Important factors in onsite SEO
April 25th, 2007 by Joost SchrierAlmost all SEO projects we do start with onsite SEO. The reason for this being that a website should be set up correctly before you should start with offsite SEO (who wants to link to or recommend a website that’s no good?). So, what are the basic first steps of onsite SEO?
When doing onsite optimization you first need to take a good hard look at the website’s structure. If you can easily make a visual sitemap of the website (so not too many lines that move all over the place) then you’ve got a start. The second thing you need to do is check if the search engines (read: Google) can easily follow the links to your internal pages.
If the links are made with JavaScript and/or you’re mainly using images as buttons you need a footer bar with text links to your most important pages. The reason for this is that the search engines don’t read JavaScript and prefer text links to image links. When these two structure related concepts are taken care of you’re half-way there. At least your pages will be indexed by the search engines.
After the structure has gotten a big fat A(+) you need to look at the individual pages. Is their internal structure any good? Does the page have a good title? And what about header tags? In short: you need to look at your individual pages as if they are essays. Every essay has a title (title tag), chapters (H1 tag), subchapters (H2 - H5 tags) and paragraphs (p tag). Search engines love a well-crafted essay webpage.
The preceding is all about structure and in no way about the contents of website. Before somebody finds a website in a search engine they need to type in what they are looking for. Here is where you need to think like your client/customes/guest to figure out for which keywords you want to rank high in the search engines. Based on these keywords you write the copy for your website with those searchers in mind who need to find you and, after they have found you, need to become interested in what you are trying to sell or tell them.
For more info about writing ad copy see our post of two days ago about who to write for. In a nutshell (if you don’t want to read yet another article): if you want to be found when somebody searches for “web design curacao” make sure that this phrase and/or its components is present in your website a few times and also make damn sure that you actually have something interesting to say about it.
I’ll leave you with a link to the website seomoz.org where you can find the collective wisdom of great names in the world of SEO. The above is pretty basic and not very thoroughly explained, but we will go into parts of this matter in more dedicated posts soon. What do you say?
