8 Key Elements of On-Site SEO

Backlinks from high-PR pages aren’t the only ways to help your search engine page results. There are plenty of things to do on your site that will help you rank higher in the search engines without any assistance from outside sources. These techniques work especially well if you don’t have much competition.

Buy a URL with your main keyword or phrase in the title. It’s best if you can do this without hyphens, but that’s often not possible. If you can’t buy cheapcars.com, go for cheap-cars.com.

Have each page’s keyword in the title. For example, your page on finding a cheap Camaro (via eBay, for example, where you can include your affiliate link) would be cheapcars.com/camaro or cheapcars.com/chevy-camaro.

Make sure you get specific–and organized. The page above will be great for anyone searching for a Camaro in general, but there will also be plenty of people searching for specific models. So you’ll also want pages like this: cheapcars.com/camaro-1984. Or you can put them all of a certain make, under the same directory, so that you have cheapcars.com/camaro/1984, cheapcars.com/camaro/1984/z28.

Build a site map. If you’re going to build multiple directories and sub-directories, you’ll want a site-map to make sure the spiders go all the way in to your links. Site maps don’t guarantee all of your pages will get indexed, but it makes each one much more likely to get crawled, especially if your linking scheme goes several pages deep.

Use your meta-tags. These aren’t as important as they used to be, but you don’t want to ignore them. Put your keyword(s) in your title tag, and put them as close to the beginning as possible (use each one only once, if possible). The text in your description tag will show up in your search engine listing, so make it relevant and interesting.

Use alternate text for your images. Alternate text is the text that shows in an image box while the image is loading. Make sure you use this opportunity to place a keyword. It will help your page ranking.

Use appropriate anchor text in outgoing links. I.e. if your page is about the 1984 Camaro Z28, you’ll want to include that text in links that leave your page (although, if you have more than a couple of links, putting that anchor text in every single one might be overdoing it.)

Make sure every page on your site is linked to by at least one other page on your site. This isn’t just about SEO, either. Your site is easier to navigate if each page links up into its main directory. You’ll also want to make sure your readers can get back to your home page from any page on the site. If your webpage is user-friendly, the search engines will take note of it and will boost your rankings for it.

Make sure you have relevant, unique content on every page. This one speaks for itself. And don’t let its place on the list fool you–it’s the most important SEO aspect of all. Google’s mantra is “Content is King,” and for good reason. People will quit looking if you’re not relevant.