If you are missing out on clicks, you are also probably missing out on sales. And if you don’t have a strong SEO strategy, you might miss out on clicks, impressions and most importantly sales.
For an online business, showing up on the first page of a search engine can be a deciding or the only factor in the success of the business. If they are missing out on clicks, they are probably missing out on sales.
Making your website SEO friendly is the first step in making your content indexed by search engines. But, before you create strategies for SEO marketing, it is very important to understand how search works or how the search engine ranks pages. Search engines use links on a web page to help them find other websites and other web pages.
This video by Google provides an excellent introduction to how search works:
Google takes into consideration various factors that help a page rank in their search engine. BackLinko has compiled an extensive list of 200 factors that Google take into consideration while deciding website ranking on a search page result.
Table of Contents
Keyword research
Content should always be created for the readers and not for search engines. But it is always beneficial to strategically create content. The best way to create content is by doing a keyword research. It helps to know the keywords that users are already searching for. It is also used to find keywords which your competitors are targeting and have been successful.
SEO tools and techniques used for keywords research while developing a SEO friendly website:
Google Adwords keyword planner– Keyword planner shows the estimated keyword search volume for a keyword, keyword competition as well as average PPC for a keyword. Researching keywords is a must while creating content marketing strategies.
Google Trends- it is used to weigh keywords against each other and even check how a group of keywords are performing in different geographical areas.
Ubersuggest.io – shows keyword ideas as well as long tail keyword ideas for entered keyword.
SEMRush or Ahrefs are used for competitor’s keyword analysis and information of their backlinks.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is one of the important things to do when developing SEO friendly website.
According to moz.com
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals
Meta Tags
The best way to begin on-page SEO is by taking good care of meta tags of the web page. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a web page’s content. The image below describes the meta tags defined for a web page. They are written in the <head> section of an HTML page.
Title tag: Title tag gives a title to a web page and they are displayed at the top of a web browser. Title tag is an important aspect of on-page SEO. The title of a result on a search page is determined by the title specified in the title tag. So, it is important to write the title tag clear and descriptive. The ideal length is 50 – 60 characters. Target keyword should be included in the title.
Meta description: Meta tags should be optimized for on-site SEO. Meta description tag should be defined in such a way that they provide concise explanation and summary of the content of the website. It is an important factor that drives a reader to a website from the search engine result’s page.
There are other meta tags that let you specify the author’s name, main keywords in the content as well as tell the search engine not to index this page.
The image below shows how the results are displayed on search engine page when the title, meta tags are optimized.
Internal Links
Internal linking is a very important aspect of on-page SEO when developing an SEO friendly website. Internal links are hyperlinks that point to another page on the same website. Internal links allow users to navigate through a website. It also gives the author an opportunity to link to his earlier content, which can help to decrease the bounce rate.
Internal links also help the search spiders or web crawlers to follows links inside a website and crawl more page, thereby optimizing the crawlability. It is also very important to test if the link if working and it is not broken. If a link is broken the crawlers would stop at that page and won’t go forward for looking for the right page to crawl.
External linking
Outbound links to authoritative websites have shown improvements in the search results. Outbound links to authoritative websites give the search engines good idea that your blog or website contains quality content. It is therefore suggested to link to websites that have good page authority or domain authority. Reboot, a marketing firm conducted a case study and showed that outbound relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and they have a positive impact on search engine rankings.
SEO friendly URL
The URL of a web page should be kept relevant, brief and as descriptive as possible when developing an SEO friendly website. One should practice is including target keyword in the URL.
Follow is a good example of a good URL
Dynamically generated webpages using PHP usually have URL’s that contain parameters and numbers, which tend to be longer and are difficult to read. Such dynamic URL’s can be changed and rewritten by .htaccess.
SEO for images
Optimizing images is one of the neglected aspects of the on-page SEO. Alt attribute should always be included in an image. Even Google says to create great alt tags. Google places a high value on alt tags to determine the content of the image. It is also recommended to name the image files in such a way that it describes its content.
An example of a google <img> tag with alt attribute:
<img src="puppy.jpg" alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch">
Duplicate content
Duplicate content can cause “duplicate content penalty” and drop your ranking in search engines. Duplicate content can also occur if you have a separate website for desktop and mobile version. One way to fix the problem of duplicate content is adding canonical Tag.
An example of a canonical tag:
<link rel=canonical href=” http://www.iambiomed.com/article/566/25-companies-every-biomedical-engineer-wants-to-work” />
Other measures to consider while creating a SEO friendly website:
- Creating mobile friendly pages
- Optimizing the loading speed of the website
- Creating a sitemap (both html and XML) and submitting to search engines
- Creating structed data by adding schema terms such as “itemscope” to the exisiting HTML.
Putting efforts on creating SEO strategy can help you develop an SEO friendly website and get best results from the search engines.
