On and Off Page SEO, Tips and Tricks
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great addition to any online marketing effort.
Proper implementation can lead to amazing results, with a higher search engine ranking leading to an increase in traffic (website visitors) and sales. Good SEO takes dedicated work and time to start seeing the results, but if you find the magic mix of strategies, you’ll see continuous returns on your investment both in search and organic traffic, and ultimately in sales.
On-Page SEO
1. Add a title tag.
You will need this on every page of your website, as this will show the search engines and your visitors what the page is about. It should be about 70 words or fewer and include the keyword or key phrase that you want to rank for.
2. Write a meta description.
Search engines allow site owners to write descriptions about the page that’s crawled, which they display within the search engine results page. This isn’t generally visible to the user (unless they’re using adaptive technology like screen readers, or go looking for it) and is a great place to include keywords.
3. Create subheadings.
Subheadings can be thought of as a tag showing what you believe to be important to your content. These make your content easier to read, both for human users and for search engines. Good use of subheadings helps improve your search engine rankings, and is yet another place to add additional keywords and key phrases into your content.
4. Build internal links.
This technique can be powerful and may be strong enough to help rank individual pages without any external (off-page) SEO. Just put a link in your smaller articles and content pieces to a longer, more authoritative piece of content. This helps the longer content to rank higher.
5. Use image name and ALT tags.
Give each image on your website a name that includes your chosen keyword. When indexing the page, the search engines may rank these images when people search for that particular keyword.
6. Avoid over-optimizing.
Google in particular goes to quite a bit of effort to penalize content stuffing, or overuse of keywords to the point of obscuring natural language. When creating the content for your website, it’s important not to over-optimize. Make sparing use of your main keyword unless it fits naturally within your content, and instead try to branch out into a larger pool of keywords you can rank highly in.
7. Make your website mobile-friendly.
These days, most searches and social media traffic will come from mobile devices. So, it’s important that your website works properly on mobile. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, this will impact your user experience, and therefore your ranking signals, negatively.
Off-Page SEO
1. Building trust
Trust has become an important ranking factor. It shows the search engines that what you say is accurate and that visitors can trust your content. To develop trust, build high-quality backlinks from other trusted sources, build relationships with other businesses and customers, and work towards a good array of positive customer reviews.
2. Good backlink profile.
Most SEO experts gain backlinks by building relationships with other websites. Build high-quality backlinks from other trusted sources, and ensure that your content is both polished and accurate. It’s crucial to avoid spamming your links or building them too quickly, which could result in your website becoming de-indexed.
3. Social signals
Even without the benefit of driving customers directly to your site, getting likes and shares from social media may have an impact on your search engine rankings. It only makes sense to create the most valuable content you can and share it with your own social media accounts, where others can like and share it too.
What are your best SEO strategies? Share them in the comments, and remember to keep CodeDesign in mind for all your web development, digital marketing and SEO needs.
