Today, there are almost 500 million active websites on the internet. This means, as a marketer or business owner you are up against completion, irrespective of the industry and size of the business. Staying ahead of your competitors or keeping in pace with the big players in the industry requires you to generate more leads than ever. And to achieve this, you, in turn, need to have a website with high ranking in the search engine results and visible to your target audience. That’s exactly where the SEO strategy comes to your aid.
An SEO technique that is likely to increase the website visibility and ranking the search engine results, includes two major components. On-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO
On-site SEO ( on-page SEO) is the process of optimizing different parts of the website affecting the search engine rankings. It simply means that certain elements in the website are adjusted to enable the search engine to crawl and understand the structure and content of the website. Some of the key factors that affect the on-page SEO services and ranking include:
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Keywords- Keywords play a crucial role in improving the rank of a website. Incorporate the keywords strategically throughout the content. Beware! Do not overdo it. Keyword stuffing may end up hurting your website ranking rather than improving it.
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Niche content - Content is the king. Your website content needs to be useful to your reader. Google checks the quality and usefulness of your content using various measures. Therefore, provide value-adding, engaging, useful and specific content to your reader.
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Title & title tags - The title of your website and individual pages can work wonders for you if done correctly. Optimize the title tag by incorporating the keywords in it. As a rule of thumb, limit the characters in the title to 60 words. Ensure the title is catchy and relevant.
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Headings - The search engine gives more weight to the headings when compared to other text within the website. Ensure to incorporate suitable heading tags such as H1, H2, and H3. include the target keywords in the heading and make it easy for search engines to crawl into your website.
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Meta-description - Meta- description appears below the title of the page in the search results. Include attractive words that build curiosity within the reader, leaving the reader wanting for more.
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URL structure - If possible include the keywords in the URLs. However, ensure not to change the old URLs until and unless to are redirecting the old ones to the new ones.
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Page load speed - Time is taken by your page to load pays a significant factor in ranking your website. An ideal page should load within 3 seconds. One possible way to increase page speed is to reduce the size of the images.
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Alt text for images - You can use images to boost your SEO. include keyword-rich, relevant Alt text and a text summary of an image.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO (off-page SEO) focuses on obtaining links from other websites and improving the authority of the domain. Some of the factors that affect the off-page SEO ranking are:
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Backlinks - It is the core of off-page SEO. backlinks are nothing but links redirected to your site from other websites. A backlink from a high-quality website can boost your ranking instantly. The best way to attain backlinks is to develop and post valuable content or posting guest blogs on top-ranked websites.
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Social media - Promoting the content via social media platforms can skyrocket your search engine ranking. However, this process demands a solid plan and content to be handpicked by the readers and shared among the huge audience.
Off-page and on-page SEO combine together to enhance the search engine ranking. Hence choosing only one among them to be visible to the target audience is similar to choosing an only foundation and not roof for a building.