subject: On Site SEO: If you don't do this Your Competitors will Outrank you! [print this page] On Site SEO: If you don't do this Your Competitors will Outrank you!
Whenever people think about driving traffic to a website the next thing that usually comes to mind is back links. This is very important, not only because search engines and web directories place great importance on it, but also because they are sources of direct traffic to your site. However, concentrating on building back links alone will not make you to outrank your competitors, you have to also do what is called on site SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it involves optimizing your webpages so that they rank high for specific keywords in your niche. When you build back links you are doing off site SEO, but when you tweak your page to make it search-engine friendly, you are doing on site SEO. Neglecting the later can compromise your search engine ranking.
If you ignore on site SEO your competitors will outrank you. Now you've known the importance of this, let's now see how you can really do it.
Meta tags
We are going to focus on only two meta elements: the meta keywords and meta description. They appear within the head tag of your document. These tags once helped search engines to know what a page is all about but due to misuse, some search engines now neglect them, but they are still important.
The meta keyword goes like this:
And the meta description:
Title and Header Tags
Many people misuse the title and header tags. Search engines pay special attention to these tags. The title tag should contain a description of what a page is all about and this description should also contain your primary keywords.
The header tags range from h1 to h6 with h1 being the largest. This tags help search engines to understand the hierarchy of your site and they also place importance on keywords between these tags. So use your keywords between the heading tags.
Some people avoid using the heading tags because of their very large font-sizes. This would not be a problem if you know your CSS. You can quickly overcome this by using relative sizing. Set the body font-size to 1em and size other elements relative to that. You can give the h1 a font-size of 1.1em, h3 a font-size of .8em, h6 a font-size of .9em and so on.
Keyword Location
The location of your keywords is also important in SEO. Always place your primary keywords in the first paragraph of your content. Search engines will place more importance on keywords at such location.
Anchor text
Don't link to different pages in your site with words like click here or get it here. Use your keywords in anchor text so that you can rank high in search engines for those keywords. This rule also applies when you're building back links.
If one of your keywords is dog training tutorials, here is a good example of a sentence that contains the keyword anchor text:
We have several dog training tutorials that would help you turn your dog from a deaf and foolish pet to an obedient one.
Sitemap
Sitemap is a page that contains links to all the pages in your site. Sitemap helps search engines to crawl every page in your site. It also help your visitors to see the overall structure of your website.
Sitemap can increase your page rank because search engines take internal linking into account. The more pages search engines see in your website, the higher your page rank.
You can easily create a sitemap using free services like xml-sitemaps.com. How to do it is very straight forward. It is as simple as entering your main website URL and clicking on a button. After creating the site map, save and upload it to your root folder (http_docs or public_html).
Submit your sitemap to Google if you have a Google webmaster account. If you don't have one get it at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview. Always remember to create a new sitemap and submit to Google whenever you update your site.
These simple on site optimization tips can go a long way to boost your website ranking.
