On-site SEO – what is it?
Baking in website SEO during the design process
Following on in our series of articles aimed at clarifying basic web design and marketing principles, today we will take a quick look at on-site SEO, including what it actually means and why it’s important to get it right from the beginning of the web design process.
As with other recent blog posts, this one was stimulated by a recent project where we were approached to assess a dental website with a view to a complete overhaul of the on-site SEO. In principle this seemed straightforward until we were given access to a the website content management system to start the work.
This is where the problems started – the site was built on a WordPress template which had been configured with scant regard to some of the key on-page components needed for effective SEO. A project that should have cost a few hundred pounds actually cost considerably more because of significant coding changes that were required to bring the WordPress template to an acceptable standard. We see this too many times i.e. SEO being badly neglected in the initial design process.
So what is on-site SEO exactly?
On-site or on-page SEO is all about the infrastructure of a website and the design elements which are known to make a positive contribution to how the site fares in search engines. The main factors to consider are:
- page titles
- meta descriptions
- ‘h’ tags (denoting content hierarchy within a page)
- inter-site links and how they are configured
- content and how it’s configured
- “rich” markup to describe page content
- web page urls (“addresses”)
- page hierarchy within the overall website
- elements to enhance user “dwell” time e.g. video
- quality of the underlying code
- page load speed
- optimisation for hand-held devices
There are other elements too, but those shown above are key to get right.
Can you retro-fit SEO?
As the example at the start of the article illustrates, this will depend on how the site has been built in the first instance. If the platform is good but certain of the elements have just been configured badly, then it’s reasonably straightforward for an experienced SEO practitioner to make a substantial difference quite quickly. However, if the site infrastructure has been developed without SEO “baked in” then retro-fitting is much more difficult and will usually involve some re-design work.
Consequently it is essential to make sure that whoever you use as your dental web designer is not just good at aesthetics but also has a deep understanding of SEO too. Getting it right from the start will mean that you don’t have to retro-fit wholesale. You will also be assured that any new content you add or tweaks you make will be to an infrastructure which is already search engine friendly – so less work for you together with much better chances for your website ranking well in Google.
How much of a difference does this make?
Great on-page SEO will make all the difference for your rankings – of course you may still need complimentary off-site work to assist but that will simply fall on rocky ground if your site framework is in poor shape. The days of being able to compensate for poor on-site SEO with lots of back-links are gone – you simply have to get the on-page work as good as it can be.
I suspect my website is suffering from poor SEO, what can I do?
If your site is in bad shape and suffering in the rankings, it’s time to seek some experienced guidance.
The Dental Media SEO team will be pleased to provide a free assessment and recommendations – please call us on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to advise.