SEO Best Practices – Part 2
by Team Position2

How on-page Search Engine Optimization can boost your organic search results

In Part 1 of the blog, we discussed a few important on-page SEO factors that are essential to get high rankings in the Search Engine ranking pages.

This part will cover the rest of the top-nine Search Engine ranking factors. These factors include:

1. Header Tags:

Header tags such as H1, H2 … H6 define the headings in HTML documents or pages. The main heading on the page is defined using H1 tags , followed by H2, H3… H6.

These header tags help search engines identify the important keywords of the particular web page.

Given below is an example of a heading tag.

E.g.: <h1> Search Marketing & Social Media Marketing Solutions</h1>

2. File naming:

It is good practice to use your important keywords in the file names of images, documents, sound and video clips, etc. Ensure that you describe your files well by choosing keywords that describe the image or the file.

File naming helps images or documents to be searched across Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo!

E.g.

1. search-social-media-marketing.jpg

2. social-media-marketing-whitepaper.pdf

3. Alt tags for images:

Search Engine spiders are unable to read the content present within an image. We recommended that you include an alternate text in the HTML code of the image. The alternate text should describe the image and should also contain keywords being optimized for the page.

E.g.: <img src=”/images/ social-media-marketing.jpg” alt= Social Media Marketing Company” />

4. Use Anchor texts:

An anchor text is text that links a term to a particular webpage. Ensure that your anchor text contains keywords. Anchor text that points to a destination page is considered as a vote given by the page where the link appears. Anchor texts are generally of two types,

1. External links – links pointing from sites other than yours

2. Internal links – links present within your website

E.g. If your home page is about “Social Media Marketing”, then it is recommended you use keywords in your anchor text links as “social media marketing” and then point it to the homepage.

<a href=”www.position2.com”>social media marketing </a>

5. Variations of tags:

It is good to place important keywords inside tags such as:

a. bold tag

b. Strong tag

c. Italics tag

d. Emphasis tag

These tags helps Search Engines identify an important word present in the content of the page.

E.g. Position2 has emerged as a pioneer in the field of Search and Social Media Marketing

6. Links to external pages:

External website links help in bringing quality visitors and will have a positive impact on search engine rankings. Ensure your site links to related domains or categories.

7. HTML/XHTML/CSS validation of a webpage as per W3C standards:

Validation is the process of checking your document against the authoritative body, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which governs the standard of coding for websites. W3C standards are the benchmark for web development and are developed for cross-browser compliance and general usability. By having your website validated on W3C, you can minimize errors present in your website’s coding and ensure that your website loads correctly across all browsers.

8. Adding a sitemap:

Sitemaps are an essential element of website optimization. Sitemaps help users and Search Engines to find the pages present in your site. There are two types of sitemaps, HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. An HTML sitemap should help users navigate within the website, while an XML sitemap is meant for search engines.

9. Adding Robots.txt:

A robots.txt is a file that is placed on your server to avoid Search Engine spiders from crawling or indexing confidential pages of your site. It is also used to disallow broken links and pages that are unimportant to visitors who come to your website.

The file is a text file, which can be created in Notepad. It should be saved to the root directory of your site.

E.g. www.position2.com/robots.txt

The robots file should contain:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /paid-downloads

Disallow: /admin-login

In the next part, we will talk about elements of on-page Search Engine optimization that should be avoided.

Contributed by Asha Krishnan

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