Adding alt tag in WordPress

9 On-Page Optimization Ideas

Below is a list of additional on-page optimization tasks that may improve your blog’s reach in the search engines.

1) Redirect www. to non-www.

Google views www. and non-www. as two completely different versions of the site, so if no redirection is placed it confuses the Google spiders about which version to show in search result pages.

2) Obtain Google+ Authorship

McDougall authorship markup

Assigning a couple different bloggers with Google+ can increase search engine query click conversions as the authors’ faces will show up in the search results. Having Authorship also potentially gives Google more trust in your content (if it does not right now, I believe it will in the future), which will likely indirectly or directly increase your rankings.

3) Connect your social profiles together with microformats

Webmasters can help Google even more now by adding microdata to their website. One of the most powerful pieces of microdata is the rel=‘‘me” snippet, which can be used to claim ownership of social profiles. The most common example of this is in your Twitter profile, where you’re allowed to include a URL. Twitter puts rel=“me” automatically in that code and your website should link back to your Twitter profile with rel=“me” as well, in order to complete that handshake. This is powerful from an online reputation management perspective as well, because Google can now know which profiles are verified as yours to display in search results.

4) “Noindex” date archives

Duplicated/repeated content on websites can be detrimental to Google’s trust in a website. If you utilize keyword-optimized categories in WordPress, then having date archives doesn’t hold any benefit and just clutters your website with re-used content. For Google to not index those archive pages, you will need to give them some indication that they should not be crawled. This is possible by going into your website’s .htaccess file and manually coding it in, or downloading a plug-in that does it for you (Yoast’s plug-in can help you with this task).

5) Optimize images with alt tags

Adding alt tag in WordPress

Adding an alt tag in WordPress

Images from a blog can add a lot of traffic through Google images, referral traffic, and even backlinks from people who use your site images on their blog. One of the most beneficial things you can do to optimize your images in the search engines is to use “alt” tags. When you’ve uploaded an image through WordPress, it’s easy for you to add alt tags as they present the “alt tag field” right under your photo.

6) Adding/category-name/ to the URL structure

A good URL structure for an improved silo (batch of content) is “www.url.com/blog/category-name/post-title/”. That’s because instead of Google determining ranking priority between x number of blog posts from the entire blog, it splits the priority between x number of blog posts in the category (much quicker for the spiders to process and understand).

7) Conditional sidebars for internal linking

Developing what we would call conditional sidebars (unique sidebars for certain areas of the site as opposed to having one global one) to make sure you keep your internal linking in your “silos” can yield big improvements in search engine traffic by having more relevant internal links pointing to related pages. Another benefit: Google will view those conditional sidebars as a change-up in content (in other words, “unique/new content”).

8) Add Google Analytics code

Use Analytics to make sure you can track things like referrers, load time, conversions, bounce rates, and exit rates, etc.

9) Reduce load time

GT Metrix logoUse a tool like GTMetrix to track your load time (how long it takes your page to load in a browser) and improve image optimization to decrease the time it takes to load each page. Make sure you have good hosting, as inadequate hosting can be a huge drag on your page speed. There are many other ways to speed up a web page, so do your research and really put some effort into this, as it has become higher on Google’s radar as they focus on mobile.

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