Eight On-Page SEO Magic Bullets

In SEO, if your competition is savvy, top search rankings comes down to time, creativity, dedication and persistence. However, if your competition is not savvy, or you are just starting out in the field, there are a few things you can do to make a big difference in how search engines  view your pages. Today we are looking at the simple little on-page tasks that everybody (or their SEO firm) can do in less than a week, to instantly gain kudos with the search engines.

Magic SEO bullet breaks the Google front page barrier

1. Ensure internal links contain anchor text

Your own website is the place you have the most control … use it! Ensure that when you link to another page on your site, it is with relevant, keyworded anchor text.

2. Use your H1 tag

This is a must on all pages! The H1 tag is one of the major ways that Google decides what a page is about – one of the strongest ways to ensure that it matches a page up with a user search.

3. Use your H2 and H3 tags

Same as above. Not using these tags is a massive wasted opportunity.

4. Move the keywords to the front of the title tag

In some sites you will really have to prioritise the pages that you do this activity on … because it is a bit transparent when every one of your page headings starts with ‘Melbourne hotel‘, or ‘hotel in Melbourne’ or ‘Luxury Bangkok hotel’ or ‘Discounts on Bangkok hotels’ that you care more about the search engines than you do about accurately describing content for your readers. A good page structure, created with SEO in mind, is obviously of help here.

5. Bold your keywords

Use the <strong> code to bold at least one instance of the keyword that you are targeting. No point overdoing this one … so it takes very little time.

6. Use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs

Google indexes punctuation, including underscores. It will recognise the words “Bangkok_hotel” within a URL as a single word. However, if you write “Bangkok-hotel” the page will rank for Bangkok, for hotel, and especially for Bangkok hotel.

7. Put alt tags on your photos and images

It doesn’t make a huge difference, but if you don’t add your alt tags, it is just another wasted opportunity. SEO has become such a big game that every one of these little things is absolutely necessary … if you wan to be competitive.

8. Don’t put anything more than three clicks away from the home page

Three degrees of separation is the golden rule for both users and search engines.