The Importance of OnSite Optimization.

OnSite Optimization is a very important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many people concentrate on link building, on link baiting and other important techniques. They are all significant for your product, but links are not the only thing you have to worry about. For a SEO to succeed in his target, he needs a good website to offer.

This is where OnSite Optimization comes. Your usual target is to put a page in the top 10 (or even on number one spot) list of sites in the search engine result page (SERP). To start doing that, you need to offer a good product to the audience. No matter how good links you are building, in the best directories possible, with the highest PageRank and the biggest Trust Flow, it just won't work until you have done your Onsite.

With the help of some reliable sources (Moz, Search Engine Journal) and personal experience, I created a useful guide on Onsite Optimization for beginners.

On site optimization from Geoffrey Smith

And if you by some reason don't like SlideShare you can see the presentation on ISSUU.

SEO Pyramid

What is it all about? First you can see the SEO Pyramid. It is a representation of the work you should be doing. You start with a strong base and continue working upwards.

1. First you will need some high quality content. You need your unique text - no duplicate content, everything should be made specifically for your website.
   
   Don't forget you are doing this for the users, not only for crawlers. Stop stuffing your text with keywords. Make the content user friendly - smaller paragraphs, less stuffing, bullets, headers, short sentences, more multimedia (pictures, videos).
   
   
2. Keyword Research. You need to figure out what words you will be using. Use Google's Keyword Planner. By my opinion it's not as good as the old, too, but it does the work. Search the search volume of your desired words. Research the competition. Big search and small competition is something rare. Don't be afraid to jump in to deep waters and try out the High competition - this is the places with the thousand of monthly searches.
   
   Then use these keywords in your text, in the body, in the titles, in the Meta Data. Just don't overdo it - you don't want your main keyword to be repeated 20 times in a 300 word text. Use synonyms.
   
   
3. The rest is Offsite - Link Building and Social media. They deserve different presentations and articles.

Site Architecture

The next page is about Site Architecture. You can see a regular structure of a website. You have the home page then the sub pages in depth. The authority pages pass value to pages in their hierarchy only. That's something you should learn. That's why you need to do a little bit of Cross-linking. This will enhance the pages across as well as down.

OnSite Checklist

This is the most important part. You will need a checklist to guide you through the whole process. This is a simple version. With time and experience you will add more and more ideas.

The general idea is - when you get a website to optimize it, you will need a guide to help you out with figuring out the mistakes. Domain age, URL structure, Meta Data, Cross linking - they are all part of this list, but for more, check out the presentation.

After the list there is a short description and guides on some of the more important items.

Tools and Recources

At the end you will see a list of tools you can use. They are very useful and will help you a lot along the way. Of course some people prefer other website, other tools, but those are the ones I prefer.

Don't forget to visit the recourse websites. Moz, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land are the giants in the SEO "industry". They can give you many tips and advises, so make sure to follow their blogs and newsfeeds.