On-site SEO is probably one of the most challenging parts of designing/creating a website. Of course the objective is always to get as much traffic through the site as possible and the SEO is meant to ensure that those hits come as often as possible.

While off-site SEO is a specialised field, on-site SEO takes that specialisation to the next level where the site has to be examined in minute detail to make sure that search engines pick up on the keywords and then send traffic to your site.

There are quite a few things that one can do to successfully create and maintain on-site SEO:

• The first is to take note of the naming conventions that search engines look out for.
• The next step is to try and incorporate title tag attributes into your navigation tags in order to facilitate easier navigation on the site.
• Then there are the all-important title tags (which is not the same as the title tag attributes). These are the tags that a search engine will use to determine the ranking of the site.
• Following the title tags in importance are the Meta descriptions that give the user an idea of what the site is about.
• Since search engines don’t know how to interpret images or graphics, it is always a good idea to provide each image with an appropriate description or tag.
• Incorporate keywords into the heading tags which will help improve your rankings for those specific keywords.
• Use cross links on your site to help search engines evaluate the relevance of the keywords and information at those links.
• Another important factor that search engines use to rank the relevance of a site to a query is the keyword density in the site. It is important to not overpopulate or force the keywords, but also to make sure that there are enough mention of the keywords to have the site ranked highly. The same goes for keyword proximity which is almost the same as keyword density, but merely focuses on the location of the service, e.g. wingdings online would mean that you will be able to find wingdings online. Here it is also important to get the word order right so that there is no confusion about what is being offered.
• Once on the page, the contents need to be organized logically, sequentially and be easy to navigate through. Where there are pages with non-SEO content make sure that the same style, flow and standard is maintained.
• Keep your audience in mind when putting the content together and make the content and the keywords relevant to the audience that you’re targeting.