Welcome back to Analogue to AI blog. In this post we will get started on the discussion about some of the factors that influences Google to rank your website for the set of keywords you desire ranking for. You can catch up on our previous posts to get a grip of setting up for SEO. So lets begin...
What is On-page Optimisation?
Simply put, there are a lot of things webmasters do to get their websites ranked on SERPs, so all these actions that are taking within the scope of your website is termed as On-page optimisation. Broadly On-page optimisation cover 3 areas.
- Design & Architecture of the website.
- Content of the website
- HTML Tags
On-page optimisation encompasses all these areas on a website so that the pages & content are Index & Crawl friendly.
Lets look at a few factors with the domain of Design & Structure that go into building an effective website.
SEO Design & Architecture
The Goal here is to create a design that would make your website search friendly and add value to the overall User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) of the website. Following are some of the factors (though not the only factors) which can get you started with effective design & structure.
- SEO friendly URLs
URLS of your site are of utmost importance to give your visitors a context of what page they are on. It not only helps users, but also search engines to identify the structure & information flow of your website. The more clear and straight-forward the structure of your URL is, the better. Some of the best practices in building URLS for your website include...
- Do not use unnecessary words (Stop Words) - Words like "and", "for", "because" etc. You can find a comprehensive list of stop words here.
http://www.example.com/best-cakes-in-mumbai.html
http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html
- Use hyphens - Its a great idea to separate URL words with (-) hyphens as compared to (_) underscores. The reason for this is the understanding Google holds of these signs. For eg: a URL like: http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html is read by Google as (best cakes mumbai)
whereas a URL like: http://www.example.com/best_cakes_mumbai.html would be read by Google as (bestcakesmumbai)
It has a small impact though its the right thing to do.
- Avoid using dynamic characters in the URL: Using "&", "@", "$" etc is not considered SEO friendly. These would mostly come up in case of a dynamic URL or (auto-generated url) On e-commerce sites you would often see words like cgi-bin or .cgi in the URL. You could use a custom link shortening tool to convert your dynamically generated URLs into simple ones.
http://www.example.com/productid=2xdgi3/iGHSP=U#xyz1234.html TO
http://www.example.com/seo
- Avoid sub-folders in the URL link - These linked are automatically included when you add new pages to your websites, mostly its the CMS functionality, you can counter this by changing the Permalink of that page.
http://www.example.com/2018/05/iphone.html
http://www.example.com/iphone.html
- Try adding a highly searched keyword to the URL - Typically the one you would use in the Title of your page. this adds weightage to the quality factor of the URL.
http://www.example.com/iphone.html
http://www.example.com/iphone-deals.html
- Using a complete and descriptive URL structure: The image below is a breakdown of a typical URL structure.
Pic credit: Cult of Web blog
As a rule of thumb, a URL that is easy to read by humans is most preferably an SEO friendly URL
- Using Lower case characters in the URL: A URL is only appealing if its easy to recognise in the most simple text. Hence various tests have proved that a URL with lower texts have resulted in better click-throughs than Upper cases. for e.g.
http://www.example.com/Digital-Marketing-Courses.html
http://www.example.com/digital-marketing-courses.html
Innovation in URLs is great, provided its supplemented with simplicity. Hope you found this post useful. More posts like these coming up through the coming weeks, so keep coming back.
If you have opinions on this posts make sure to be heard on the comments section of this post. You can get back to me with specific questions through the contact form too.
See you around.
Happy learning.
Mitul Shingadia
- Do not use unnecessary words (Stop Words) - Words like "and", "for", "because" etc. You can find a comprehensive list of stop words here.
http://www.example.com/best-cakes-in-mumbai.html
http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html - Use hyphens - Its a great idea to separate URL words with (-) hyphens as compared to (_) underscores. The reason for this is the understanding Google holds of these signs. For eg: a URL like: http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html is read by Google as (best cakes mumbai)
whereas a URL like: http://www.example.com/best_cakes_mumbai.html would be read by Google as (bestcakesmumbai)
It has a small impact though its the right thing to do. - Avoid using dynamic characters in the URL: Using "&", "@", "$" etc is not considered SEO friendly. These would mostly come up in case of a dynamic URL or (auto-generated url) On e-commerce sites you would often see words like cgi-bin or .cgi in the URL. You could use a custom link shortening tool to convert your dynamically generated URLs into simple ones.
http://www.example.com/productid=2xdgi3/iGHSP=U#xyz1234.html TO
http://www.example.com/seo - Avoid sub-folders in the URL link - These linked are automatically included when you add new pages to your websites, mostly its the CMS functionality, you can counter this by changing the Permalink of that page.
http://www.example.com/2018/05/iphone.html
http://www.example.com/iphone.html - Try adding a highly searched keyword to the URL - Typically the one you would use in the Title of your page. this adds weightage to the quality factor of the URL.
http://www.example.com/iphone.html
http://www.example.com/iphone-deals.html - Using a complete and descriptive URL structure: The image below is a breakdown of a typical URL structure.
As a rule of thumb, a URL that is easy to read by humans is most preferably an SEO friendly URLPic credit: Cult of Web blog - Using Lower case characters in the URL: A URL is only appealing if its easy to recognise in the most simple text. Hence various tests have proved that a URL with lower texts have resulted in better click-throughs than Upper cases. for e.g.
http://www.example.com/Digital-Marketing-Courses.html
http://www.example.com/digital-marketing-courses.html
