With Google’s algorithm constantly updating and changing, your site must keep up with the search engine giant’s rules to get a good rank. Step up your SEO game with these tactics.
Search engine optimisation serves as a sure way for your website to rank better on the results pages of search engines, driving more organic traffic your way. Naturally, different strategies emerged over time to help with rankings and site performance.
Now, there are two main types of SEO strategies – off-page and on-page. Both are useful in building your site’s reputation and they can produce excellent results when used together.
But in this article, we’ll concentrate on on-page SEO as a crucial element of your marketing strategy.
On-page SEO refers to the optimisation of your content with the goal of making your website more visible and discoverable for search engines. The point is to make the big search engines recognise and understand what’s on the page and connect your content with specific queries.
The content in question can be in written format, as well as in HTML code. What’s important here is that the so-called ‘crawlers’ that search engines send about categorise your site properly.
But why is optimising your site for on-page SEO so important?
Currently, there are more than a billion sites online, so algorithms already have their hands full when it comes to organising the data. And since Google’s algorithm updates and changes constantly, there’s a pressing need for website optimisation for all those who wish their content to be discoverable online.
Luckily, there are specific tactics you can leverage to come on top in today’s SEO landscape. Let’s take a look at the five tactics you shouldn’t hesitate to introduce right now.
Five On-Page SEO Tactics You Should Implement
Tactic #1. Create Great Content
The quality of your content will always be crucial for how your website performs. If you have poor content, no amount of SEO optimisation will save your site, but excellent content might surface on the web even without SEO.
However, combining great content with great SEO is the most fruitful option.
While there isn’t a single recipe for high-quality content, there are specific characteristics that are more or less always present on the best-performing websites. If you want to achieve such results, your content needs to be:
- Original – Without exception, you should never resort to copying existing work, whether it’s visual, textual, presentational, or aesthetic.
- Site-exclusive – This is an elaboration on the first point and it expands it to your work that’s already been published. If it has previously appeared online in any form, don’t put it on your site.
- Enriched with textual elements – Visual content should never stand alone. Add accompanying text to your images or videos as brief illustrations of context.
- Useful – There’s no benefit in publishing ’empty’ content. Whatever you put on your website should add value for visitors – think quality before quantity.
- Well-researched – If you want to build authority and make search engines promote your site more, make sure all of your content presents reliable information. Avoid rushing to publish without proper research. Also, make your content longer rather than shorter.
- Objective – When covering a topic, maintain an unbiased approach. Cover every angle and answer relevant questions with plenty of fact-based information.
- Search-friendly – People often search online to find a specific content type. That means before you start uploading anything on your site, you should get a clear picture of what your potential customers will enter in their search queries.
The final point from the list refers more to your content type than the quality, and that’s another crucial aspect of on-page SEO you should consider.
You’ll need to aim your content to fall into one of the four common groups: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial.
Luckily, Google can provide great assistance when determining how you should formulate your content. The massive search engine already has a vast database of search terms and websites, which can help you pinpoint the content type best fitting for your audience.
It would be best to google all target keywords you’re using and analyse the top results thoroughly. This way, you can see examples of content that currently has the best rating and is relevant to what you’re presenting on your website.
Strive to emulate this content in terms of informativeness, readability, and uniqueness. You’ll get a better chance of meeting the search intent and boosting your rankings.
Tactic #2. Optimise Your Images
Naturally, images always make enticing content, serving to make your pages livelier and easier to understand. Although search engines don’t have an excellent grasp on visual content, you can still do much with your images in the way of SEO optimisation.
The first thing you should ensure is something we touched upon previously: originality.
Search engines don’t take kindly to the ‘borrowing’ of material. If your site features existing images, you should always reference their source to avoid copyright issues that could reflect poorly on your ratings.
Another way images can influence your site ratings indirectly is by slowing it down – the larger the images, the slower your site will be. That’s why you should opt for sizes just large enough to keep the image clear.
It would also be best to consider using a CDN service to speed up your website. CDN providers host your content on several servers, making sure your images don’t make the site load slowly.
Help the search engine understand the context of your images by adding Alt tags. These are HTML code text that describes the image in detail. Your pages won’t display the Alt tag, but search engine crawlers will surely find it.
Lastly, don’t forget to name your images properly. Change that ‘img10.jpg’ to something more descriptive, depending on what the image shows. Like with Alt tags, the search engine might not be able to ‘read’ your image, but it will catch on to filenames more easily.
Tactic #3. Focus on User Experience
Google might favour websites with lower bounce rates in its rankings, although that kind of system isn’t official. Bounces occur when visitors enter your website but return to the results page or click away to a different site.
This most often happens because your website isn’t properly updated, loads slowly, or doesn’t look trustworthy. In other words, the user experience could have a direct impact on your Google ratings.
There are several things you can do with your content to make it more user-friendly and thus give your site an SEO boost:
- Create easily readable posts. Naturally, this will require quality writing in terms of ideas, delivery, and proper spelling and grammar. However, you should also focus on keeping the paragraphs shorter and varying the length of your sentences to ensure good flow.
- Make the page visually lighter and more organised. You can achieve this by using subheaders, breaking up text with white space, and inserting images. Bullet points are a great idea as well.
- Ensure your website’s optimised for the best user experience. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help you test your pages and analyse how visitors interact with them.
- Increase the speed of your site. Image compression will often do wonders in this regard, as will choosing the best available hosting service. When it comes to compression, bear in mind that you need it to be at a level that makes the site faster but doesn’t compromise the quality.
Tactic #4. Have Strong Titles and Meta Descriptions
Every page on your site should have a descriptive title to make navigation more straightforward for users and search engines alike. This step is quite important, as page titles are among the crucial factors of on-page SEO.
It’s recommended to put some of your keywords in the page title. Although it will certainly help search engines categorise the page, make sure not to force keywords in every title if they don’t fit logically.
Keep in mind that your page titles should be no longer than 60 characters and they should contain power words and numbers.
Meta descriptions, on the other hand, show up on the search results page and provide a short explanation of what the page is about. Note that Google might add an automated description, so it’s better to provide your own instead of relying on the algorithm.
Remember, you’ll have 200 characters at your disposal for the meta description. It would be best to use them wisely as an opportunity to ‘sell’ your website to potential visitors. Meta descriptions are also an excellent place to insert your keywords, making the search result more relevant.
Tactic #5. Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords consist of more than three words and they’ve become a vital SEO element, especially with the rise of voice search. In fact, research indicates that speech searches gravitate towards longer keywords. With this online searching method becoming more and more popular, the time is right to tap into its potential.
If you want to ensure your site ranks for long-tail keywords, your content should support their use. The best way to optimise your content for long-tail keywords is to create plenty of semantic keywords and build your copy around them.
Be careful not to rank too many pages on your website for the same long-tail keyword, as you’ll make your own pages compete with one another. This phenomenon is called ‘keyword cannibalisation’ and it can spell disaster to your SEO.
Transform Your Site Into an SEO Powerhouse
With such a plenitude of websites online today, it would be a mistake to surmise that a basic site setup will keep your pages visible. The competition’s doing their best to keep up with Google’s algorithm and stay among the top search results, and you should be doing the same.
Once you make all the necessary adjustments and SEO optimisation, your website will start producing better results. It could be quite a process, but it’ll prove highly beneficial in the end.
You don’t have to brave the vast SEO landscape alone, though! With Automation Agency, you can leverage our Concierge Service to help you improve by automating tasks. We can help boost your site’s efficiency while saving time and money.
Go to this link to find out more about our services and start building a powerful online presence today.
