Simple On-page SEO Tips

It can be intimidating to come up with link-building tactics or marketing campaigns. While those efforts are worthwhile, especially long-term, sometimes it’s nice to just make some concrete on-page changes. Tweaking your website copy doesn’t hurt your standing; it helps, because search engines reward sites for constantly-changing content. And don’t forget to keep track of your analytics – if you notice something isn’t working the way you expected, you can always change it back!
Here are some good changes to start with:

Title

When titling your blog posts, make sure that you include your most important keywords close to the beginning of the title, while still making it enticing to read.

You also need to make sure your blog is set up to put the post title into the title tags of the actual page. Some blogs include the site name after the post title, and some keep it simple by only using the post title. Either way, just make sure all of your posts don’t have the same title tag, or they will all end up competing for the same keywords and search engines and users will have a harder time telling the differences between the pages.

Meta tags

The descriptions entered into meta tags are not worth a lot in most search engine algorithms, but the meta text is still often displayed under the page title in the search engine results. Write your meta tags to include some keywords without being hard-to-read. Also make sure the text is informative, engaging, and representative of the content on your page, to encourage people to click and stay.

Alt text

When adding pictures to your blog post, try to find original pictures that are meaningful, not just pretty. Then add very descriptive alt text to the pictures, as well as descriptive file names. This can help your pictures be ranked higher in image searches, where it is often easier to rank for a high-quality term.

Alt text is also useful outside of search engines, as people with screen readers or other specialty devices cannot view or access the images, but can find the text.

Subheadings

Search engines give more weight to terms appearing in header tags within your text. Make sure your subheadings are literal and descriptive, and format them using Header 1, 2, and 3 tags instead of just making them bold. Remember that you can use CSS to format header tags to look however you want, but they still communicate importance to search engines no matter how they look.

Links

Don’t forget to include a few high-quality links in your body text. You can link to relevant posts internally, and you can also link to other great sites. It’s good to affiliate yourself with similar sites by linking to them.

Linking to other sites can also be a good link-building strategy as your blog begins to attract more visitors. Often, site owners will look into the major sources of their traffic, especially if they see a traffic spike, which will help your blog get their attention.

Schemas

If you really want to cater to search engines, you can use the HTML schemas detailed on schema.org to communicate with search engine crawlers for Bing, Google, and Yahoo.

These schemas are especially good if you are writing a post about an affiliate offer, an event, an organization, or a person. You can also identify non-text objects, like audio, video, and images with descriptions. Because schemas were announced in the spring of 2011, it still isn’t clear how widely-used they will be – but giving search engines better information about your content is always important.

Content

Most importantly, make sure you are writing quality, descriptive content. Focus on including clear details and a wide vocabulary to get hits from more long-tail search terms. Repetitive writing and high keyword density are out-dated SEO techniques that are no longer effective. Instead, using related words and phrases are analyzed by search engines to give more accurate, interesting results.

Writing good content is also important outside of just improving your search engine ranking. Once someone clicks your link, they will be more likely to stay on your page if it has high-quality, interesting writing. And having readers spread the news about your work is the best SEO of all!