20 On-Page SEO Tips & Techniques

This article has been contributed by Faizan Khamisani.

There are many on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques that we can use for each of our websites, some that often get overlooked. So, here is a checklist of the most important techniques that we can use for 2014, 2015 and beyond.

Editor’s note: Some of these have been around for a while but they are always good as a refresher.

Title Tag

The best and most effective way to use the title tag is to not to make the title tag longer than 70 characters. The title should be according to your page; try to use the long phrased keyword within the title tag.

Description Tag

Use this tag smartly. Describe your page content and try to use your most competitive keywords in the text. Use no more than 160 characters.

Keywords Tag

We all know that Google stated that this tag does not affect your rankings but there are many SEOs, who still use this tag for other search engines. Target your 5 most competitive keywords within the tag.

HX  (Heading) Tags

Use HX tags with each of your main article headings / sections. Use h1 for the main headings and the rest in h2, h3, h4 and so on. Try use your keywords in the headings and highlight them in the eye of search engines with these HX tags.

Images

Optimize each image with ALT and Title tags. Image name can also be optimized; try to use the keywords smartly within the tags as well.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Try not to use signs like &, Spaces, ?, etc in your URLs otherwise it can come across as spammy. Ask your developer to make the URLs look easy to read, short and clean.

Quality Content Is King

As we all know “Content is King” in the SEO industry, so we can’t ignore this one. Each page should have a minimum of 500 words of great quality content.

Navigation

Make sure your navigation is crawlable, whether it be text or image based.

JavaScript/CSS External

Externalize the JS and CSS codes to make your website pages load faster. Take this with a grain of salt as it’s not always the best choice in any case. Sometimes it’s better to use pregressively inline JS and CSS for faster rendering and perceived time.

Internal linking

Internal linking will help you to engage your customers within the website. Internal linking will also help you to control the bounce rate as well.

External pages

Adding links to external high quality website (not just popular) resources builds a good relation in the eye of search engines and this trust will help the websites to get higher positions on search engines.

Geo-tagging

Use geo-tagging to let your users and search engines see your actual business location.

Authorship Markups

Use authorship to take the ownership of the content you publish on your website.

Sociability

Add social media buttons to encourage your readers to share your website’s content on their profiles. Websites with social signals can get better rankings in search engines.

XML SiteMap

Create xml sitemap and add each of your website in it. You can submit to sitemap in Google and Bing webmaster tools to make your website index soon.

Robots.txt

Updated: The robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.

Analytics

Make sure you have added and setup the analytics code so you can properly analyze your website.

Webmaster Tools

Add and verify the ownership of your websites via Google Webmaster Tools. These webmaster tools will also help to analyze the on-page validations.

Xenu (Broken Links)

Xenu is free software to find broken links within your web pages. Find and fix those broken links as soon as you find them.

Hosting

A website hosting server should be up and running 24/7, with at least 99.9% uptime. A website with too much downtime can be de-indexed from and won’t be able to rank higher on search engines.

Have any more SEO tips for 2014 to share?

Faizan Khamisani is a Blogger and SEO Expert; you can contact him anytime on Twitter and Google+.

Source