On-page

On-page SEO covers the range of factors you have direct control over in the design of your pages and websites. A few years ago, these factors had a considerably greater effect on your position in search engine results pages, but over time have become less of an influence. As these factors became better understood, more and more sites employed them to boost SEO, so Google and other engines have put less emphasis on these over time.

That’s not to say that on-page SEO doesn’t matter – it does, principally because having good on-page SEO makes your site compare more favorably to those that don’t, and at the very least gives you an equal footing with competition employing the same tactics. And there are still a staggering number of sites in the small and medium-sized business arena that don’t use on-page SEO to its full effect, so the comparative benefit is worth having.

Page structure and attributes

Find out why titles and descriptions are so important, together with a range of other elements that tell search engines about your content.

Problems associated with duplicate content

Duplicate content is a major problem and one of the most unintended negative influences over SERPs. There are many reasons why your site almost certainly has duplicate content.

Web server configuration settings

The .htaccess file is extraordinarily powerful, and can help handle redirects and canonical naming issues.

Outbound links and anchor text

The web is one big network of links so those contained within your webpages do matter. Discover why ‘click here’ is on the least useful anchor text phrases.

Social sharing buttons

Make it easy for visitors to share your site’s compelling content by using one of the many widgets available to access social sharing networks.

It’s important to understand that on-page SEO is about giving your site the very best opportunity to be evaluated fairly and accurately by the search engine spiders. You are crafting the HTML and structure of your website so that a crawler can assess and navigate all your pages easily and without confusion. Spider algorithms are ultimately just software, and optimizing your pages for that software will ultimately lead to better placement than ignoring how they work.