How to use search engine optimisation (SEO) ON-PAGE and OFF-PAGE by Google guidelines
Did you know? Right now, over 81% of people first search online before purchasing vs using yellow pages, newspapers, traditional “offline” methods.
Did you also know? – 60% of traffic that comes to the websites is from searches-From people typing in what they are looking for in Google, Yahoo & MSN/Bing. Now, if your site is not on the first page of the search engine results, then, unfortunately, you are nowhere. So knowing that I am sure you would like to know how to achieve first-page search results…and it begins with proper SEO strategies.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an essential technique or process for people who depend on their websites to bring them business or are trying to do so. Merely having an online presence by way of a site doesn’t serve any purpose if various pages of the website are not optimised with search engines in mind.
Search Engine Optimization is a technique with the help of which one’s site attains a position in search engine. Depending on how well the website is optimised and marketed will decide its place in Search Engines. The higher the place, the better. The higher position will ensure higher traffic to the site, and more visitors means more sales.
Optimising is done with the help of key phrases. Key phrases are what people generally type in Search box while searching for a particular topic.
Keywords are what the search engines love to index. Choosing the right keywords in your text can make all of the difference in search engine ranking. Optimising your website is not difficult to do, and that something everyone who owns a site needs to start doing to be visible online.
Way back, a few years ago, meta tags were important for search engines to find you for indexing into their databases. Meta tags are those unseen bits of HTML information that is in the “header” section of every web page. The meta tags give the search engine robots all of the relevant keywords about the website.
Meta tags used to matter a lot about relevancy for ranking purposes in the engines. However, like most good things, meta tags were abused by everyone looking to get higher placement in search engines. Today, the meta tags are unimportant and almost useless. The search engine spiders do not care about the meta tags. It’s all about SEO today.
The basic approach to SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
Yes, we already knew the meaning of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation but the question here is how to optimise it. SEO is about two things: On Page Optimisation and Off Page Optimisation. In this article, for those not knowing, I will discuss what the two means and what factors that need to be optimised. Let me start with identifying On Page Factors.
On-Page Optimisation
On-Page Optimisation is the SEO on your actual page or blog. In the old days, one of the most popular ways search engines ranked websites was by looking for the prominence and frequency of specific keywords and phrases on your site and assigning an appropriate degree of weight. This is how people thought they could rank #1, or on the first page, of Google search.
On-Page SEO has to do with all objects in a website. These are HTML codes, keywords, keyword density, keyword proximity, keyword prominence, domain name, URL structures, sitemaps, htaccess, robot.txt, and even the content. On Page Optimization is all on page factors. On Page Factors includes:
Keywords
Keywords are an essential part of SEO. People who are new in the internet industry need to research the right keywords to increase traffic on their websites. Even though you offer the best products with the best prices offered all over the world but your site was buried under many other websites there is no point of having a website because you will surely have minor traffic or if worst comes to worst, you might not have any traffic at all. This why we need to research for the right keywords that suit your business. To find the right keywords, you should visualise what your target market might be searching to find your website and optimise that keyword to increase your visibility on search engines.
Content
Content is the next essential part of SEO. This where you will convince your target market to purchase your products, that is why the content is called “The King”. The principle of creating articles for online purposes is different from articles for magazines, newspaper, and other publications. The difference between an article made for online purposes and the other publications produced for offline distributions is the number of keywords being repeated throughout your article. It would help if you observed three essential things which are keyword density, keyword proximity, and keyword prominence.
Keyword density
Keyword density is the most critical aspects of successful search engine optimisation. Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword or key phrases to the total number of words on a webpage. Keyword density is calculated by dividing the total of some words on your page by the number of times of your primary keyword or key phrase you place all over your page. The recommended percentage of keyword density was around 2 – 4 %.
Keyword proximity
Keyword Proximity refers to how close between two or more keywords, the closer the keywords, the better.
Keyword prominence
Keyword Prominence refers to how close to the top your keywords are within a webpage. It is recommended to place keywords that are important at, or near, the start of a Webpage, Sentence, Title or Meta Tag.
Html Codes
Html Codes refers to the overall appearance of your website. Content or In page text. Text codes refer to the appearance of your content. These are the “b”, “i”, “h1”, “h2”, “h3”, “h4”, “h5”, “h6”, “h7”. These codes emphasise your keywords and let search engines know that they are important.
Title Tags
Title tag refers to the title of your webpage. For better rankings, you can include your keywords in it.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are information inserted into the area of your webpage. Although search engines do not give too much importance, it can be useful on your webpage. There are many kinds of Meta Tags, but will only discuss to you the most important among them. They are the following:
Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords allows you to provide additional text information for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body. This is where you will put your keywords. This also helps search engines to come up for synonyms, misspellings or unusual words that do not appear within your webpage.
Meta Description
Meta Description allows you to influence the description of your page for search engines that support it.
Alt Tags
Because search engines do not recognise images, we need to insert descriptions in Alt tags. Adding keywords in Alt tags also increase traffic; some experts usually refer to this as Image Optimization.
Domain Name
Domain Name also has an impact on search engines especially if you put your keywords in it. For this reason, lots of people buy lots of domains that have keywords in it and sold it with much higher value. If you are targeting only in your region, you should purchase domains that are specially made in your target region. Ex. [https://www.seo-bangkok.com], [http://www.domain.ph], etc. Google gives high importance of domains with .gov, .edu. URL Structure Internal pages and its structures are important for the accessibility of your target viewers and spider.
Sitemap
Sitemap has two purposes: 1. Search Engines, 2. End users. For search engines, sitemap help to speed up the crawling especially those deep links. While for End users, sitemap helps them to navigate your whole website.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt was used to exclude or provides restrictions to search engine robots to crawl an unwanted file in your server.
Off-Page SEO Optimization
Off-Page SEO is the use of keywords of your site. Search engines use mentions of your website, business name, and keywords used on other places across the web to determine your ranking in their results. While your on-page SEO efforts can take your website in the right direction, you need to implement off-page SEO that is strong and focused in order to benefit from search engine traffic entirely. SEO techniques can maximise your site’s visibility and enhance your search engine ranking.
As with on-page SEO tactics, always make sure you keep your preferred keywords and phrases in mind when you update your social media accounts.
If you implement each of the following off-page SEO strategies, then you enhance your website’s chances of moving up on the search engine page results. In turn, this increases your company’s visibility and the opportunity to drive new traffic to your virtual doorstep.
Content-Sharing Sites
One of the ways that you can get a bit of free advertising is to post informative articles on a content-sharing website. Since the content you post reflects your company, it’s essential to submit quality content that is relevant to your business. Since you get to include a link to your site, you also enhance your link building strategy at the same time.
Directory Submission
Arrange to have your website listed in relevant categories of various high-ranked directories. While you may look at this practice as link building, the description of your website that is included enhances your site’s search engine friendliness.
Press Releases
Submitting press releases to different websites can generate essential backlinks for your site. A press release offers a great way to advertise your business products or services.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social networking sites can take your business out of the depths of the unknown and into the realm of highly visible websites. Building credibility for your business is easily accomplished through interactive communication on social bookmarking sites. Each positive interaction attracts online notice while providing a foundation to build upon.
A Presence in Forums and Blog Posts
Become a regular member of a relevant forum and offer sound advice to fellow members. If you can create loyal followers, you enhance your company’s credibility and generate traffic to your website.
Search the Web for blog posts that relate to your products or services, and add a useful comment to related posts. Make sure that your post doesn’t amount to spam. It’s essential that you incorporate a do-follow blog on your site, allowing other individuals to comment. Do-follow blogs generate links that enhance search page rank.
Backlink Building
The number of quality backlinks your website has is critical to your company’s success. When another website links to your site, it’s a vote of confidence in what you have to offer potential customers.
Keep your anchor text, the words included in the link, relevant for a better chance at moving your search engine ranking up. The use of specific keywords in your anchor texts should provide a clear indication of the nature of your website.
In summary
Search engine optimisation refers to the employment of several strategies that make it easier for search engines like Google to index your website and serve it up to people looking for the information it offers. The result of SEO is organic traffic—visitors who come to your site by clicking on it in search results. There are two types of SEO that help to improve your website’s ranking: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
There is an ever-increasing perception around the web marketing world that off-page search engine optimisation (SEO) is more important than on-page SEO. As explained before, on-page SEO is about everything that happens on your website and off-page SEO is about the things that happen away from your site.
For many internet marketers, off-page SEO is primarily about gaining backlinks to boost search engine rankings. Within this, some people focus on the quality of backlinks and others the sheer quantity. However, in the never-ending quest for backlinks, many website owners forget about or are unaware of the importance of on-page SEO.
Conclusion
While on-page and off-page are different approaches to search engine optimisation, both are essential for your website to increase its likelihood of landing on top of the search engine results page. Search engines and organic traffic play a significant role in your business growth because the majority of your target audience uses a search engine to find you. Implementing both on-page and off-page SEO will help you to get seen by more potential customers anywhere and anytime.