On Page SEO – Making Websites Search Engine-Friendly as Possible

How Search Works

Google released an interactive inforgraphics "How Search Works." It illustrates how website, especially new ones, are being crawled and indexed to their database. It was divided into three sections, namely - Crawling and indexing, Algorithms, and Fighting WebSpam.

Here is an interactive walk-through to better understand how Google Search works :

Nature of On-Page SEO

• On Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the text, content and html markup of your web page.
• On-page optimization is based on tests, analytics and errors.
• On-page SEO encompasses all the techniques to make the website transparent and easily indexed by search engines.
• On-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. 

What Covers On-Page SEO

• Target Keywords
• Broken Links
• Permalink
• Canonicalization
• Page Titles
• Robots.txt
• Meta Description
• Page Loading Speed
• Meta Keywords
• Analytics Script
• Alt Tags for Images
• Search Engine Verification
• Content Headings
• Text Modifiers
• Anchor Text
• Sitemaps
• Keyword Density
• Page Layout
• . . . and a lot more . . .

Major On-Page SEO Terms

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) - the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.

Search Engine Spiders (Web Crawler, Web Spider) -  program that follows, or "crawls", links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes.

Crawling Vs Indexing - crawling takes place when there is a successful fetching of unique URLs which can be traced from valid links from other web pages. Indexing takes place after a crawled URLs are processed, storing the processing results in a document index.

Do-Follow Vs No-Follow Links - dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

Target Keywords - creating a list of specific words and/or phrases which  you know people are searching for, and making sure that when these keywords are searched for your site will be in the  result pages.

Permalink (Permanent Link) -   is a URL that points to a specific page after it has passed from 

  the front page to the archives.

Page Titles -  the name for a given web page that describes the content found on the page.

Meta Description - a meta tag that describes your Web page.

Meta Keywords -  a list of keywords used to indicate what your web page is about.

Alt Tags for Images - the required alt attribute specifies an alternate text for an image, if the image cannot be displayed. It describes your images to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

Content Headings (Heading Tags) -  a heading element that briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. They are defined with H1 to H6 tags, according to the degree of significance.

Anchor Text - the visible characters and words that hyperlink display when linking to another document or location on the web.

Keyword Density - the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

Text Modifiers - text modifying tags within the content of the page to highlight important phrases/keywords. These include <STRONG>, <EM>, <B>, <I>, and <U> tags

Page Layout -  positioning of relevant keywords and important phrases across the page. This includes proper content headings, CTR-friendly anchor texting, non-spammy keyword density, and aesthetically text modifications.

Broken Links - are links that lead to pages that do not exist and prevent the complete indexing of the website.

Canonicalization - is a process of identifying the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

Robots.txt - used to control how search engines crawl a website, usually a set of instructions on what pages are allowed and not allowed to crawl.

Page Loading Speed - the amount of time needed to completely load a particular page.

Analytics Script (e.i. Google Analytics) - a particular code to install in a webpage to monitor visitor data and other statistics.

Search Engine Verification - a particular code to install in a webpage to control and monitor how search engines access the website.

Sitemaps - HTML Sitemap is an easy way to supply your users with a snapshot of the structure of your website and allows for them to successfully navigate quickly through your website. XML Sitemaps allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.