SEO, in itself is a two part job – there’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Additionally, on-page SEO has two main parts to it as well: (1) the keyword-focused part, and (2) the technical part.
Getting the keywords for your site right is a whole different story, and some people even believe that this is the only thing that matters for on-page SEO.
This isn’t the case. In fact, if you don’t do your best at getting your site to its top shape (technically speaking) then you might not even experience any search engine ranking improvements.
Following are the most important technical aspects of on-page SEO. Make sure to get to know all of them so you can tune your site accordingly.
Correct HTML and CSS Code
If you’re not a web developer you’ll find it really difficult to tune any HTML or CSS code by hand. And hiring someone to do this will cost some serious money.
That’s why I have a better solution that fixes all problems like this right from the get-go. Simply grab yourself a quality website platform (WordPress) and then search for some quality premium WordPress themes.
Why is it even important? Essentially, you need to make it as easy as possible for search engines to read and crawl your site. If you have many HTML errors then you’re making it significantly harder for Google to index your content.
Removing Broken Links
Google really doesn’t like broken links. For them, this is a sign that the webmaster is not very serious about doing their job. And there’s one more problem…
No matter how hard you try you’re still going to find some number of broken links on your site. That’s just the way it is, and it’s the reason why you should scan your site and remove the links every once in a while.
Of course, you don’t have to do this by hand … it would take ages. Instead, use a plugin called Broken Link Checker.
Improving Your Site’s Speed
As of late, Google openly admits that they take site speed as a ranking factor. In plain English, the faster your site is the higher it ranks.
The best way to make your WordPress site work fast is to start with a quality theme (mentioned before). Then you can take care of a couple of additional things:
- Get the W3 Total Cache plugin.
- Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and follow the instructions there.
- Get the WP Smush.it plugin for optimizing images.
- Remove all plugins you don’t use.
Using Canonical URL Tags
Canonical tags were introduced a while ago, but they are still not commonly known among webmasters and SEOs.
Basically, a canonical URL tag looks like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://domain.com/article-about-something/” />
It can be placed in the <head> section of an HTML page. What it does is it tells search engines that the current page is only a copy of the page marked as the canonical. This results in search engines not indexing the current page and giving all credit to the canonical page.
This tag can be useful if you have duplicate content on your site indexed under two or more URLs. By using the canonical tag you can choose which one of these pages you want to rank.
Note. Don’t forget about the other side of SEO – the off-page. To be honest, you won’t be able to get any decent rankings without doing link building or other off-page SEO practices.
This closes the guide. Is there anything you find challenging about on-page SEO, anything you have problems with? Feel free to share in the comments.
Guest article written by: Karol K. is a 20-something year old web 2.0 entrepreneur from Poland and a writer at ThemeFuse.com, where he shares various WordPress advice. Don’t forget to visit ThemeFuse to get your hands on some premium WordPress themes (warning: no boring stuff like everyone else offers).
Very useful SEO tips; thanks! I do use canonical tags on my blog. Good to be confirmed its usefulness. Cheers!
Awesome post. Many bloggers seem to forget to maintain their blog in top shape and this not only looks bad for the readers. but SEO can scan and identify when a blog is being taken care or not.
Think your blog as a room where people meet – you surely want it to be clean!
Bloggers begin their work by logging in to a Content Management System. This is the inner workings of the blog, where the writer can create new posts, edit old ones, manage user comments and set up the blog’s look and feel.
I’m as guilty as most bloggers are when it comes to removing broken links. It used to be so tiring to keep track of all the links in all of my sites, especially those with over 100 pages of content. Thank God for a plugin I found which reports broken links.
I appreciate your article as it is very informative. I am really interested in the part wherein Google also consider the speed of the site when it comes to ranking. What if you have lots of plugins and you are using all of them? Is there other way that you can make your site works faster? Just a question in mind. Have a great day!
Chris
Oh, such useful advices. I have never thougth that website loading speed would have anything to do with your rankings. Thanks for that tip!
Thanks for recommending W3 Total Cache plugin. This plugin seems to be getting good ratings from users and I’m trying it on one of my sites now and it really improves site speed significantly!
As per the current trend in the SEO, make use of CSS and HTML 5 in the website design is the best for making SEO friendly website but that is also true that broken links will create a bad impact on the SEO in the terms of traffic on the site.