Here is an overview of the important factors that make on-site search engine optimisation.
Title tags are a main descriptor for the page it represents, search engines utilise these and display them in search results. These are clickable pathways from the search engine to the page itself.
Meta tags are an array of tags that act as a descriptor for the document, much like a library reference system, meta data defines the page, its keywords and many other factors such as author, formatting, content rating and more.
Header tags are visible tags that highlight the information within them. These tags are typically used to highlight important areas and content within the page and are used as an alternative to a font specification. These tags are typically used as best practice for websites.
Page content is a vital part of on-site search engine optimisation. The content is a major factor used to rank a page, simply because search engines use the content to determine how relevant it is to the users query. A website that is resourceful and content rich is more likely to be returned than a website with low content volumes or content that is poorly written.
Anchor text is the visible text used to represent a clickable link. There are various types of links from static links to dynamic links. Anchor text should be directly relevant to the page it is linking too, however this does not mean creating excessively long link text.
This will focus on managing the websites internal link profile, ensuring pages link to other relevant pages, whilst maintaining an optimum level of internal links, this will involve reducing links on pages with too many outbound links, and vice versa. This will also cover internal content links that help convey relevancy between documents.
This will evaluate the content structure throughout the website, and how the internal content pages link between each other. Research has shown that URL's linking between one another that share relevant content helps boost a websites relativity.
Keyword emphasis uses basic HTML formatting to highlight keywords relevant to the pages content. This should only be used to enhance the keyword profile in moderation, this includes bolding, underlining, alternative font colours and bullet points.
The URL structure of the website should be clean and should utilise keywords where possible. Messy or malformed URL's can present problems when search engines come to crawling and indexing the URL's.
Sitemapping
Sitemapping typically uses a series of tools to create alternate sitemaps for search engines. These sitemaps are useful to monitor a search engines crawl behaviour on a website, they can also provide an easier means for search engines to index pages that are linked deeply within the website.
This file is used to instruct search engines. This file can be used to direct search engines, prevent the indexing of dynamic or private pages and more.
