On Page SEO: Introduction
On-page SEO is something you do on (or to) your site to boost you search engine rankings. It involves making your site more search engine friendly.
On-Page SEO can be further broken down into different page facets and changes. These are:
· Site Title
· H1 Tags
· Keyword Density
· Internal Link Structure
This list is not exhaustive. The are also webmaster best practices that boosts your rankings
Broken Links
Make sure that all your links work. Broken links gives you the 404 (Page Not Found) error. What it means is that the page your link is pointing to does not exist (wrong address). What you need to do is to correct the address, and you are back in business. You can check for broken links on your site by:
a) Checking the error log on your CPanel. At your CPanel homepage, look for "Error Log" icon among the icons in your CPanel. It will display a list of broken links on your site. You now have to play the detective to go to the file in question and figure out what is causing the broken link and correct it.
b) Checking them manually by clicking on them manually to confirm they work, and also they take you to where it says it would. If not, make the correction.
c) Another option (if your site is large i.e. has many pages) is to use a link checker. A lot of them are free. Do a Google search for "free links checker", and you will find more than enough. Select the one of the top four, and at the site, you will be asked for your URL (website address). When you you submit, the site will launch a spider (site crawling software) that crawls your site and reports it's findings which you can save in a txt file, and check out one by one.
Broken links frustrate search engine spiders (crawlers) which will make them turn back without covering your whole site. Spiders follow links, and when a link leads to nowhere (broken), they will definitely not be able to locate the page. What this means that the pages affected will not be indexed by the search engines, which means some valuable content and links that would have boosted your rankings are lost.
Page Size and Coding
Your page size and coding can affect your ranking. If your page is too large and takes forever to load, it will not only frustrate human visitors but also search engine spiders. If the spider gets stuck in your home page, it may abort the trip and move on to another site.
Apart from the actual content on your home page (which in most cases is quite low), the single most important reason for bloated page size is poor coding, tons of unnecessary code. While designing your site, use minimum coding to give give you the desired effect. MS Frontpage is a major culprit in dumping junk codes in your file while you have fun moving things around in the front end. This is one of the reasons you need to be familiar with HTML, and better still use another HTML editor for your design.
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