Any small business can agree that starting on an SEO journey is a multi-step adventure that is not always the easiest to undertake. Like any trip, there are lots of things to prepare for before you get started. You could get recommendations from family or friends on what to do and how to do it. Even when the SEO road ahead looks successful, there are still many stops you could be missing along the way.
Here at Boostability, we’re your friends to help you on your SEO journey. This article will help give you the most common on-site recommendations you need to understand to be successful in SEO. Pack your bags, get your checklist ready, and let’s dive into this SEO journey.
What is On-Site SEO?
On-site SEO is optimization done to your own website for the purpose of increasing your search engine rankings. This can be done by optimizing keywords, content, titles, meta descriptions, headlines, microdata, site speed, internal links, mobile friendliness and alt tags. Because these things are all done on your own website they are considered onsite optimizations and are a good starting point for any SEO campaign.
How to Improve Your On-Page SEO
When you’re new to SEO, it’s easier to start with the basics. While your web page structure needs to be technical, content and what your write is equally as important. Search engines like Google understand and scan what your writing displays within your text. The overall goal with search engines is to create content that attracts and builds trust with your intended audience and readers. When your audience creates positive signals about your content, so will search engines.
Writing content may seem like an easy task, but adding optimization and key details you need to succeed adds a new layer to your SEO strategy. Below we’ve compiled a list of on site SEO recommendations to help improve your businesses SEO. Think of this as a checklist to help go over what’s important for your businesses website.
On Site Recommendations
Page Loading Speed
One of the most frustrating things that can happen to your website pages is slow website speed. You want to give your audiences answers and resources, but how can you do that if they can’t load your information? When your page slows a customer down it ultimately discourages them from pursuing your business. It further results in losing a battle for ranking higher in organic traffic and rankings, regardless of how professional or excellent your site may be.
Page loading speed plays a crucial role in SEO. Your site could be slow for a number of reasons. Some reasons may be due to larger file sizes with images or loads of HTML on the page. It could be due to problems with your server or redirect chains and loops. No matter the reason, go through your website and see what you could get rid of to make room for faster page loading speeds. Overall, it’s important to pay attention to your site’s speed so your bounce rate isn’t too low.
Linking
Link building is a fundamental part of a SEO optimization strategy. From internal to external linking, these types of strategies help create more awareness and trust within your website. While it’s important to build your links, it’s more important to not overflow your links to your site. Link building focuses more on quality than quantity of links. You’ll build more trust in your niche if you have a few authoritative links rather than a dozen poor quality links. The best way to get started with link building is utilizing internal linking within your website to help individuals discover pages.
Content
Content is one of the most crucial aspects to having successful SEO. Without content your website would be nothing. Keeping content at an appropriate length creates balance for readers and search engines. You want to inform your reader with the right amount of information without overloading them with content. There are many ways to keep your content in check. One way is keeping your content around 800-1,400 words. Another could be organizing the readability of your content to not confuse your readers. Having a theme or standard within your writing helps keep uniformity on your website.
While you’re writing content for your website and search engines, it’s important to have a main focus on writing for a real person instead of a computer. When you focus on the reader’s interests instead of keywords, you’ll be rewarded in the end by enhancing your user’s experience and trust. When you’ve built up enough content for some time, it’s important to go through and make sure you don’t have duplicate content. While search engines won’t give you a penalty on your SEO for this, it can decrease the value of your content. Be sure to generate evergreen content that will continue to attract readers years from when it was published.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the first section that people see when Google serves up your page to search users. A well-written meta description can help you to stand out on SERPs and appeal to people browsing through the results page. A poorly written meta description can lead to people glossing over your result and choosing something better on the SERP. Be sure to focus on writing unique and relevant meta descriptions for every page on your site.
URLs
The same could be said about meta description for URLs. Your URL should be quick, clear, and unique to your page’s content. Refrain from using jumbles of numbers that will make no sense to your audience. If users can’t read or understand your URL, then search engines such as Google might be confused as well. Search engines follow search users and keeping your URL simple and readable will help improve its structure. It’s as simple as adding in keywords or your title into the URL.
Keywords and Images
Keywords help users not only answer their question, but also helps your site become more discovered. Building out content on your website in order to grow your online presence through utilizing keywords is known as content marketing. Adding keywords into your website helps readers know what you’re talking about and what to look for. It also gives search engines a positive signal that helps improve your ranking.
Just like your content, the same can be done with your images. When users are looking for a particular image, what do they search with? Keywords. For this reason, you should use the right keywords in your image names and accompanying text (like the caption). Doing research and testing what keywords are best for your website will help improve your SEO over time.
Crawlability
When a search engine looks into your website to see what you’re offering customers, they search for multiple things. This is called crawlability. When a search engine is doing a crawl on your website, such as Google, it’s important to not be blocked or restricted or else your SEO will go to waste. It’s important to check on broken links, not enough internal links, and missing a clear sitemap. These examples could damage your website’s SEO that you work hard for.
Social Sharing Platforms
In this day in age, more social platforms have started to take over the way viewers look for information. Being mobile friendly is a big step in learning to adapt to new technology and the way people search on their phones. It’s also important to stay connected within your networks and communities to share and post on social platforms.
If you’re wanting to get more social signals from your viewers, here are some ways to do it:
- Create useful content that’s share-worthy across your social media platforms.
- Add share buttons to your post and make them visible.
- Encourage people to share, by asking them to.
- Host a social media contest to get more shares.
- Mention and link to social media influencers/power users in your post and notify them.
Connecting through thought leadership and social media are great ways to expand your audience. Look for ways to reblog or link share with others within your internal or external network.
Conclusion
There are lots of steps in SEO that are easy to get through, while others are based on waiting. Building on your on site SEO is one of the best ways to improve and grow your website’s SEO. If you’re needing help along the way, Boostability is here to help. Visit our partner program to learn of more ways Boostability can help grow your businesses’ SEO together.
