Drive Traffic To Your Site With Search Engine Optimisation

If you're looking to increase traffic to your website, leads, brand awareness and rank better on search engines, it's time to understand search engine optimisation or SEO. I'll be mainly focusing on on-page optimisation. 

What Is On-Page Or On-Site SEO?

On-page or on-site search engine optimisation is the process of optimising different front-end and back-end elements, so your website ranks well in search engines.

What 3 Factors Does Google Rank Your Website On?

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO
3. Technical SEO

Why Is On-Page SEO Helpful?

Great on-page SEO communicates to search engines about your website so that way the search engine can assess your site's value, compare and rank it accordingly. Focusing on on-page SEO optimises your website for humans and search engine bots. 

On-Page SEO Elements To Be Aware Of... 

1. Quality content 
2. Page titles
3. Headers 
4. Meta Descriptions
5. Image Alt-text 
6. Structured Markup
7. Page URLs 
8. Internal Linking 
9. Mobile Responsiveness
10. Site Speed

High-Quality Page Content  

High- Quality content not only is of high value to your target audience but also informs search engines that your site is credible and helpful. 

You'll want to start by choosing relevant keywords and topics. You can do some keyword research by looking at Google for terms associated with your site. Look at what competitors come up with and other related websites. If you want to dive deeper into your relevant keywords, check out, Answer The Public and Uber Suggest.

Tips On Writing Quality Content For Your Site

•  Include short and long-tail keywords and ensure that they blend well within your content. 
•  Incorporate engaging and relevant visual content. 
•  Write content with your audience in mind. 
•  Solve your customer's problems. 
•  Create content that is relatable and entices your audience to share with their network.
•  Encourage conversions by adding a call to action on your offer and product pages. 

Understand The Buyer's Journey

Understanding the buyer's journey stages will help you decide the type of content you should focus on. 

HTML Elements 

HTML elements are the elements in your source code. 

Page Titles/Title Tags

Don't underestimate your page titles. Titles inform your visitors and search engines what information they can find on your site pages. 

<title>Drive Traffic To Your Site With Search Engine Optimisation</title>

To increase your pages' ranking, ensure that your focus keyword for each page is incorporated in the title as naturally as possible. 

Tips for titles:

• Your title should be under 60 characters (according to Google). 
• Make your keywords seamlessly blend in. Keyword stuffing can indicate spam, and you may be penalised by the search engine if they deem it unnatural. 
• Stay relevant to your page. 
• Don't make your title all caps. 

Headers

Headers or body tags, can be found in the HTML <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. These body tags organise your content for your audience and support the search engines to discover which parts of your content is most relevant or important. 

Moreover, include your most important keywords in your <h1> and <h2> headers and don't use the same ones in your page title. 

Meta Descriptions

• Ensure your meta descriptions are under 160 characters. Google, however, can allow up to 220 characters and on mobile up to 120 characters. 
• Add your keyword or the whole keyword phrase. 
• Avoid unique characters such as & or +. 

Image Alt-Text 

Image alt-text provides context to your images and informs search engines what your image is about. Google almost shows as many image results as text-based results. 

Tips For Image Alt-Text

• Be descriptive and specific. 
• Stay relevant to your content. 
• Ensure you're under 125 characters. 
• Don't stuff keywords. Use them sparingly. 

Site Architecture Elements 

Site Architecture Elements are how you structure the elements that make up your website and site pages. A well-structured site becomes easier for search engines to crawl your pages and content. 

Page URLs 

Make your page URL clean, consistent and straightforward for your audience and search engines. 

https://www.kobisimmat.com/blog

For example, in the above URL, "kobisimmat.com" is the domain and "blog" is the directory for our blog. 

Tips On Page URLs  

• Get rid of unnecessary words.
• Include only one to two keywords. 
• Use HTTPS if possible; Google's search engine reacts positively to this. HTTPS is an indicator that a site is secure and encrypted. 

Internal Linking

Hyperlink your content to other helpful pages on your website. Internal linking improves on-page SEO as it sends your audience to another area of your website. Internal links will increase the audience's time on your site and inform Google that your site is valuable. 

The more time your audience is on your site, the more Google will crawl and index your website pages and rank you higher as a result. 

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly 

Ensure that you choose a website hosting service, design theme, and layout that can easily be navigated and read. Test your mobile-friendliness with Google's test tool. 

Check The Speed Of Your Site

Whether your site is being viewed on a computer or a mobile, your site needs to load fast. It is a massive influence on your on-page SEO performance. 

Search engines are mindful of your user experience, and if your site loads slowly, your audience will not stay long. Google's PageSpeed Insights will be able to show you your website's speed rate. Moreover, a great way to reduce load time is by compressing file sizes and optimising images. 

Remember that SEO will forever be a work in progress and will need to be updated and improved. If you want to learn more about SEO, check out Hubspot's article on SEO.

If you're interested in learning about how to boost your social media content, check out our article, "A Guide To Boost Your Social Media Content". 

Keep learning, 

Kobi Simmat