On site seo optimization is a very important aspect of a SEO campaign. Al though these days Search Engines put a very high accent on backlinks, the main goal is relevance and the best way to achieve high search engine rankings is to have good onsite optimization followed by a strong link building campaign or offsite optimization.

Over the time Big search engines such as Google constantly changed their search algorithms in the urge to provide better, more relevant search results. We’ve compiled a checklist you should consider when doing your onsite SEO optimization.

1.The Domain Name

It is very important to think about your audience when you choose the domain name. The keywords should be friendly, simple , not too long and easy to remember. As example how does it sounds: onlinebakeryshop.com from onlinebakery.com? You have two alternatives you either partially keywords like onlinebakery.com or you can use a new name made by you and this way you can create your own brand name.

2.Keywords in the url

Having your keywords in the url is very important. For example if your keyword is iphone your url should look like: http://www.your domain name.com/iphone.html .

The closer your keyword is to the root the better.

3.Keyword in the title tag

The title tag is a visible meta code used in HTML that acts as an intermediate between your browser and the display image. The title tag  tells the browser what to display in the title of the window at the very top of the screen. The title tag will have to describe the content of the page and it should have different keyword phrases on each page. Make sure you include your main keyword in the title tag.

4.Keywords in the meta description

The meta description tag is a invisible component part of your HTML page which displays information about your page when your page appears in the search engines results. This doesn’t change the way your page looks, it just encourages visitors to click on your page. It is used by half of the search engines. Your description must include best of your  keywords and must be readable to a person. If it is just a list of keywords only few people will click on your link.

5. Keywords in the Header Tags(h1 h2).

The H1, H2, and H3 tags represent the headings of a page. Search engines gets the principal idea of a website from these headings. Use relevant keywords phrases that are related  to your page and domain in the header tags because these are one of the most important aspect of onsite SEO optimization. The most important of them all being the H1 tag.

Again in each of your paragraph of you must incorporate keywords at a rate of about 10% density.

6.The frequency that you change outbound links

The outgoing links of a site change over time. Link churn is the instrument that measure this stability of the outgoing links. If you change frequently the sites that you  link to, Google might think you are involved in selling links or link farming and this will get your domain penalized or even sandboxed.

7. Don’t Link to Spammy Sites

Linking to spammy sites such as porn sites, link farms, casino, ea is not a good idea.

8.Outgoing Link Anchor Text

The anchor text must be descriptive and related to the site you are linking to. You must be careful about the quantity and the quality of the links that gets out and the place where they go. Having few outbound links will be appreciated by Google so be careful about where they go. As example: if you link onto a site with a ecommerce platform choose an anchor text with a description related or similar to your products or services.

9.Content uniqueness

I am sure you’ve heard it or read it thousands  times but we have to mention it as well.  The uniqueness of the content is one of the most important factors in determining your ranking in the search engines.

The Google objective is to deliver relevant results to searchers depending on their search terms. So if your content is more fresh and accompanied with a good and relevant presentation to searchers you will find your website  higher in the ranking results.

If you deliver great information you will be rewarded with natural backlinks from people that read and enjoyed your web page content.

Another important aspect related to the content of your website is the frequency at which you add content. If you constantly publish new content on a site Google sees your website important, crawls it more often and your rankings improve . Take for example news portals: they are updated hourly sometimes even sooner, Google crawls and indexes them fast and once a new article is posted it also gets high rankings in Google.

10.Site Age

The age of the site is given by the time the site was build on the domain. The more aged the better. An old site is more trustworthy than a new site.

11. Domain Registration period

If  you register your domain for a year, it will make Google think your website will be gone in a year. Still this doesn’t mean it will take 5 years to make it successful. But if you buy the domain for 5-10 years  will show to Google that you plan to be there for a while. The domain registration period is very important so make sure you register your domain for a minimum 2 years if you expect good SEO results.

12.Use an XML Sitemap

An XML map is a invisible map for visitors. This ensures the full access to all the web pages that your site own, without missing any of them.

The visible  sitemap is used by web surfers and is a chart of your website, showing where pages are in relation to one another, as well as how the pages link to each other.

To index fast all pages from your website, build a visible page and define a “sitemap.html” containing all the links from your website, and an xml site map that you can submit manually to search engines.

13.Robots.txt

The robots text files exist on your website and they tells web crawlers which pages to index and which web pages should be ignored because you don’t want every page indexed on your site, such as feedback forms or your internal search engine tool. Any onsite optimization should start with making sure that robots.txt contains the proper settings.

14.Internal Linking Structure

Internal links are used as a doorway to the rest of the web site. To make your readers navigate to another page of your website you can use the anchor text that must be relevant to the page is linking to. Each page of your website should contain links of related pages of your website. This way the search engines will crawl and index your pages faster and better.

15.IMG Alt Tags

Images are not indexed by the search engine web crawlers because they cannot read them.  With the Image Alt Tag you can include a short description of your keyword which will help gain extra traffic to your site. How would you gain extra traffic with Img Alt tag?  Well the search engines can also bring traffic trough their image searches ( eg. Images.google.com).

16.Keyword Density

To better determine where your website belongs in the Serp search engines also look for keywords and key phrases. If you have few key words and few key phrases in search engines few people searches for them. If you repeat them over and over on your webpage the reader will be disturbed and not only you will get penalties because the search engines will find it as spam. So the key is to keep a balance between these 2. Most SEO experts recommend key words density at a 1-3% meaning out of 100 words, then 1-3 should be your keywords.

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