Every business needs a website, and every website needs Search Engine Optimization (SEO) skills either limited or experienced. SEO might be complicated and sophisticated, but when you get things organised from the pillar sources down to the resources, it will lighten up your burden in achieving your goals.
Your goals can either be Paid/Organic traffic or keyword rankings. But, setting up these goals are not as easy as you think. Let’s put it this way, when you’re selling something, you need to have profit. Because logically, the more sales, the more profit you will have. We listed a few techniques that are widely used by digital marketing experts which include SEO, Web Designers, and Content Writers.
What is On-Page strategy and how does it work?
On-page can be considered an important aspect that influences search engine rankings and gives more leverage to your business into what industry it belongs. Here is a list of the things you would do in setting up your website on-page from scratch.
Add XML Sitemap
www.domain.com/sitemap.xml you can achieve this page using a generated sitemap available via downloading online sitemap generator or adding new sitemap generator plug-ins in WordPress CMS.
Add Robots.txt file
www.domain.com/robot.txt is necessary to allow and disallow pages inside your website and formats the permalinks for SEO and user usability experience. There are corresponding usages of robot.txt; one is that you can’t use the file to hide information. The second one is that the file is publicly available that anyone can see what section of your server you don’t want the robots to crawl or index.
Add Navigation & Menus
This serves as your website’s map that leads your visitors to the areas that contain information within your site. Makes the navigation clear and provides a good user experience for your visitors.
Add a website property at Google Search Console
Google Search Console is formerly Google Webmaster tools. It was rebranded in 2015 as it describes charge-free web services by Google that allows webmasters to check their website indexing status and optimise their website visibility.
Configure your Meta Tags
<Meta> tags provide data about the HTML. The Metadata is not visible on the web page, but the HTML metadata codes are machine parsable. The Meta tags remain important in crawling your website’s data. It relates to the search queries of users in any search engine results that display your website’s brief information. Somehow, the tags are not the magic formula for obtaining highest keyword rankings in any search engine. But if implemented correctly, the search engine will decide which search results are relevant to user’s queries.
List of Meta tags
- Title tags – <title>relevant and attractive phrase </title>
- Description tags – <meta name=”description” content=”text”>
- Keyword tags – <meta name=”keywords” content=”words”>
- Robots tags – <meta name=”robots” content=”selection”>
- Indexing Frequency tags – <meta name=”revisit-after” content=”period”>
- To learn more visit All Metatags.
Check your website speed Performance
Speed, speed and more speed of the website are what people want nowadays. The low speed of the site drives away your visitors to click other competitor’s websites.
These are the things you need to keep up-to-date and running:
- Check Mobile-Friendliness (Responsive Design)
- Check Multi-Browser-Friendliness
- Compress images
- Check and visit Google Developer insight speed then follow the instructions provided on how to improve website usability experience as per Google’s recommendations.
- Check website loading speed, this tool (tools Pingdom) helps you determine which areas of your site are causing the slowdown.
URL Structure Settings
Having these precise URL structures are important and the keys in achieving keyword rankings as seen on most of the top sites in any search engines results. Having keyword phrases generate anchor text and increase search visibility results.
Things you need to set up- Incorporate primary keywords
- Use of absolute URL
- Only use dynamic URL with MOD_re-write engine
- Use 301 redirects for rewritten URL and HTTP to https
- Set up non-www version to www version and vice versa
How does URL permalink structure help you gain traffic?
Proper usage of permalinks structure helps you gain and generate anchor text. Notice in the screenshots below, that from the title, description and URL permalinks, the keyword is being implemented, and it was sitting in the top 3 in Google search results. The keyword “SEO” is garnering 90.5K estimated traffic and having $10.96 an estimated CPC (cost per click). And if you set it up accordingly, that estimated traffic would probably be achieved. Having those well-organised hierarchies of categories, pages, menu’s and permalinks, it become easy for the user to navigate your website and understand how your website works.
301 Redirects Vs. Old Domain
An inexperienced developer will not help your website rankings in any aspect. I raised my concern in an SEO online community on one of the sites I worked on for a couple of months, and one thing that I noticed is that the primary domain apparently redirected to the main site subfolder. See the response below.
The bottom-line is if you correctly implement those things mentioned above, once the search engine crawls your site, data will come in for you to build further analysis and modify it for any improvements. Search Engine Optimisation is constantly evolving, and there’s no magic formula for obtaining and maintaining keyword rankings. And It needs to have constant analysis.