1. Domain Canonicalization
Sounds complicated, huh? Don’t worry – it’s not.Try going into your URL bar and entering the non-www and www version of your site. If they both show up as http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com, you have canonicalization issues. All you need to do here is 301 redirect the one that has less links to the one that has more links. You can use Open Site Explorer to determine which page has less links.
2. Title
The title is one of the most important on-page SEO factors so make sure you get this right. Generally, you want all of your titles to have your target keywords in the front and have the site name in the back.For example, look at how Zappos structures their title:
Shoes, Clothing, and More | Zappos.com
3. Breadcrumbs and Related Links
Internal links help structure the strength of inner pages so take advantage of them. Think of your site as an ant hill with water pouring down the tunnels. Ideally, the water would flow through all the tunnels to fill them all up. Breadcrumbs are a great way of creating internal links, here’s an example of what they look like:
In addition, linking to related articles or related products (if you’re an e-commerce store) goes a long way in telling the search engines that these inner pages have some importance as well.
4. Robots control
Many webmasters like to use the robots.txt to block portions of their websites. As an alternative, try using the ‘noindex, follow’ tag on pages because this will allow the link juice to flow freely throughout your site. Using the robots.txt basically creates a black hole for link juice – it stops the flow.5. Alt tags
As of today, search engines still have difficulty discerning what an image is about. Make sure you use alt tags when you add images so search engines can crawl the text. By doing this, each image you upload with yield some SEO benefit. Remember: No alt tag means you won’t get credit for the picture.
Here’s an example:
“img src=”http://www.evergreensearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/zappos-breadcrumbs.jpeg” alt=”zappos breadcrumbs” title=”zappos breadcrumbs” width=”326″ height=”186″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-674″
6. User Generated Content
Whether you own a blog or an e-commerce store, user generated content is a great way to boost long tail search traffic to your site. The additional benefits include adding more engagement and building trust on your site. Over 62% of people read online reviews which means if you have an e-commerce site, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot to not include user generated reviews. These will help increase conversion rates plus help you generate content on your product pages to help increase organic traffic.If you have a blog, you can get great user engagement from your great content. The result: lively discussions in your blog comments section and added content at no cost. UGC is a scalable form of SEO that most webmasters should not miss out on.
