SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Did you know that only 33% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have optimized websites?
If your website is not optimized correctly, you will lose all the potential that search engine optimization (SEO) has to offer your business. By optimizing your on-site SEO, you will produce more effective results with your SEO campaign.
Next, we'll discuss the basics of on-site SEO and six crucial components of SEO to drive success.
What is on-site SEO?
On-site SEO is the process of making a search engine friendly. When you use this strategy, it focuses on optimizing elements on your website that will help you rank higher in search results and generate more valuable traffic to your site.
This SEO practice requires adjusting elements of your website, so that search engines - Google - can easily crawl your site and index its content. When you use on-site SEO, you optimize both the content and the HTML source code on a page.
One of the most critical factors of on-site SEO is relevance. You need to ask yourself how relevant your content is to the user's search query and the intent behind the search. If you understand your audience, you can create content that helps you reach those potential customers.
Why is on-site SEO important?
On-site SEO is a crucial part because it helps search engines interpret the content of your page. If search engines can't crawl your page, they can't index your information. If you have good on-site SEO, search engines can easily understand what a human would see if they visited your page.
Indexing your pages helps search engines deliver the best content to your audience. When search engines know what's on your page, they can easily index your content so that it appears in the most relevant search queries.
As for the human aspect of SEO, you will appear in front of potential customers more relevant to your business. They will see relevant content that fits their search query. It helps you connect with more relevant leads.
If your site is not optimized correctly, you will lose all the potential that search engine optimization (SEO) has for your business.
6 important on-site SEO factors:
Now that you know the importance of on-site SEO, it's time to start optimizing your site to achieve valuable results. Let's take a look at six crucial on-site SEO factors you should focus on to maximize your results.
1.) Create valuable and insightful content to keep potential customers on your page.
Content drives traffic to your site, gets people to interact with your pages and keeps them there. If you're not investing in content marketing, you're not maximizing opportunities.
Content comes in numerous forms, including blogs and ebooks. It can cover multiple topics about your industry to help attract potential customers.
If you want to attract relevant leads to your website, you must create content that is valuable and informative to your audience.
The content should be well organized and easy to follow.
Good content is linkable. If you're writing something valuable and informative, your audience and other companies will be more likely to share or link to it.
By creating in-depth content that matches the user's search intent, you will attract more traffic and increase the time the visitor stays on the page. These two actions will send a positive signal to Google that your page is relevant for Google to increase its ranking.
2.) Optimize title tags to appear in more relevant results.
When users find your website's pages in search results, the first thing they see is the page title. The title plays an important role in determining whether they click through to your page or move on to a competitor's page. Title optimization is one of the most important SEO techniques to get people to visit your page.
Not only does Google search for the keyword in the title to help rank your page, but your audience also searches for the keyword to see if your listing is relevant to their query.
Title optimization is one of the many on-site SEO techniques that can improve ranking and appear in more relevant search results.
3.) Use internal links on the page to keep leads on your site longer.
Every time you write new pages, you should link to other pages on your site within the content. These are known as internal links because they keep the leads within your site instead of sending them to other external websites.
Internal links improve the user experience. They provide your audience with valuable information and help them learn more about the topic.
These internal links also help search engines discover more pages on your site.
Adding internal links improves the user experience. It allows them to get more information on topics that may be difficult to understand or confusing. These potential customers spend more time reading the information on your site, which increases their dwell time and improves rankings.
4.) Improve your page load time
Everyone wants information fast. When users search, they want to click on a link and see the page load immediately. In fact, 83% of users expect a website to load in three seconds or less.
If your page doesn't load quickly, users will abandon your site. 53% of users will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. You can lose half of your traffic simply by having a page that takes too long to load.
There are numerous ways to improve loading time including:
- Reduce image file size
- Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML
- Reducing white space in coding
- Reduce the number of redirects on your site
- Leverage browser caching
- Host videos on external platforms such as Wistia and YouTube
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
These are just some of the ways you can improve your site's load time.
5.) Create friendly URLs
Your URL is a crucial part of SEO. When search engines crawl your site, they read the URL to understand its content. If your URL is unclear, it won't help search engines index the website or help users remember the URL.
URLs must be clear and have a hierarchy.
6.) Make sure your site is responsive
Your audience will access your website from multiple devices. It's crucial that you create a positive experience on all of those devices. If you want to do on-site SEO correctly, you need to make sure your website has a responsive design.
Responsive design ensures that the website adapts to whatever device the user is using. Whether it's a smartphone, computer or tablet, the website will adjust to best fit the screen of that device.
