Five tips for on-page SEO

On-page search engine optimisation is all about boosting the ranking of your web site or web page in the natural search results of basic search engines like Google.

There are a number of factors that will help your site to rise up the listings – here’s a guide to some of the most important.

Page title

The title of a page is a major factor that search engines use when assessing what keywords to rank that page for and where to rank it. If you include your keyword in both your SEO page title and meta description it helps to cement the fact that your page is relevant to that search term, therefore helping your rankings.

Meta description

Meta descriptions are the HTML tags you give to your page title and other content. The meta description isn’t displayed to visitors to the page itself, but it does show up in a number of crucial places – the search results page and on social websites when someone links to the page.

These are both important for SEO because they help to boost click-through rates, page views and social shares – elements search engines factor into their ranking algorithms.

Keyword density

Modern search engines, such as Google, work on the law of diminishing returns. The first couple of times a keyword appears on a website will help to substantially boost your rankings but continue to repeat a word and your ranking will plateau and eventually decline.

The way to approach the challenge is to think about the keywords that you would like in your copy and then ensure that the article you are going to write will be long enough to accommodate a couple of mentions of each keyword while still sounding natural.

Image Alt tags

An alt image tag is a text description for an image that helps search engines understand what that image is. Humans can look at a picture and straightway know what is happening, but for a search engine a picture is meaningless unless it comes with a written description. Image Alt tags help your images become more accessible on the Web and also help visually impaired users who may be using a page reader.

Good quality content

Google constantly updates it’s algorithms to ensure that the top ranking sites are those containing the most relevant, high quality information about any given topic or keyword. This means good quality content is more important that ever.

In short, don’t try and trick search engines. There are no loopholes to exploit when it comes to search engine optimisation. If you want your website to be found on Google make it a website worth finding.