Optimizing a website is a difficult art that requires understanding not only the needs of users, but also the work of web robots. What are they?
Aleksandra Pietrzak
You’ve spent months carefully crafting your website to produce the best user experience, but you’re still not achieving the search engine rankings you’d hoped for. What could be wrong? It might be your website’s on-site SEO optimization, which allows search engines to understand and index your site, and lets users easily find what they’re looking for on your site. Here are some key tips to help you optimize your on-site SEO in order to achieve good rankings.
It is a process that allows you to increase traffic from search engines by improving how relevant search engines perceive your website. If you want to increase traffic, but don’t want everyone in sight seeing your website, for example, then you would use an on-page technique. Your goal would be attracting more targeted viewers and ultimately converting those visitors into clients or customers.
While off-site optimization implies improving your social media network or getting backlinks from other websites, on-site strategies are all about making changes to your website with a view to improving its position in search engines. These two together work towards attracting more visitors and boosting sales.
Before you start promoting your website, take care of its interior. Be sure to take care of such elements as:
The importance of auditing a website cannot be stressed enough. Auditing your site should be an ongoing process and it’s vital that you do not skip it no matter how busy you are with other tasks. A comprehensive audit will show you how your current site performs in terms of structure, content, link profile, architecture and more. These metrics are crucial for businesses which want to compete online.
Friendly in this context means easy to read and remember by users, so that they can easily find you and share the link. The shorter the better. Do not use special characters, capital letters, spaces and numbers. Use only alphanumeric characters without any extra spaces or symbols. Your URL should be unique and readable. Use your main keyword as part of your URL.
The main difference between HTTP and HTTPS is that HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s how a user’s computer requests information from a website or sends information. Google now prefers that all websites be in HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It ensures information being transferred over a network is encrypted so no one can intercept it.
A site map file can help Google better determine how your website is structured and what its topics are. If your site isn’t using one, get started by creating a basic XML sitemap like this. Before submitting it to Google, make sure that you review it for any problems or mistakes—it’s better not to have one at all than to have a broken or incorrect one! You can also use tools like Yoast’s WordPress plugin to create an XML sitemap as well as other elements of great SEO.
The robots.txt file is used by search engines to find out which pages/urls you don’t want shown in search results. It also tells them what parts of your site can be indexed and how frequently. If you have a high volume website that serves large amounts of traffic, it might be beneficial for you to create multiple robots.txt files with separate schedules for each one.
A meta tag for each page should at least include your primary keyword and preferably two or three others as well. Meta tags are also important for ranking your site in search engines, so don’t think that you can get away with minimal meta tags. The title tag should contain a maximum of 60 characters and be as original as possible to encourage the recipient to click. Meta description, in turn, is a compact description of the page that tells what is on it. Here you have 150-160 characters at your disposal to interest someone.
Rich snippets include details like reviews, price, images and a lot more. It provides you with a better chance at getting your content listed above your competitors in search results, resulting in higher click-through rates for your business. This also means that it will take longer for your website to appear in Google’s search results as well. Because rich snippets are so large, it’s best if you only use them when they are relevant to what users would be searching for.
Knowing your keywords and optimizing your content based off of them isn’t a new concept. In fact, it was one of Google’s primary ranking factors. If you want to make sure that people can find your content when they search online, you need to optimize your content around keywords so that it shows up in relevant searches. The most common type of keyword is known as a long tail keyword. Long tail keywords are typically more specific than broad terms, which means there are fewer results for those searches—and therefore less competition.
Internal links are an important part of a site’s architecture and content. By creating inbound links to related pages and posts, you help search engines better understand your topic and subject matter. This can improve your search engine rankings by providing a rich, cohesive experience for users. It also helps people discover new content that might interest them, so it’s a win-win!
Search engines can be really picky, which means that your page needs to meet all sorts of requirements in order for it to rank well. A big part of meeting those requirements is adding relevant images and video. Plus, as you probably know, images and video get higher engagement rates than plain text. In other words, you’ll benefit in more ways than one from creating visual content for your pages.
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing out on traffic and sales. Customers are increasingly going mobile, meaning that if your site can’t be viewed or navigated from a handheld device, you could be leaving money behind. Mobility is one of the ranking factors and additionally affects the process of indexing the page. So if you don’t have a mobile website, you are invisible in the SERP.
According to reports from different Google sources, page loading speed has been found as a ranking factor for organic search results. A website that loads slowly might lose its visitors and customers. Check your results for core web metrics – Core Web Vitals – in the Google Search Console and Google Analytics dashboard. The faster you are, the greater your visibility.
So you can see how many elements affect the position in organic search results. Everything that a page consists of – even the smallest dot – is a ranking factor that must provide a high quality user experience. If you do not feel strong enough to interfere with the structure of the site yourself, use the help of a specialized agency. They have the necessary knowledge and tools to take care of your place on the web.
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