SEO
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most widely used techniques of Digital Marketing. It helps to increase traffic and improves the overall rank of the website. There is nothing wrong with exclaiming, that it is the heart and soul of every Digital Marketing campaign. Because if done extremely well, SEO could fetch way better results in terms of revenue of the businesses.
In general, SEO is done in two ways. The First one is On page SEO and Off page SEO is the second one. Both of them have their own importance and use cases. However, in this article, we are going to focus on the first one.
What is ON PAGE SEO?
It is the practice of optimizing our web pages in order to rank better in SERP. SERP simply means “Search engine results page”. This page appears along with the suggested URLs whenever a visitor tries to search for anything in a web browser.
Apart from rankings, it is also vital for driving organic traffic towards the website. If most of the traffic is organic and relevant at the same time then the rate of conversion increases. So, attracting a lot of traffic is important but that traffic should be relevant is even more important for generating desired revenues.
On Page SEO could be easily confused with the blacklisted keyword stuffing approach. But it is entirely different from that and includes almost everything from header tags to sitemaps, title tags to URLs, and much more.
It basically uses all the elements, HTML tags, attributes of that web page. So that owners could fully control the representation of their websites. Which in turn makes it easy for the crawlers to understand and suggest your website in the SERP.
Different factors of ON PAGE SEO
- Researching for Keywords
Using keywords in a webpage to boost its visibility is not new in Digital Marketing. Today there are various free and paid tools available online which could easily provide you with the statistics of the most trending and used keywords.
Now it seems to be an easy job, right? The marketers just need to get their hands dirty on one of these tools. And guess what? They are sorted for the keyword thing. But wait! It won’t work in today’s Digital Marketing scenario.
Today you need to have an edge over others. So, a proper amount of research should be involved in sorting out keywords for the webpage. Here are some points which should be kept in mind to fetch relevant keywords.
- Know your targeted customers.
- Use online tools for research.
- Analyse keywords used by the competitors.
How to use keywords effectively?
- Try to use them as early as possible.
- Use them naturally in sentences.
- Use them in accordance with natural language processing algorithms.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
2. Develop Engaging Content
We all are very familiar with the popular phrase that “Content is the King” and that is very relevant because a nicely written article keeps the visitor engaged which in turn increases the chances of related sales.
Content should be specific and more importantly in the form of storytelling which could give a clear understanding of what the writer actually wants to convey.
The information which is short and crisp has better chances to make its place in the mind of the potential buyer.
Here are some tips to write engaging articles.
- Spend some time doing quality research.
- Define the purpose very clearly.
- Write mind-blowing opening lines.
- Try to be more specific and leave out the jargon.
- Content should be factually correct.
- Keep it simple both in terms of language and explanation.
- Optimize it by using the latest SEO best practices.
3. Using HTML Header Tags Effectively
HTML which is “HyperText Markup Language” is responsible for the creation of the skeleton of the website. HTML uses different Tags for creating and displaying the structure of the website on the browser.
One such Tag is the header tag. Which is basically used to display headings and sub-headings on the web page. There are six types of header tags available in the HTML which are from <h1> to <h6>, sorted in descending order of their importance. Where <h1> tag is the most important one as it is used to define the main heading.
Effective use of header tags is still very much underrated in SEO marketing but it can be the deciding factor of your overall SEO marketing strategy.
A concisely written statement inside the relevant header tag helps the search engines to crawl and determine the very purpose of that web page. After which search engines could include your webpage in their desired search results.
4. Title Tags
The title tag of an HTML file displays the title of the respective web page. It is the first contact of your website with the potential visitor. A catchy but not flashy title is enough to compel the visitor to click. An appropriate title also helps to increase CTR.
CTR is nothing but “click-through rate”, which can be simply defined as, the percentage of visitors who actually clicked on your URL after noticing it.
Statement inside the title tags is displayed on SERP along with the meta descriptions. It provides a brief idea about what kind of information would be processed inside that particular URL.
So, one should use their title tags very carefully as they could be solely responsible for making the visitor click on the desired URL.
We can also compare it with the YouTube video thumbnail also. An appealing thumbnail has quite a high chance that visitors would be compelled to open that video. In the same way, we can also play with the psychology of the visitor by writing compelling titles inside our HTML Title Tags.
5. Meta description
A meta description is a piece of information about your webpage that appears right below the title in SERP (search engine results page).
Not to be confused with the metadata. A meta description is effectively written inside the meta tags. It is generally written the same as the ad copy. It usually provides an overview of the information which the visitor is going to encounter after clicking on that URL.
So, one should be accurate about what they want to convey in their meta descriptions. It should be appealing and less revealing at the same time.
How to write excellent meta descriptions?
- Use relevant keywords.
- Keep them short yet attractive.
- They should be distinctive.
- Specify the information one would get after clicking.
6. Alternate Text for Images
We all are very much aware of the fact that images are the best ways to represent your content, data, and any piece of information in a much better and more readable way.
With the growing advancements in technology, our machines have become much more efficient than ever before. Google’s algorithms are getting better day by day and so are the web crawlers.
But they still find it difficult to process the information inside an image. For now, it is beyond artificial intelligence to calculate and determine the true meaning of an image.
In the future, they will definitely find a solution to it also but for now, it is completely up to us to inform browsers about the type of our image file and the information that the image file is actually going to convey.
We can achieve that by using nicely written alternate text inside ALT tags of the HTML file. By doing this we are optimizing our image file to help in our overall SEO strategy.
How to write meaningful ALT TEXT?
- Be particular and precise. Define the content of the image adequately.
- Avoid being redundant or repetitive.
- Avoid using phrases like “pic of” or “photo of”.
7. Canonical Tags/URL
The canonical word can be defined as genuine. So, from that, we can conclude that a canonical URL is the best-suited URL that we want spiders should consider whenever tracing for the relevant information.
Canonical URLs are defined inside the canonical tags. These tags have been in existence for a decade now. They were introduced to reduce the delicacy of the content.
It is quite evident that every web page has more than one URL. There could be many reasons for that for example browser or platform compatibility. Sometimes we have different URLs for the same website on mobile and desktop.
So, here we have to use Canonical tags in order to stop spiders from considering it as duplicate content.
If we fail to provide the best-suited URL inside the Canonical tags then the web crawlers would pick any and could treat others as duplicate copies which in turn could increase the crawling time of the browser.
This would eventually lead to lowering our rankings and will severely affect our Marketing Strategy.
So, by doing all that by ourselves we would have full control of our URLs and we could use crawlers and algorithms to our advantage.
8. Internal Link building
Linking and routing are the basic terminologies of a website and are helpful to determine the overall navigation within and outside the website. We need to understand the importance of links in SEO marketing strategy.
Let me give you a quick summary that how sorting and determining algorithms of browsers work. Their digital spiders are in constant search of information and are trying to interpret some kinds of patterns in the given data.
So, now here links play a very major role in forming some kind of hierarchical patterns and making it an easy job for the spiders to identify and process them.
Digital spiders determine a value or index for every web page. By relevant linking of web pages with one another, we are just increasing the value of our pages and helping in forming a pattern of information.
This pattern is then traced by the spiders and is taken into consideration while generating SERP (search engine results page).
Links are also broadly categorized into two internal and external ones. Internal focuses on the navigation within the website and external deals with navigation outside.
Things to keep in mind during Internal Link Building.
- Use anchor text smartly.
- Linking should be logically sound.
- Every page must be just 3 clicks away from the homepage.
9. Page speed
In recent surveys, it is found that around 80% of the users leave the website in just 5 seconds if it is unable to generate any response.
So, who in this ever-growing competition would want to reduce their website traffic just because of the loading time? Lower page loading time means higher traffic and higher traffic means a higher rate of conversion.
Ideally, it should not take more than 10 sec to load the page completely. In order to keep visitors engaged the initial bit of information should be displayed in a couple of seconds.
After all, it is not an easy job to appear on the first page of the web browser’s search result. Our visitors would only get to know about the quality of content, products, or whatever once they are inside of our website.
If we fail to get them on board just because of our poor page speed then it’s a complete waste of all efforts made in various other things.
Here are some tips which we can follow in order to improve our page speed.
- By Optimizing our code.
- Removing the unnecessary CSS used.
- By Using different optimization tools available.
- Compressing our images.
- By monitoring our website regularly and removing the garbage.
Conclusion
Now it is quite clear that On-Page SEO has all the capabilities to boost the visibility of your website and improve the overall rankings by all means. Businesses should use this vital technique in order to fair better from their competition. It should be properly used alongside the Off-Page SEO so that website owners could reap the benefits of both. After all, the overall goal is to increase and retain the customers at the same time.
