Jun

5 On-Page SEO Tips to Rank Higher in Search Results

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5 On-Page SEO Tips to Rank Higher in Search Results

Here are some on-page SEO considerations to help your website rank higher in search engines:

1. According to Matt Cutts (Google’s webspam guru), using tables instead of CSS has no impact on how your site is crawled and indexed (at least by Google). So while tables are considered old-school, they aren’t penalized and are still very useful in certain instances.

2. According to Matt Cutts, Google can now crawl and interpret Javascript links and a lot of Javascript code itself. In fact, they are getting quite sophisticated at doing so. (See Matt Cutts’ videos on YouTube for an example…it’s pretty amazing!) However, don’t risk putting important content in Javascript in the event Google (and other search engines) have trouble crawling it since they currently can’t interpret all Javascript code. I guess a good rule would be to make things as easy for the search engines as possible, despite how sophisticated the engines are becoming. Therefore, include your content on your pages as text in HTML tags.

3. Google always says, “if you design your website with your users in mind, then that will take care of most SEO issues.” I have to disagree with Google on this point because they contradict themselves when they say they can’t crawl Flash websites, images, videos, etc. These multimedia elements make websites much more interesting and engaging for users, but they are a black hole to search engines. I can understand why Google can’t crawl these elements, but then they shouldn’t be giving people the direction they do. I guess the take-away is to write the content of the website with users in mind, but design the structure and elements of your website with the search engines in mind.

4. According to Matt Cutts, code bloat is no longer an issue for Google. They used to only crawl the first 100k of a page, but with their upgraded systems they will crawl your entire page (within reason). So even if you have relevant content at the bottom of your page preceded by tons of extraneous code, Google will still crawl and index that content. But making life easier for search engines is always better, and eliminating any unnecessary code is a good idea.

5. Matt Cutts made a point to webmasters to ensure their internal linking structure is robust to help search engines index deep into your website. Along those lines, Matt also said that links in the content of your page are given more weight by Google than navigational links in menus and footers that appear on every page and aren’t surrounded by relevant content. So if you have a page you definitely want Google to index, be sure to link to it in your content and don’t just rely on your navigational link structure.

Good luck in your SEO efforts, and remember that building relevant, one-way, “followable” backlinks is the absolute key to ranking higher in search results. It trumps all of your other SEO efforts.

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