On-Page Basic SEO Tips – Urls, Head and Body Areas

One aspect of SEO is on-page optimization. Here I will be giving some basic tips, yet important factors for achieving positive search engine rankings. Sometimes even experts tend to overlook these issues when planning a new website. One of the most critical factors in my opinion is deciding on a url structure. Although we can change any online url in the future, ideally we shouldn’t. This is because it can create complications, which will be discussed in one of my next posts.

URLs

• It’s very clear that search engines in general, at least for the time being, give a lot of importance to keywords in urls, whether being the domain name, internal directory structure or actual file names. Whilst I personally think it’s more professional not to use hyphens when selecting a domain name, all other keywords in urls should be separated with a hyphen.

Head Area

• A title tag should be unique and be the first tag in the head section. It should “obviously” include (just once) the main key phrase for which we aim to rank for.
• You should not create a title tag longer than 65 chars, since Google will simply not display the rest.
• As regarding the description tag, you can either opt not to make one (if you have optimized content), or create couple unique relevant short sentences for each page. Remember that this description will actually be showing in search results, so it’s suggested to optimize it aiming to maximize click through.
• The meta keywords tag is not that important nowadays, but if you use it, make sure you include just once the most important keywords.

Body Area

• Use hierarchical headings, and insert the main keyword (or a slight variation of it) in an H1. Put related key phrases in the other webpage headings.
• You should emphasis and bold or display in a bigger font the most important keywords throughout the body text. Web surfers usually stay on a page less than a minute, bolded text is a clear indicator of what the page is about and this helps search engines identify your page subject too.
• Keep all content in one page highly relevant to one subject. Using main keywords close to the beginning and even near to the end of a webpage helps in this respect.
• Don’t forget to add descriptive image alt tags and include relevant anchor text links to other pages of your own site or even other websites.