" Our company's business has increased by an unbelivable 300% in one year since we started to use your services, all thanks to your SEO work. "
On-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Optimization techniques which are implemented directly on the web pages of your site, and in some cases by creating new files. In other words they require access to the web hosting server.
Note that on-page and off-page SEO goes hand in hand and should be conducted at the same time, when given a quote for an SEO project both are usually included. We have just separated them here to give a clearer overview.
The points below are not necessarily complete, and are not listed in any particular order.
Title Tag
The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It's also what displays in the top band of your browser when your site is displayed.
Every page on your site can (and should) have a unique title tag.
Meta Tags
These are simple tag lines which can be put at the beginning of every web page, while not being displayed to anyone visiting your site, they are used to give instructions to the browser and search engine spiders about your site and individual pages. For SEO the two most important are:
Description Meta Tag
The description tag is the paragraph that people often will see when your page comes up in the search results (depending on the search engine).
Keywords Meta Tag
The importance of Meta keyword tags fluctuates from month to month among different search engines. There is a debate in the SEO community as to whether or not they help at all on certain search engines. In fact, in the summer of 2004 it appeared as if they were losing importance altogether.
Image Alt Tags
The small (yellow) box that pops up when your mouse cursor is placed over an image is called the ALT tag. Every relevant image should have an image ALT tag with selected keywords and phrases.
Header Tags
The text of each page is given more weight by the search engines if you make use of header tags which describe the body text following below on the page. More than one header can be used; H1, H2, H3 etc.
Emphasized Text
Your keywords and key phrases can be made to stand out, not only for human visitors but also for search engines, by enlarging the text, use bold, bullet points or similar.
Link Text The text that the user sees when mousing over a link is called the link text.
Site Map A site map linked to from your main index page makes it easier for the search engines to spider your site, and should be included. (And it makes it easy for your human visitors to see the entire structure of your website.)
404 "File Not Found" Error Page
We consider this part of SEO, all sites should have a unique 404 Error Page with the same style as the rest of the site, and if designed good will be able to keep anyone reaching it within your site.
Clean and Valid Code
If your web pages source code is cluttered, obsolete or invalid search engine spiders may not be able to read and follow it, the result may be it do not get indexed and the spider might even leave your entire site.
Don't be fooled; your pages might look perfect in the web browsers, but that doesn't mean the code is valid. This is an often overlooked part of SEO.
robot.txt file
Create and upload a robot.txt file to the web server. This instructs the search engines how to crawl your site.
CONTENT!
We can't repeat it often enough: Content is King!
It must be original, relevant and helpful information that people want to read.
These days, each webpage should be highly focused on one specific product or subject.
Concentrate on writing quality web pages that actually appeal to the human reader. Use your keywords or phrases often, use variations of them, and use them at the beginning of your paragraphs wherever possible. But, don't overuse them and make the page sound like it was written by a seven year old.
