Nine elements of on-page website optimization

It’s our position that websites should be designed and written for your audiences, not for search engines. That said, it is worthwhile to learn a bit more about SEO in order to better optimize your site to ensure your audience finds you!

1. Page Title: Page titles are one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Page titles are the text you see at the top of your browser window when viewing a web page. They are also the title of a page that is presented in search engines.
2. Meta Description: Meta data is an often-overlooked opportunity to attract visitors from search. Interestingly, it does not directly influence search engine rankings.Nevertheless, it is a good practice to include keywords in your meta description.
3. Headings: Text in the headings is more likely to be read by search engines as keywords than text in the rest of the page. For this reason, it is good to include keywords in your headings whenever possible.
4. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): HTML is the back-end code of your website that search engines read. Search engines extract relevant information from your HTML, such as keywords.
5. Images: Images on a web page can certainly enhance user experience. However, when inserting images into your website, you should not use images excessively. More pictures mean your page will take longer to load. This has a negative impact both on user experience and search engine optimization. Additionally, you should associate text with pictures to give more content for search engines to latch on to.
6. Domain Info: Search engine rankings favor sites that are registered for a longer period of time. Longer domain registrations indicate a commitment to the site and mean the site has a lower chance of being considered to be spam.
7. MOZ Rank: MOZ Rank is a general measure of how much online authority your site has. A higher MOZ rank is better.
8. Google Crawl Date: When Google crawls your site, it updates the information related to it, such as your keywords and other SEO factors. Therefore, you want Google to crawl your site as often as possible.
9. URL Structure: The URL of a web page is its web address. For example, OSD’s blog has a URL of http://www.outsidesource.com/blog.

How does your site rank? What issues are you facing? Let us know what you think.

Or if you’d like to take a deeper dive into this topic, check out our eBook: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing.