In our previous article, we mentioned that there are two types of SEO job that you need to apply into your blog so that it will be ranked high up the search engine result pages. These are On-Site SEO, and the Off-Site SEO.

What is On-Site SEO?

On-Site SEO, is an optimization for the search engine which is done on the website itself. The job is to make the parts of every webpage of the website appealing to the search engines.

If you already had set up your website, then what we need to do is to modify the parts of your website especially those given more weights by the search engine in ranking webpages at their organic search result.

But you should not forget that even if you are trying to make your website appealing to the search engine, it should also be appealing to the human who visits your website.

Major search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, will penalize websites that are made for the search engine alone. So instead of getting the higher ranking in the search result, if your website has been penalized already, you’ll never find it on the SERP, not even on the last page of it.

Why should they penalize websites intended for the search engines alone?

The search engines are just tools. They are created so that internet users would easily find the specific website that contains the information they are looking for.

Now, if you’ll make a website which doesn’t have content that are useful to the internet users, then you are just disturbing the normal result of the searches made through the search engines and you are only helping the search engine to fail to fulfill their missions and visions. So, to avoid this scenario, the people behind the search engines decided to penalize these kind of websites.

In other words, what we need to do is the proper and acceptable modification of the parts of the website.

On-Site SEO application

1.) Domain

If you haven’t setup yet your website, then consider registering the domain which is relevant to the topic of it.

For example, if you want to build a website that talks about Basketball, basketball products, and basketball events, then you need to use a domain that mentions basketball, ie. “yourbasketballinfo.com”.

However, if you already had register a domain which is not relevant to the topic of your blog, it’s just okay. But it would be better if the domain is relevant to the topic for its greater SEO weight.

2.) URL

The URL of every pages of your blog should contain important information about the page. For example, in a webpage that talks about the schedule of PBA events, you can use the URL: “yourbasketballinfo.com/PBA-schedule-of-events.html”

The reason for doing this is because there are other bloggers who tend to link into your blog’s webpage by simply using the URL instead of using anchor text.

In other words, a URL that contains information about the webpage will give the internet users and also the search engine a relevant information about that webpage. While the internet users will be enticed to click on the link at the other websites, the search engines will give more weight to that particular webpage in the keywords found at the URL.

But then you need to avoid using excessive keywords in the URL for it might just cause a penalty from the search engine.

3.) Page Title

Make the Page Title accurately describe the blog. In our example, our blog is about Basketball, basketball products, and basketball events. So, making your Page Title accurately describing the blog, it should be “Basketball: Information, Products and Events“.

Make sure that each of the webpage has its own Page Title other wise the search engine will be forced to consider other webpage with the same Page Titles as duplicate copies and therefore the search engine will also be forced to choose 1 webpage as original and the other will be thrown into trash for they are just duplicate.

And one more thing, the Page Title should be short but much descriptive.

4.) “Description” Meta Tag

SEO gurus have different thoughts about the “Description” meta tag of the webpage. Others say that it’s not already used by the search engines in ranking webpages. But others say that search engines are still giving weights to the content of the “Description” meta tag.

Whatever is true, we should still make use of it. It’s because search engines often times use the content of it as the description of the webpage listed on the SERP.

5.) Content

Your blog’s content are the articles you published in your blog.

Make sure that your articles have quality and are relevant to your blog. Make use of the relevant keywords and their synonyms in composing your article.

Use properly the H tags (H1, H2, H3, H4) and the “Bold” (strong) style of text. Some SEO experts said that search engines are giving greater weights on the keywords enclosed by the “H” tags and “Bold” tags.

And of course, make sure that you interlink your articles using your targeted keywords as the anchor texts.

And if you’ll use images in your articles, make use of the “ALT” tag.

6.) Sitemap

HTML sitemaps might be helpful to your visitors in finding the information they are looking for. However, HTML sitemaps and also the XML sitemaps is very much important so that the search engine will find and spider every pages of your blog.

More SEO Articles

I will be writing more articles related to On-Site SEO so that I can explain every details on how to apply the on-site SEO into your blog. If you have questions and suggestions or comments, simply reply this email or just visit the live version of this article, “On-Site Search Engine Optimization“.