Blog

October 6th, 2013

To promote our new search engine optimization packages and to celebrate our new found position at the top of Google, we've put together a list of the basic on-page SEO tasks you can do to help get that lucrative page 1 position in the search engines.

SEO is no easy to task, but take the time to optimize your website and the rewards can be well worth it! We've recently taken our own website from the depths of Google to numero uno for the search terms "web design telford". If you're unsure on how your site could be improved with SEO, contact us about a FREE Website Review or take a look at our SEO Packages.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves tweaking the content and structure of your website itself to help influence your ranking.

• Content is king

The content of your site is what makes it worthy of a search engine rank. It's what your visitors come to see and therefore makes it an extremely important factor to the search engines. Your content should be informative, relevant and include the keywords you want to optimize for. Be careful when placing your keywords as too many could be considered spamming or "keyword stuffing", this can have a negative effect on your ranking. The keywords should be worked into the content in a natural way, think user first, optimization second.

• Title tags

That brief bit of text that appears at the top of your browser window, i.e. "Blog | Search Engine Optimization - The Basics | Yellow Marshmallow", is the page title. This is set in the

section of your code within thetags. This title is what the search engines use to display your site on their results pages. It therefore needs to clearly and concisely show what your pages are about. Titles should be no longer than 70 characters, otherwise they will be truncated (cut short...) and should include your main keywords and company name. If you are targeting a specific location it also helps to include this in your page titles.

• URL & Domain Name

The domain name of a website can play a part in influencing search engine positions. For example, let's say we had two brand new websites, both selling and optimizing for "custom built PCs". One called www.totallyawesomecomputers.co.uk, and the other www.custombuiltpcs.co.uk, which would get the head start? You guessed it, the site with the targeted keywords in will get an added boost purely for having a domain name relevant to the search term. This doesn't play a huge part in your ranking and it's quite possible to overtake keyword rich domains if your website has better content and optimization everywhere else. Take Yellow Marshmallow as a prime example! 

SEO friendly URLs also help with on-page optimization by including your main keywords in your page URL and giving a clear reflection of the page hierarchy. A bad example of an SEO friendly URL would be something like "www.custombuiltpcs.co.uk/id/24298345". This doesn't tell the visitor or the search engines what this page is, where it's linked to or the category it might fall in. A better example would be "www.custombuiltpcs.co.uk/budget-pcs/intel-core-duo-gaming-pc".

• Image Alt & Title Tags

Alt and title tags are used to show alternate text about a specific image on your web page. When a visitor hovers over an image, this is the text that shows up in a caption box. Not only does it give extra information about an image, it also allows users with disabilities to read your content much easier. Blind users can browse the web using page readers that read out the alternative text to explain to them what an image is. Search engines like to see that your site is accessible for any user.

• Sitemaps

Sitemaps do what they say on the tin. They include a list of all the URLs you have on your website and allow a webmaster to inform the search engines about all of their pages. It gives the search engines an idea of the sites structure so they can crawl the pages more efficiently.

These are just a few of the on-page techniques we use to optimize our websites but they can make a world of difference to your search engine position and also to how usable visitors find your website. To find out more about how Yellow Marshmallow can help you climb the SEO ladder, get in touch!