The SEO landscape has changed considerably over the years. The amount of information now included in search results, such as tweets, news, and photos, is a huge improvement over the lines of text we used to see. When creating your business website, it is important to consider how your website will appear in the three major search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Having a website with good SEO (search engine optimization) can make a significant difference in the depth of the number of pages you rank. If it is a smaller local business; attention to local SEO efforts is more important than ever.
When designing a website and creating content that adheres to SEO best practices, it is a good idea to check the search engines themselves. Both Bing and Google have SEO user guides that explain exactly how their services rank websites.
Off-Page is considered to be a more important and tough aspect of SEO. However, both must be a part of your digital strategy, as this is not a choice. On-page and off-page SEO work hand in hand to improve your search rankings
What you rank for is determined by on-page factors and how high your rank is, determined by off-page factors.
The two types of SEO are equally important, the reason being;
On-page SEO
On-page SEO: It refers to “on the page”, where the structure of the website plays an important role.
Factors:
Page title – Make sure you use the right keywords in the title. You can also answer questions for readers and rank high.
Heading(H1 tags) – Since this text will be the most visible and recollected by the reader, requires keyword research
URL(permalink) structure – Organized URL is more appealing and adding keywords to the URL will give the content a higher rank. Avoid numbers, dates, redundant words in your permalink, unless it is necessary.
Meta description – A short description of your article, without spamming with many keywords. Just include the primary and secondary keywords smartly.
ALT tags for images – Inserting relevant keywords will help search engines crawl the image and understand the contents on your page.
Website Loading time – Optimizing your pages to load faster will help the site rank higher. Google has now made a mobile-first index, your mobile site should load much faster than the desktop for better indexing, user experience followed by Google Rankings. Instant Articles and AMP are two good mobile solutions to load the website almost instantaneously. Additionally, you can use a CDN to load HTML files faster.
Page Content – As the content will be crawled, you need to have relevant and helpful content that will be of value to the consumer.
Robots.txt file – Avoid redundant pages like archive, search, etc. from Google search results.
Sitemap – A simple.XML sitemap should help in better indexing of the site.
Schema Markup: A proper schema is a must to show up in the Google Knowledge Graph and conquering top results on Google Search Results.
Spilt Testing: Yes, you heard it right. We heard about split-testing for Ad Placements and conversion optimization, but the same spilt testing has also got a huge role to play in 2020. Companies like Rank Science and Distilled ODN will make the split testing on autopilot mode.
By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), Ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) can be significantly improved by using the best keyword researching tools and good content. You could also link relevant content from other pages of your website to give the user more knowledge as well as rank higher.
Off-page SEO:
It refers to “off the page”, where branding and authority play an important role. As we all know, Google still considers backlinks to be the major part of its algorithm.
There are numerous ways to build backlinks, some of them include:
- Guest blogging
- Content Marketing
- Directory Submission
- Social Bookmarking
- Forum submission
- Paid links
Creating great content with a robust content marketing strategy, Infographics, Podcasts, explanatory video tutorials, etc. will help in gaining organic backlinks.