About SEO
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is a web marketing technique that is used to drive more organic or natural traffic to a website.
SEO is very important for gaining and improving a website’s presence in major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. According to Experian Hitwise; Google has 66.35% of search engine visits, whilst other search engines followed with Bing receiving 10.07%, Yahoo Search! 9.46%, Ask 3.40%, and AOL 2.02%. These search engines aim to display the most useful and relevant website and content.
How do Search Engines Find Relevant Results?
Search Engines look at several different factors on a website to help them give you the most useful results; each search engine uses complex algorithms to sift through different sites. Google Algorithms depend on more than 200 unique signals and Bing uses more than 1000 unique signals.
“Google gets more than One Billion questions from people around the world in more than 181 countries and more than 146 languages. 15% of Google searches they get every day have never been seen before”.
Google and other search engines use a software program called Spider to fetch web pages and then index these pages in the search results.
How Does Google Decide on How to Rank Your Websites?
As stated previously Google looks at 200 unique signals, some include:
- How many times pages contain common key phrases or words
- Do your keywords appear in your URL and titles?
- Does the page contain equivalents for those words?
- Is the page from a high or low-quality website?
- What is the Page Rank – this rates the webpage importance based on how many outside links and the importance of those links.
Google looks at all these factors together and gives the page an overall score to display useful search results.
What You Need to Do to Help Google Rank Your Site?
Several basic SEO tactics will help your website be indexed and ranked, such as:
- Build web pages that use common phrases or keywords relevant to your business.
- Ensure your keywords are placed in your Meta Titles, Meta Description, and Headings.
- Content is king – Google likes unique and relevant information.
- Quality link building – not too many links though.
- When link building on sites related to your business, anchor text should include common phrases/keywords.
What is On-Site SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is divided into two techniques; the first is On-Site SEO (also known as On-Page SEO) and Off-Page SEO i.e. link building. On-Page SEO is a vital part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy; it is aimed at making the website look attractive to search engines by amending certain elements of your website. Google looks closely at the HTML Syntax, Structure, and textual content when ranking pages.
Why is On-Site SEO Important?
New websites must spend money on on-site SEO from the outset. Using this technique, they could goal their services and products in a highly powerful way, getting their message across to their target audience. This can assist enhance their possibilities of the boom at some point in the early stages. A mixture of rightly optimized and On-Page search engine optimization with different online advertising channels is better as it covers all the elements of a successful marketing campaign.
On-Site SEO helps search engines like google and yahoo analyze your website and the content material linked to it so that it can perceive if a searcher’s query is relevant to your website. Google is continuously updating its set of rules so that it can higher apprehend a searcher’s intent and deliver search results that meet that user’s needs. As Google’s set of rules develops, so ought your internet site. It is essential that your internet site and its content material, which includes what is seen to users (i.E. Media, content material, images) and what is visible to search engines like google (i.E. Metadata, HTML), are optimized to today’s practices used by companies like Google and Bing. This way search engines can understand your website and a way to rank it.
What Are The Important Factors For Effective On-Site SEO?
Keywords in Heading Tags
Add the Keyword/keyphrase you wish to rank for to your H1, H2, and H3, H4, H5, H6 Tags. Keywords, which are placed in your H1 tag, have more weight in search engines as it tells the search engines what your content or your webpage is about. You can only have one H1 tag but you may use the other tags multiple times.
To add Heading Tags you simply place the tags in your HTML code, so for example let’s say your keyword/keyphrase is RC Helicopters you will place the following heading tag in your headers:
H1 – <h1> Top RC Helicopters </h1>
H2 – <h2> Electric RC Helicopters for sale </h2>
The rest of the tags are structured in the same way.
Alt Text
Ensure you use the Alt attribute on your images, this tag is important for several reasons. Firstly if the image name is well optimized it can send traffic signals to your website. And if your images don’t load it will show the alt text instead.
Again the image alt attribute will be placed in your HTML code and will look like this <img src=”rchelicopters.gif” alt=” RC helicopters ” width=”42″ height=”42″>
Title Tag
The Title tag is important as it tells search engines what the website or content is about, it is displayed in search engines’ results, at the top of the internet browser, and also external websites tend to use your title once a link is submitted. The Title should be less than 70 characters, as this is what Google Displays in their search engines. A title tag is placed in the HTML and looks like the following:
< head>
< title>title tag < /title>
< /head>
Also Read: 6 Easy Ways to Write Article Titles That Can Attract Visitors
Meta Description Tags
HTML Meta Tags are very important for telling search engines what your website or content is about. These Meta tags are placed in your HTML code; these tags are not visible to the visitor and are displayed in the search engine results.
Meta Description Example
See below for an example of Meta Tag:
< head>
< title> title tag < /title>
< meta name=”description” content=”Top selling rc helicopters”>
< meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″>
< /head>
Site speed
Ensure that your website loads fast; in 2010 Google announced that site speed was an important factor, site speed represents the time it takes your website to load in response once a web request has been searched. There are several tools to test your site speed; such as Google Webmaster Tools and Page Speed.
Unique Content
In the world of SEO, you may have heard the term content is king, that’s because Google loves unique content. This means everything you write on your site must be unique and not copied.
Onsite SEO combined with Offsite SEO is the perfect SEO strategy for increasing your search engine ranking position (SERP). Also if On-Site SEO is not done correctly this can have an effect on your website performance thus stopping you from reaching the first page of Google.
Want to Create a Quality Content? Read 3 Tips for SEO Friendly Quality Content – Instantly Increase Your Traffic