SEO OnPage Factors

It is safe to say that SEO can be split under many sub categories, the two main ones. 
1. On Page SEO and 
2. Off Page SEO.

You can always control On Page SEO. You can’t always Control off Page SEO.

Here is a list of On Page SEO Factors you need to look out for

1.      Keyword in Domain

2.      File Naming

a.       Should Be Relevant. Don’t call your home page “Home”.

b.      All keywords in the URL are necessary

c.       Make sure you use dashes instead of underscores. (If we give _ it will be taken as a single phrase not as different words). The other method for spaced words is

                                                              i.      Weekly-Offers-Online = Weekly Offers Online

                                                            ii.      Weekly_Offers_Online = WeeklyOffersOnline

3.      Title Tag

a.       All Title Tags should be related to the page.

b.      When your site is listing in a Search Engine Listing, the title plays an important factor in your Click through Rate

c.       Under no circumstances should you leave your Title Tag Blank.

d.      Make sure you put keywords here.

e.       There are 2 factors you ne

f.       ed to take into consideration.

                                                              i.      Prominence = How far to the left your keyword is

                                                            ii.      Proximity = How often is your keyword shown in your title.

4.      Description Tag

a.       The Description Tag does not hold much weight for Ranking Purposes.

b.      However search engines use it as a “snippet” of text that the search engines post from your page.

c.       Sometimes search engines like Google will choose the snippet text for you and will completely ignore the description tag.

5.      Body/ Copy Text

a.       Make sure that the body is relevant to the title and the description tags.

b.      Keywords should add up to not more than 20% of your body copy

6.      Headings

a.       Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines.

b.      Tip is use only 1 <H1> Tag per page

7.      Avoid canonicalization of URL

a.       Canonicalization errors occurs when a website is able to be accessed via both www.website.com and website.com

b.      Worse than that would be if you use also linked to the home page in different combinations throughout your website

8.      Validate your code and feeds

a.       Use http://validator.w3.org/ for to validate my websites and http://feedvalidator.org/ for my Feeds (RSS1,RSS2 and Atom) to make they are crawlable by spiders.

9.      XML sitemaps

a.       XML sitemaps are a way of communicating to Google and other search engines the page structure of your site.

b.      Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:

                                                              i.      All site pages are crawled and indexed.

                                                            ii.      Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.

                                                          iii.      New site pages are quickly indexed.

10.  Good Fresh Content

a.       Pages you update frequently are crawled more frequently by bots

b.      There are websites who rank without having any SEOs working on them just because of this factor, however if you have a good website and you know Search Engine Optimization, then you will most definitely have more edge over your competitors.

11.  Create Robots.txt file

a.       The robots.txt file is a form of communication between visiting robots (spiders) that index the content of your web site pages.

b.      Every search engine has a spider, Google has one and so do Yahoo!, Msn and Ask.( program that visits your website and takes information to be analyzed later by the search engines.)

c.       The robots.txt file resides in the root directory, http://BonsaiJon.com/robots.txt

12.  Hosting

a.       Choose a good hosting provider (get a decent server)

b.      In a server, if there are many spam sites, server gets black listed.

c.       Google doesn’t like slow websites either and you may be penalized.

13.  Optimize Images

a.       Search Engine Spiders DO NOT see images. They see only text, however we can also optimize our images for SEO.

b.      Size maters for SEO (Image size 1K-35K)

c.       Quantity

d.      Use ALT and TITLE tags

14.  Site age

a.       Websites are like wine (old- trust worthy)

15.  Be certain that all links are valid

a.       Linked properly

b.      Google Webmaster Tools (complains if it notices dead links)

16.  Website folder names

a.       Putting your keywords into your file names

Ex:   www.example.com/recipe1.html Do this instead www.example.com/pie-recipes/apple-pie.html