if you are managing the SEO for your website, take a look through the short checklist that details some critical on-site SEO issues that can make or break your rankings.
The Title Tag
Few would doubt that the title tag is one of the most important features of a webpage and if you don’t have your keywords stuffed in your title, the chances of you ranking for a particular keyword reduce somewhat. Of course, you can’t go too overboard, but subtly dropping your main keywords into the title tag is widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to nominate your site for a decent ranking for those particular keywords.
Headings
Another important on-page element is the headings on a page. This might well be something you have forgotten to tinker with, particularly if your site is still using a traditional HTML design rather than one with CSS. A lot of webmasters making use of such code tend to rely on old fashioned bold and font tags to highlight their titles and while this is slightly beneficial from a SEO perspective, it’s known that the CSS heading tags are the most effective when it comes to creating keyword-based titles on your site.
Authorship
This was a debatable addition to the article as while Google Authorship is proving to be increasingly important, one could suggest that it isn’t yet a fundamental requirement for a website. Nevertheless, if you do want to put yourself ahead of the competition, make sure all of your articles are attributed to your Google+ account and claim authorship for them. With the big G supposedly set to use ‘AuthorRank’ as a ranking factor in the not too distant future, there’s certainly no harm in making the minor code adjustments to activate it.
Search Engine Friendly URLs
This is an old classic and if your site uses a standard CMS package, you shouldn’t have any problems. Several years ago, a lot of URLs were constructed with numbers, question marks and a whole host of other foreign characters. These days, there is no excuse for your URLs to contain anything other than keywords and if you are not following such a process, you’re definitely missing a trick.
Optimize Your Content
Our final tip is to simply optimize your content. There was once a time where stuffing as many of your keywords into the content was the simple thing to do. Nowadays, you’ve got to dilute the concentration somewhat, with most experts speculating that no more than 5% of the total content should be made up of your keywords.
