SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization. This service is about optimizing your web pages to help your website rank as high as possible in all the major search engines’ result pages (SERPs). The higher your rank in search engines (e.g. Google/Bing/Yahoo), the higher would be traffic on your website.
There are two categories of SEO — On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, Meta tags & descriptions, long and unique content etc. Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, blogging, social bookmarking, directory submission, etc.
In today’s post we shall talk about everything you need to know about On-Page SEO and how it will affect your search engine rankings.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
1. Page Title
Your page title is the most important on-page SEO factor. You should have a unique and distinct title for all your pages and each title should have the main keywords relevant for that particular page. Also, the closer the keyword to the beginning of the title, the more priority it gets from search engines.
And, adding modifiers to your titles such as “best”, “guide”, “perfect” and “2016” will help you rank for long tail versions of your keywords.
For example: Have a look at my title ‘12 Things you need to know about Successful ON-PAGE SEO’. This way when someone searches for On-Page SEO, my post has a better chance of ranking high because I have included those keywords.
2. Quality Content
Content is King! All search engines love new and fresh content. If your content is unique it is extremely probable to be ranked well in search engines. So, you should avoid making pages that have little or no original content.
But when it comes to content SEO, keywords in the content play a very important role. Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines to work out what your content is about. Mind well, that doesn’t mean that you repeat and stuff your keywords in your content for the search engine spiders. By doing so, your website will be banned from search engines sooner or later.
To avoid this, try to maintain your keyword density 3-4% of your content. If you find this tough, then use LSI keywords in your content. LSI keywords are synonyms (of your keywords) that search engines use to decide the relevancy and quality of your page. This way, you are still writing relevantly without the risk of being banned.
My additional advice is to try and put at least one of your keywords in the first 100 words of your content.
3. Meta Tags
For each of your web pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of Meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously. There are three categories of meta tags — meta title, meta description, and meta keywords.
Meta title should be the same as your page title because that makes sense right! But if not, then make sure to include your targeted keywords in your meta title too.
Meta description for each of the pages is usually forgotten by many people. These descriptions are an important spot to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.
Meta keywords are the list of all the important keywords that describes the content of that page in the best way.
4. Body Tags
When writing your content you should break it up into smaller sections and paragraphs to make it easy for people to read. These sections can be given headings which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.
The H1 tag is your headline or main title tag. All the other subheadings are followed by H2, H3, H4, etc. tags. Try to use your keywords in at least one of your subheadings. Search engines use these tags to decide what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headlines are more useful than generic ones.
5. URL’s
Including search engine friendly URL’s for each of your pages is highly suggested as these provide enhanced crawling. Try to make your page URL’s short and enrich them with your keywords instead of making them random. In other words avoid string characters based URL’s.
For example: Avoid such URL’s — http://www.website.com/1234/5678/blog/205416/&sfpr10/&145and45fdf/category
Instead go for such URL’s — http://www.website.com/category/title
You can also see the URL of the about us page of our website —http://www.anuvallc.com/about-us/
6. Image Optimization
Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually engaging and break up chunks of text. All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Also add Alt Text and Descriptions to your images. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.
7. Outbound Links
Outbound links are links from other websites provided in your web page whose content is relevant to that of yours. It is a known fact that outbound links related to the pages aides search engines in figuring out your page’s content. According to a recent study, pages containing outbound links rank higher than those without outbound links.
8. Internal Links
People often think that the only links that are vital are those from other websites (outbound links). Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site. It makes much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content and also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google Page Rank of your pages.
9. Responsive Design
From last year, Google has started penalizing mobile unfriendly websites. And they are likely to crack down even more in future. So, responsive design for your website is a must do SEO factor.
10. Social Share Buttons
Social share may not directly be related to SEO, but they definitely generate more eyes for your content. And more eyes means good marketing and thus more are your chances of getting linked.
11. Enhance Site Speed
Page speed is most likely a ranking factor for website rankings of all major search engines. According to a survey, 40% of users abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. You can enhance your site speed by using a CDN, compressed images, and a faster host.
12. Enhance Dwell Time
Dwell time is the actual time that a visitor spends on a page before returning to the SERPs. In theory, the longer the dwell time the better, as this indicates that the visitor has engaged in most (if not all) of the content on a page before either returning to the SERPs or performing another action on the site. So, you obviously don’t want shorter dwell time on your website.
Synopsis
These 12 techniques are just some of the ways to improve your on-page SEO. Any one of them or only few of them when used will not produce visible results for your SEO. But when used together optimally, a successful SEO and thus high rankings on search engines can be achieved.
Even after trying these techniques if your websites’ relevant site traffic does not increase, than you can ask your queries to our experts at www.anuvallc.com.
Anuva technologies, is a leading SEO service provider having more than a decade of experience in providing ROI based SEO services.