Your On-page Search Engine Optimisation Checklist

2 Jun

When talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, many web developers and website owners would simply equate this to having mountains of external backlinks and talk about anchor-text linking. However, the other side of Search Engine Optimisation relies largely on the actual content of your website and how well your website is structured and internally linked together. I call this internal SEO or On-page Search Engine Optimisation. Here is a checklist of on-page SEO points that you should keep in mind:

Unique Content: Remember that “Content is King”. Search engines places greater importance on webpages that have unique and relevant content. Remember to also check your spelling and grammar.
Duplicate Content: On the flipside, having duplicate content on your website is a big no-no since search engines put greater importance on unique, relevant content.
Use the nofollow tag: All links on your website that goes to any external domain should have the rel=”nofollow” tag. By including this tag, you will stop the “link juice” from going to the external website, while your own website will be valued higher by search engines such as Google.
Proper use of Headings: Every webpage should have one H1 tag. Some webmasters make the mistake of using two H1 tags on one page. Headings of secondary importance should be in a H2 or higher tag heading. Use the strong(bold) tag and list tags(ul and ol) when necessary. By correctly structuring your page with heading tags you will make it easier for search engines to properly index your page and show relevant excerpts of your webpage on its results pages
Use a Robots.txt file: Robots.txt files can help you control parts of your website that you do not want indexed. These may include administrative or private areas of your website
Use a sitemap.xml file: By having a sitemap.xml file you can tell search engines how often to visit your website for new content. By doing this you will let search engines know how often to index your website. Check out Google Webmaster for more information.
Dead links: Always check your website for dead links. W3C link checker is a good tool. You should also check other parts of your code for any errors.
Loading Times: Websites with large images and other multimedia can take a long time to load. Search engines are known to penalize websites with unacceptably slow loading times.
Use of Flash: If your website is built in Flash, this can be major disadvantage in your ability to rank well in search engines. Search Engines currently have great difficulty indexing Flash pages, so you should limit your usage. If you must use Flash, then you should also incorporate standard HTML content as well.
Use SEO Friendly URLs: By having readable SEO friendly URLs, search engines can give greater weight to certain keywords and its matching content when ranking your webpages. If you are running WordPress for you website, then I recommend you read my post on WordPress Permalinks.
Descriptive image file names: This is a technique many people do not know about. By having keyword-driven, descriptive image filenames, you will rank well in Search Engine image results (Especially Google). The naming format I use is to separate each word with a “-” (dash). For example, “this-is-a-picture.jpg”
Meta Description Tag: The Meta Description tag, unlike the Meta Keyword tag (which is useless) is still relevant. Your Meta description tag will show up as the excerpt in search results pages. This is pretty good for having on your homepage, as you can put in a catchy welcome message. However, I find it is irrelevant and even counterproductive in content-heavy webpages, largely because Google usually does a darn good job of extracting an excerpt from you webpage for your keyword.

Above: Google did a darn good job in extracting an excerpt for my homepage in its results pages for my name: Tam Nguyen. I had not included a Meta Description tag, but if I did that’s exactly what I would of put in.
Meta Title Tag: The Meta title tag probably holds the greatest weight in determining how well your webpage will rank for a certain keyword (from an on-page SEO perspective). So you would want to make sure it is relevant to the content and has keywords you want to rank for.
And finally… keywords: Make sure you have the relevant keywords you want to rank for in you content, title tags and headings. But remember not to go overboard and stuff every sentence with them. If you need help finding the right keywords to target, then I suggest you use the Google Keyword Tool

If you keep these points in mind when building your website, then chances are you will rank well for your keywords in search engines such as Google. If you need any clarification on any of these points or would like to add your own on-page Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) methods, please feel free to leave a comment.