On-Site Optimisation: A Beginners Guide
Ensuring that your website has all of the credentials required to rank highly, and consistently, within the search engines, can be one of the more cost effective means of driving traffic to your website, with the return on investment from this form of digital marketing being vastly greater than that of any other practice.
It can be quite daunting at first, if you are unfamiliar with HTML as some knowledge will be required when making on-site changes, but this knowledge requirement will be minimal. Once you have grasped the basics of HTML the next step would be to obtain full access to your website if this is something you don’t currently have, as this will allow you to access your website through FTP to fully edit your pages outside of your content management system, if this functionality is not in place or practical for your developer to implement.
Why is on-site optimisation important?
On-site optimisation does much to inform the search engines of what your website is all about, boosting its relevancy for the array of keywords and phrases you want it to rank for. This, combined with the page content of your site and the link popularity you have built for your selected terms to your website are all a search engine has to go on, so ensuring that these on-site elements are well thought-out, constructed logically and designed to properly pass the flow of link “juice”, or weight, effectively, throughout your website, are vital for search engine optimisation success.
To help you get started, and in helping you to understand the various elements of on-site optimisation, I’ve put together a checklist, guiding you on how to go about implementing and better optimising the on-site elements of your website for greater search engine performance.
META Page Titles – These must be unique throughout your website, and not repeated on multiple pages. This is important as when search engines categorise the respective sections of your website they simply won’t be able to identify which sections are most relevant for which topic, which will more than likely result in the wrong page ranking for your desired keyword, or worse, your site being unable to rank highly for your keyword at all.
It is also important to include keywords in your page titles, as close to the beginning as possible, with your branding at the end. Many people get this wrong and fail to realise just how important a page’s title can be in increasing the relevancy of your website to the keywords you wish it to appear for.
As well as this, page titles should be in sentence form and not just a list of keywords as this could be seen as spammy, which may negatively impact on your wider optimisation efforts.
META Description – This is crucial to the success of your website in the search engines, as this will act as your ad copy, appearing beneath your listing within the search engine result pages, so it is important to treat this as if you were writing an ad for your Pay Per Click campaigns. By implementing the same thinking, structure and general practices that you have seen work for your paid search campaigns, you will significantly improve the click through rate of your website when it appears in the natural results.
These should also be unique for each of your sites pages, and although it’s not conclusive, it doesn’t hurt to include some of your keywords here. However, be mindful that this description is more for a user’s benefit, rather than the search engines, so no keyword cramming or poorly constructed sentences, as you simply won’t get the click through rates needed to make your website a success through natural search.
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