On page SEO has, over time, become the ugly stepchild of search engine optimization, with many webmasters overlooking many on page SEO elements that could be of a huge benefit to their site. With many search engine optimization experts focusing solely on off page factors such as link building and anchor text diversity, on page optimization has seemingly taken a backseat. Unfortunately for many webmasters, they do not realize the huge benefits that can be had through on page search engine optimization. Sometimes, simply changing your on page optimization to better reflect what Google is looking for, can result in huge boost in the search engines. A few of the most overlooked on page search engine optimization factors include thorough interlinking between the pages of your website, bolded content that reflects the most important aspects of your articles, and Alt tags on all of your images.
Interlinking Thoroughly
The best thing that you can do to improve your on page search engine optimization is to link thoroughly between all of the inner pages of your website. This means that you should be linking to other pages of your website, when relevant text and keywords are contained in your articles. Not only does this give Google a good idea of which keywords should be assigned to which pages in their search engines, but also allows their spiders to better navigate your website as a whole. By interlinking thoroughly you make your website more easily navigated by users and search engine crawlers alike, Google will value your website more highly and see it as a reliable source of information on the subject. If you are looking for inspiration on proper interlinking of inner pages, you should look to Wikipedia, which does an excellent job of linking between their pages for relevant content.
Bolded Content
Another often overlooked aspect of on page search engine optimization is utilizing bolded content on your website, to help Google to better classify what each page on your website is about. For instance, if your website is about “haloween costumes,” it might be a good idea to bold costume or Halloween related keywords, in an effort to help Google to understand what your website is about as well as the types of keywords that you are targeting for a specific page. Bolded keywords have become increasingly less common, but can have a great affected helping Google to identify keywords for the page.
Alt Tags
Doing a quick annualization of many webpages online will show that webmasters are not utilizing alt tags on their images as much as they should. They can have a profound effect, helping Google to better categorize your website, and allow these images to show up in Google image search. It is especially perplexing because with the increased usage of content management systems, alt tags are relatively easy to set, and change with little effort.
As the focus on search engine optimization has shifted to off page factors, too many webmasters solely focus on off page factors without paying the necessary attention to on page factors, which can provide you with huge benefits.
