The Top 10 On-Page SEO Factors to Ignore at Your Peril

When you optimise your website for SEO, your campaign really lives and dies by the on-page factors. Whether for a new website, a website re-design or an existing site, the following ten on-page factors are important to any SEO campaign and all make a contribution towards how well your site ranks in the search engines.

• Valid HTML: This helps developers to clean up their code. The HTML Validation tool at http://validator.w3.org checks your website's code and feeds back about errors and warnings. You may have failed to close a tag, added an extra character somewhere, duplicated attributes, etc. W3.org defines the HTML standards, meaning that if you have errors and warnings you are not completely compliant with best practice HTML.
  While a small issue in the grand scheme of on-page SEO, every little helps when it comes to increasing the general perception of your website by the search engines, so meeting best practice standards by having error-free HTML can only be a good thing.
  
• Page Load Speed: Just like HTML validation, page load speed is a small consideration in the grand scheme of things, though Google has confirmed it is a ranking factor. The Google Page Load Speed tool gives you a score out of 100, and then tells you exactly what you need to do to improve that score to the letter. Google's tool will even give you optimised images of a smaller file size to replace your current ones to make it easier for you.
  The optimum speed is over 80 out of 100, and with all the help that tool provides, you really have no excuse to avoid making the simple changes.
  
• Internal Linking: The internal links on your website can help to point Google in the right direction to work out which pages should rank for which keywords. While the search engine algorithms are very intelligent, give them a helping hand when you can to point them in the direction you want!
  
• Rel="Canonical": If you have pagination on your website, for example multiple pages of product listings, you should look at using a rel="canonical" tag to ensure that all of those extra pages point back to the original page. This ensures just the original page gets indexed in Google, not the many pages of duplicate content.
  
• Working Links: It may seem obvious, but if any of the links on a website don't work then it devalues your entire domain in the eyes of the search engine robots, as they have to spend time backtracking and working out where they should go next. Search engines also realise this is bad for the user and this can damage your listings.
  One or two broken links may be a mistake, but if the search engine spider finds many broken links then your rankings will suffer, and you will annoy your users and potential customers.
  
• URLs: Create a linear URL structure for your website as both users and search engines will find this easy to understand. Your URLs should be optimised to include keywords and should follow the structure of the website, for example /dvds/sport-dvds/product-name. Some websites have URLs with random characters such as /786858/?34543543543, and the subject of these could be anything.
  The URL is one of the first clues to a search engine what a page is about and you should make it very obvious by including the keywords that you want Google to see in the URL - within reason and in a natural way, of course.
  
• Website Structure: A well-structured website can help search engines to find all your pages by making it easier for their robots to find their way around the site, as well as doing the same for the users.
  It is also imperative that within that structure you have only one page for each group of keywords; for example, one for "jobs in medicine" rather than having "job in medicine" and "medicine jobs" pages as well.
  
• Titles: Along with the URL, titles are the first indication to the search engines of the subject of your page, so you should ensure your titles are descriptive. The keywords should be in your title in a natural way and should tell both search engines and users exactly what they will find on that page.
  
• Unique Content: Having duplicated content (i.e. exactly or mostly the same) on multiple pages of your website may lead to all of those pages being excluded from the listings, or as a best case scenario will mean a less important page is listed instead of a target page.
  
• Great Quality Content: Don't add just any old content to your website; make your content entertaining, useful and relevant. Google will not index pages if it believes feels the content is generic or simply of poor quality. Your content must also serve the purpose of driving conversions by actually speaking to the audience and telling them what they need to know.

So there you have it – 10 top tips for making sure your get your on-page optimisation right. There are many other ranking factors and this is not some magical quick fix for your SEO woes, however follow these tips as a base guide and you will definitely be going in the right direction! 

This post was written by Ian Collins of I-COM, an Internet Marketing Agency that provides services including website development and SEO services in Manchester.

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Guest Post: Using PPC for Your SEO to Get a Higher ROI on Your SEM

Pay per click advertising (PPC) is one of the most popular and oldest online marketing methods. It is inexpensive, effective and highly targeted. PPC can be used to successfully increase traffic and establish brand awareness.

PPC, however, is much more than simple promotional tool. It can be successfully incorporated in a website's search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. SEO and PPC can work together in an attempt to improve the search engine marketing (SEM) of a website.

This strategy is the one that guarantees biggest return on investment or ROI. It sounds like a complicated task but using SEO and PPC together can often be the most effective strategy for better search engine positioning of a website.

Keyword Research: Keyword research is the heart and soul of search engine optimization and it will remain one of the most important aspects connected to website content. PPC can be used efficiently to test keywords and improve your SEO strategy.

PPC campaigns are inexpensive to carry out. In addition, they require keyword research for the selection of the best channel and the targeting of the commercial message. Trial and error via PPC is less expensive than getting keywords to rank through SEO only to find out later that they don't get the expected amount of traffic and conversions.

PPC keyword research can be utilized to analyze the market and to decide which keywords will be most appropriate for the website's SEO. Optimizing a website for a specific keyword that is inefficient will be time consuming and costly. PPC can be utilized to run tests before introducing an effective and successful SEO strategy.

What is SEM and How to Use It?
Search engine marketing differs from SEO and it incorporates various techniques. SEO and PPC can be blended for better SEM and for more cost-effective promotional strategy.

Search engine marketing has one main aim - higher website traffic through better website exposure in search engines. This can be achieved through organic SEO that requires no ongoing payment or through PPC that results in paid search engine results appearing on top of the free results or on the right side of the search results.

This fact demonstrates that both PPC and SEO play a role in terms of SEM. Studies have been done to find out whether people are willing to trust organic SEO results more than PPC marketing messages. The results are ambiguous and it seems that they depend on the type of message and the things that search engine users are looking for.

People who are looking for content tend to be more willing to trust organic SEO results. When products are involved, however, PPC tends to be just as effective. Website promotion and SEM can benefit from both. The two strategies combined may also increase the click through rates and conversion rates as compared to just choosing one strategy.

SEO benefits from PPC and PPC can benefit from SEO in return. Relying on a single keyword or a single campaign is usually a less effective approach. Experienced web marketing experts will tell you that you need to utilize all available channels for the best results.

You can often tell quickly from looking at the reports if a PPC campaign is profitable and which keywords are the most lucrative. Focus your SEO efforts on the best keywords, especially the ones that are easiest to rank for.

PPC and SEO are two good strategies that will improve your search engine marketing efforts. A combined approach allows you to analyze results, compare statistics and deal with the shortcomings of your approach. Although PPC requires payment, it enables you to see what kind of traffic and conversions you can get for a specific keyword before spending resources and time on SEO.

Jamie Highland is a writer and internet marketer for My Baby Shower Favors, a site that sells baby shower favors and other party supplies grouped by baby shower themes. Jamie discusses how you can use PPC to get a better return on your SEO efforts.

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