How Important are Onsite Factors to SEO?
By Mercedes Aspland
If you are getting a website created you will probably find the web developers you talk to go on endlessly about how they include SEO. However usually what they mean is they will take care of the onsite factors for you. What does that mean for you and your SEO campaign?
Well the first thing to say is that SEO is not a do and leave thing so if your web developer is including SEO you should always find out how long they will work on your site. If they stop when your site is built then they are not including SEO but are actually making your website friendly. This usually means you will have a quality url structure and the ability to edit title tags, meta data and your content through a CMS. This does not guarantee you top rankings and will probably go only part of the way to getting you there.
When you set up your website it is vital that you do proper research to select your keywords and make sure you are aiming in the right direction. When you have your keywords the following will need to be done to your website:
1. Include keywords in URL
2. Include keywords in title tag
3. Write a compelling meta description
4. Include text links to other pages in your text
5. Include keywords in your text
The above 5 things are just the beginning of your SEO campaign and it goes far wider than that with a concerted link building campaign.
So the question is, how important is what you do to the web pages compared to what you do offsite? Well in some ways that is a complex answer and is not easy to give but lets look at it from the point of view of Google as it is the most popular search engine. It is widely known that Google will use over 200 factors in order to rank your website in its results. Some of these factors have more importance than others.
So how do you know what is most important to Google? Well the answer to that is we dont but there are some things we can infer. Firstly the aim of Google is to give the most useful and relevant results when people search. Once upon a time this was done by determining what was on pages which led unscrupulous webmasters to just cram in their keywords. For that reason Google has reduced the importance of keywords in urls, titles and content. It is useful to include your keywords but do not cram them in and make it natural and relevant to the links that your web page has.
As Google is more sophisticated now it is a lot more complex to get to the top and your website will need constant reviewing and regular updates. It is for that reason that SEO can never be included in a website build.
In answer to the main point of this article about the importance of onsite factors, well they all have some importance and should all be optimised but on their own they will have very little effect, in Google at least. If you want to get to the top of the search engines you need to have a long term plan and keep working on it. You should also be patient, it will probably take several months to get to the top of the search engines, this cannot be rushed.
If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines - website optimisation.
Dazines - web development, web design SEO Company London UK
