Onpage SEO and it’s importance

Onpage is the base of any SEO project and is what’s regarded as “best practice”. Any good search company will insist on addressing the onpage factors at the early stages, more often than not, after the keyword enhanced copy has been drafted.

Spiders need to be able to crawl and index a website both quickly and efficiently to be able to read and index those key phrases. By ensuring a website has clean, necessary and validated code is the first step for any SEO campaign.

Accessibility and usability are equally as important with information architecture and structure being key, as are usability functions such as alt and title tags.

Although META keywords are not read by certain search engines, including Google, META is again regarded as “best practise” and should be incorporated at all times and at each level.

Below are our Top Ten Tips for Onpage SEO:

• Ensure that the HTML is clean and validated

• Control functions and styles using an external CSS style sheet

• Good, strong navigation – repeated on the footer of the site

• Information architecture – content flowing from top left to right

• Descriptive alt tags for images and title tags for anchor text

• Descriptive URL’s and filenames using hyphens not underscores

• Avoid Javascript or externalise the code

• Good strong META and Copy, keyword focused and descriptive

• Avoid Flash or use the <noembed> tag

• Create and submit and XML sitemap