On-Page SEO
The importance of on-page search engine optimisation cannot be underestimated. By optimising the pages of your website you are effectively alerting Google to your presence. But like most things in life, first impressions count for an awful lot! You need to brush down your website, optimise it and make it as presentable as possible so that it can climb higher up the search engine results pages and attract more visitors.
On-page SEO helps to streamline the coding of your website so it can be categorised and indexed better by search engines such as Google. When a search engine crawls a website it goes through its code and content to establish what the website represents. It will crawl on-page content, METAs, images and more to get an accurate picture of a website and to categorise it amongst the millions of others on the internet.
Keywords
When conducting your SEO campaign, especially when competing with other businesses online, you need to carefully strategise the keywords you’ll be targeting and the terms you want higher rankings for. This will help search engines to categorise what it is your site actually represents.
Once decided, your keywords will be incorporated into your META and header tags. They will also be written into on-page content, and other off-page measures will help increase your authority for your specific terms. This is where you have to be extremely careful when choosing which keywords to use in your campaign.
Your competition probably already ranks highly for generic keywords and phrases. Is it really worth spending time and money competing against a huge and established website? Using generics may be the toughest road you can take on your SEO campaign.
Think outside the box. Utilise keywords that are similar to generics yet have a lower search volume to corner the niche side of your market. Build up your user base gradually and take it from there later on in the campaign. SEO is a long-term process – you won’t get results overnight.
Content
There’s a saying in the industry about content. ‘Content is King’, and while this phrase has become something of a cliché it has never been more relevant in modern SEO. Well-written, informative content attracts visitors. It keeps them returning to your pages to find out more information about your industry. Hook them in with good content and you’ll generate a loyal and effective user base.
Having good-quality content on your pages with your chosen keywords is also beneficial to search engines. But you should never write for the benefit of search engines or keyword stuff your content. This will work against you – search engines will think you are trying to manipulate them if your content is spammy and will penalise you.
Work keywords into your content so that it flows and is legible for readers. Good SEO content will be interesting to read and will still achieve a sound density of keywords. This will help associate your site and its pages with your chosen keywords in the search engines’ eyes whilst also entertaining your readers and encouraging them to return.
Blogging
Updating your site with regular, fresh content will be favourably looked upon by search engines. The best way to do this is with an onsite blog. By updating your blog with informative content on a consistent basis you’ll attract a wider readership through word of mouth.
But having a blog also helps with the internal linking of your website. Those who work in the SEO industry encourage internal linking throughout your website as it helps search engines to discover more about your pages and what they hold. It helps search engines discover and better categorise your site. Your blogs, while informative, can also contain keywords centred around sub-pages on your site. Linking to these sub-pages helps direct search engine spiders across the breadth of your website, helping to give the search engine a better overall picture of your online presence.