On Page SEO
Bring in search engine traffic for every piece of content you publish on your website.
As we always say, there’s no point having a fantastic website if no one can find it.
We are passionate about the art and science involved in the practice of SEO, we are proud that we are often told by clients and prospects that we give a good, simplified explanation of what is involved so…time for a blog post.
There are two elements to SEO ‘on page’ and ‘off page’. On page involves Code and Content, Off Page relates to Connections. Sounds simple in theory but it is complex and challenging and we think, extremely interesting! Any input that search engines use to rank pages and anything that people or technology does to influence those elements is SEO – huge.
In this article we will focus on a (non-techy) look at on page and we will cover off page in our next blog.
SEO is all about driving traffic to your website and ranking highly in search engine results pages, many compounding factors have an incremental effect on SEO. SEO involves making it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content. Search engines will rank and show information based on how relevant they think it will be for users.
Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results such as Google AdWords (PPC).
Search engines such as Google encourage website owners towards SEO, they provide help, guidelines and support, because ultimately this helps them improve their search results.
Like a recipe, your website and web pages need to have all the right ingredients that search engines require to index your site correctly. Search engines use algorithms (which are constantly reviewed and updated) in order to account for every word on the web and produce results pages.
Summary of on page ingredients:
Keywords – Ensure you use key words which best relate to your business and research which words and phrases are used most often in search queries.
Content – As we’ve always said, content is key, it needs to be fresh, relevant and in an ideal world, highly shareable.
Meta Description – The Meta Description does not help you rank higher but will determine if your listing entices a click through.
Header Tags – H1’s and H2’s give search engines clues as to what the page is about. Where possible you should use words you want to be associated with in the header tags.
Crawlability – Search engines ‘crawl’ websites, scanning the page information and copying it to an ‘index’. The search engine will use the index to look for all relevant pages for a search query. Some elements make it hard for sites to be crawled such as JavaScript or Flash as words can be ‘hidden’.
And rank higher if you have:
A Mobile Friendly site – as per our previous blogs, Google and now Bing reward sites that are easy to navigate on a mobile device by giving them a higher ranking. Speed of site is also deemed important for the future and so higher speed sites will rank slightly higher.
Descriptive URL’s – Have the words you want to be found for in your domain name or page url’s.
HTTPS – Google would like the whole web to be https to increase security for its users, https sites will also rank higher.
In summary this infographic and guide shows SEO in a Periodic Table format, it is the best, simplest overview of SEO we have seen in a long time and really floats our boat, in fact it may make it into a frame for our office wall.
On Page SEO is an on-going science, maintenance is key – tracking rankings, knowing which search terms and pages are driving traffic, reviewing new terms as they come out and reviewing competitors – where is your competition beating you?
There’s nothing we enjoy more than helping businesses increase their traffic and sales, give us a call to discuss how we can do this for your organisation.