There are two kinds of SEO – off-site optimization and on-site optimization. You have the most control over on-site optimization. This is the optimization that tells a search engine what your site is about, the title of your site, and what the images and content’s subject is. The structure of your website, the internal code of your website, the keyword density of each page and many other factors play into on-site SEO. They are not only easy to implement but also very effective at increasing site rank.

One of the most important elements of on-site SEO is in your code. The wrong code can greatly impact your on-site SEO. Due to this, it’s important to find a web developer, or use SEO WordPress Press Themes and plug-ins that help keep the code in line with good SEO practices. The wrong code can essentially ruin your page rank, so this is an important aspect of effective on-site SEO.

Don’t try tricks like hiding keywords in CSS code, or using white on white text with keywords etc. This doesn’t work. Google will notice, and there is no point in trying to trick search engines to index your site. Write the site for humans, but include items for search engines, too. Ensure that your code allows robots to enter your site via the meta robots tag. Check your source code for “nofollow” tags. Do you really mean to have that there?

Use the HTML head elements properly, avoiding duplicates. Crafting well-formed head elements, title tags and meta description will create a more professional-looking site that when it shows up in a keyword search tells the searcher that your site is the right one for them by the words used in the link and description. Ensure that you only have one of each element on each page; sometimes website builders, plug-ins, and other add-on create double code problems which cannot be seen to the website visitor, but can be seen by viewing the source code.

When using JavaScript, separate the code into its own file. It will be easier to edit than if you included the script onto each page of the site. Anytime you can consolidate code and avoid using it more than once, all the better. Plus, if a script is no longer used on your site, get rid of it. No point in having any extraneous scripts floating around on your site. In addition, always check for malformed code and broken links. Broken links can downgrade your site fast.

Unfortunately, errors do happen. Someone clicks through to your website to content that for some reason won’t show up. They end up sending an error page, called a 404 error, which usually says “the page cannot be found”.

So that this doesn’t happen, create a new 404 error page that includes a few text links to some popular pages on your website, a search window, and perhaps a report form, so that you’ll know a particular page is down. This serves the purpose of giving them options aside from just clicking away from your website. There are a lot of neat ways to create 404 error pages that are humorous, helpful and do double duty as help to your readers, and add additional internal linkage for great onsite SEO.

Clean code will encourage pages to load faster, look more professional, and help your site get indexed properly by the major search engines. Coding your site well is a primary aspect of onsite SEO in addition to ensuring that URLs, titles, headings, links, descriptions and anchor text all use keywords and keyword phrases that are appropriate for your target audience for the products and services that you provide.