In this article I would like to list all the onpage SEO tasks that any website need to do search engine optimization (SEO).
Please note that Google updated its search algorithm on 24/2/2011, which affects 11 – 12% of the world search result. Although the search result may probably be different from one month ago, the similar principle applied for all SEO practices.
If you want to drive free traffic to your website through SEO, here are the tasks list.
On page SEO – It means your web page should be well structured and written so that search engine can find and read your website easily. Hard to read web page will be wrongly indexed, or even not indexed, by search engine:
- Page layout should be valided HTML: Please do not write invalid HTML code. By invalid I mean the HTML code should have open tag (<strong>) and close tag (</strong>). Some tags do not have close tag (e.g. img, meta) but please do not write lousy HTML code.
- Have keyword in <meta> tag: It means <meta name=”keywords” /> and <meta name=”description” />. Please note then even Google does not pay attention to keyword meta, you should still put your keywords there because, your keywords will still be shown on the web pages. And your meta description should also include your keywords no more than two times.
- Keyword in image “alt” and title: Your images should include the “alt” attribute with your keywords in. Even if you forgot to do that, you must not forget to put your keyword in your page title, which is in <title> tag. Putting keywords in <title> tag is extremely important because search engine use this to determine what is your page all about. Unclear title or title without any keywords will have both search engine and human visitors difficult to find your page.
- Keyword in headline: by headline we means those <h1> to <h6> tags. Having keyword in <title> is crucial but not enough. If you want to have maximized on page SEO effort, format your page to include <h1> tags to include your keyword is also very important.
- Keyword in first and last paragraph of your content: This is all about keyword density. Normally 2% – 3% of keyword density is enough. Keyword density means how many times your targeted keywords are shown in the whole article. Mentioning your keyword in contents implies that your content is related to that keywords. However, you would not want your article full of keywords, which makes the whole article difficult to read for visitors. Remember, you are not writing for search engine, after all, you are serving website visitors.
- Internal link: Internal link means hyper link to other pages within your web page. If you have particular web page you want to boost the ranking (like your sales page), you would write different articles and have a link pointing back to that page, all in the same website.
- XML Sitemap: It is a text file in XML format that is provided to search engine to let them understand your website structure more easily. If you are using wordpress, you can install a plugin called Google XML Sitemap and activate it. This plugin will automatically generate an XML site map for you. If you are not using wordpress, you can go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate a sitemap for your website. That service is free but it has limitation on the number of pages sitemap can contain.
- Static URL: It means easily readable URL. Normally your URL should include your keywords. In wordpress it is called permalink, which is a user-friendly, easy to remember version of URL. You need such function because search engine will pay attention to them also.
- Original content: the content you posted on website should be original from you. Recent update of Google just pinpoint the “content farm” problem by reduce ranking of those website that has a lot of content copying from other website.
- Frequently updated: The ultimate mission of search engine is to provide, up-to-date, high quality search result to their users. In other words, if your website is not updated frequently, your website will, in the long term, have lower ranking, unless your website has a high authority.
I hope that this list of onpage seo task list can help you to get start thinking about what should be done in order to optimize your website for search engine purpose.