Optimizing a website is like placing your business in the center of the city. When it comes to offline internships, every business tries to pick a high-interest location: inside a business center, in a shopping mall, or on a busy street. Placing your business online has a similar process. Optimization will put your website in the first search results, which means getting more traffic and generating more sales.
There are a few key elements to keep in mind when performing on-page SEO optimization. We have created a list of best practices.
Robots.txt – All pages must include Robots.txt. Robots.txt actually tells the engines how to index your site.
Sitemap.xml – A sitemap provides a list of all your pages to search engines and makes it much easier for them to list your pages.
Domain Registration: Engines place higher value on domains that have longer renewal periods. In our experience, five years or more is ideal.
Meta Keywords: Each page should contain a unique combination of keywords. In our experience, five keywords per page is best. Be careful when choosing the best keywords for your site, make sure they have high potential (high search volume and low competition).
Meta Description: Search engines tend to use the description to gather information about the topic of the page. A well-written description should be no more than 160 characters with the strongest keyword phrases woven into it. A good description results in a higher CTR of your site listing after a search.
RSS Feed (if applicable): Not all sites have an RSS feed of updates to their site. With your newsletter section, you could include this as a site feature.
Title tag: the title should describe the page and use the strongest keyword(s) (don’t overload the title with keyword phrases; focus on one or two stronger keywords that best describe the topic of the web page ). Search engines will only show the first 70 characters of your title on the SERP, so use those 70 characters to create a high-impact, relevant title for your page.
Plain text on the page: Basic body text is best read by search engine spiders. Try to avoid using too much Flash and Java: Search engines are much better at indexing Flash and Java content, but be sure to include the information search engines need to do so. Friendly URLs: Some search engines (with a few exceptions, such as Google) will not index any page that includes characters such as question mark, ampersand, equal sign, etc. in the URL. Friendly URLs allow you to include some keywords and present a more user and search engine friendly page experience.
Image Alt Tags – Images can have Alt tags that are indexed for relevance and provide an opportunity to reinforce your keywords and drive traffic from image searches.
Image file names – Images are indexed separately from your site and can generate traffic if the file name is descriptive of the image content. It is best to use photos that have keyword names, as this strengthens your image for image search.
Use this list to help improve your own search engine optimization efforts. We will be the first to admit that there is some debate about the effectiveness of some of these practices. However, there is no debate about how implementing best practices will only improve your overall optimization efforts.