Tips to Improve Your On-Site SEO
On-site search engine optimisation is often misunderstood, misused and sometimes may have been overlooked completely. This is bad because your website is still something which…
On-site search engine optimisation is often misunderstood, misused and sometimes may have been overlooked completely. This is bad because your website is still something which plays a huge part in the ranking algorithm so if your site is optimised as much as possible without ruining the user experience, you’re in for a win. Below are 5 short tips to help improve your on-site search engine optimisation.
Tip 1: Fix those 404s!
As a website user, one of the most frustrating things is hitting a link and getting a 404 (even though they can sometimes be really funny). Not only is this bad for the user it’s also bad for spiders crawling your site because it means you’re potentially not distributing PageRank and may even be losing all of your link juice on a page that won’t get indexed or ranked.
The most effective way to find and fix 404s is to run software like Xenu’s Link Sleuth which will crawl your website and make you aware of any errors. The fix here should be two steps:
- Fix on-site links pointing to the 404 and change to the most relevant page or remove completely.
- Redirect the 404ing page to the most relevant page.
Tip 2: Improve your URL Structure
Not only is your URL what users type into the address bar to get to your site, it’s also a small part of Google’s ranking algorithm, that means you should always have a descriptive and keyword-rich URL. This is particularly important for websites which use a non-pretty permalink structure:
If you’re using a system like WordPress, this can be changed in Settings > Permalink in the administration panel, for any other systems you will need to get in touch with the developer of your site.
Tip 3: Rewrite your META descriptions
Whilst META descriptions have very little impact on ranking, they have a massive impact on improving CTR in the SERPs by helping your site stand out from it’s competitors.
Rather than going down the easy route and using a snippet as your META description, try and include useful and unique information or even hire a copywriter to do the work for you throughout your site. Someone who is trained in writing effective marketing copy is ideal.
Written by Jason John Mills