Optimizing your website for search engines is essential for your success. I can’t stress enough just how important it actually is. But what are the intricacies of it? How do you do it efficiently? I will tell you a little bit today.
Besides the very basic advice, which is that you should optimize your content for the most relevant and popular keywords, there isn’t really much good information being thrown around for this topic. So, to help you out with this challenging task, I have prepared a few tips on what you should pay the most attention to.
Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the meat of this article and learn some working on-site or on-page SEO tips and techniques.
Mobile Device Optimization Is A Must!
Back in the day, when a smartphone was considered a luxury, people only used desktop computers to browse the web. But times have changed, and so has the Internet.
Ever since the rise of tablets mobile usage has only been rising, and it still is. So, I can’t tell you how important it is to have a fully responsive site.
Besides the usability aspect (if a person tries to access a non-mobile-friendly site with a phone they are 100% likely to leave it in the following seconds), responsiveness is actually a ranking factor too. If your resource isn’t mobile-friendly, it will get penalized by Google and you will lose even more traffic.
Furthermore, many SEO professionals believe that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages rank higher on Google.
Loading Times Matter A Lot
Even a single extra second of page load can cost you a customer. Nobody likes to wait for content to load for any longer than a moment. If you don’t optimize your pages for speed, you will take a huge blow to your conversion rates.
It matters even more if you run an eCommerce business and sell products, because every time somebody clicks off because of long loading, you potentially lose a whole bunch of revenue, which can stack up drastically over time.
And if that wasn’t enough, crawl bots notice if your pages take too long to load and it actually affects your rankings too.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Title tags define the name of your page. A meta description is what the user sees right under your site’s title in a search results page.
You can get quite lengthy with those, but be aware that Google will only show the first 60 (for the title tag) digits or 160 (for the meta description) and the rest will remain truncated. So, it is important to optimize those as much as you can.
But don’t just cram your target keyword into it as many times as you can. That will be obvious both to search engines and users that you didn’t spend much time on your description.
What your meta description should ideally be is a brief but straight-to-the-point description of what you can offer for the user. Also, synonyms and alternative keywords are great for SEO, as long as you don’t use the same one more than once.
The same goes for the title tags, but even shorter. And don’t use duplicate content from your pages.
Create Content That Satisfies Your User’s Needs
When optimizing your site, it is extremely important to understand your target audience and why exactly are they coming to your site. What are they looking for? What do they expect?
Google knows when users are satisfied. How? By looking at the time spent on your site. The longer it is, the higher your rankings will go.
So, for example, if you run a gaming news portal, people are probably going to be coming for reviews of the latest games. So, write them in time and place them right on the homepage! Or, at least, somewhere easily accessible at the very top of your pages like in a slider, for example.
Interlink Relevant Writing Pieces
Interlinking your inner pages is extremely important both for navigational purposes, readability, and SEO. Crawling bots do their job much quicker if you give them a link, and people will stay engaged for longer if you place those strategically.
Also, Google prefers bigger pieces of content, so, as you might have guessed, a 5000-word article is much more valuable than a 500-word one.
Last thing about content: Google also takes its freshness into consideration. So, in order to get high rankings, you need to post regularly, especially about topics that are time-sensitive, like the aforementioned videogame releases.
Amplify On-Site Optimization With Off-Page Practices Like Link Building
Link Building is a huge part of SEO, and it actually can be one of the most time-consuming processes involved in it. The premise is quite simple: you acquire links that point to your site from other sites. The more inbound links you have, the more people will see them and come to your site, but most importantly, it affects your ratings in search systems.
But how do you get backlinks? The surest way of getting one is guest posting for someone in return for it. Check this list of over 700 Guest posting websites from OutreachMama here: https://www.outreachmama.com/guest-posting-sites/
But there are also quite a few ways of doing it. That includes finding dead links that point to articles similar to yours and offering the site owner your own content instead to fill that hole.
Or, if you find a link pointing at an article that is in every way worse than yours (shorter, less informative), you can straight up steal it. Just be clear why your content is better than the one currently linked to when you’re pitching the site owner.
In Conclusion
The last thing I wanted to tell you about today is that you should always keep a close eye on your SEO metrics to determine whether your optimization strategies are working or not. They are also an amazing source of information to help you better understand which areas of your site need some improvement.
So, be sure to check out Linkio’s blog article about best SEO audit tools to figure out which tools will be of most use to you.
Thank you for your attention, and good luck with your SEO campaign!
