Ready to boost rankings on SERP? Here's a quick on-page SEO checklist to follow in 2016 to make your website SEO-friendly and to rank on Google's first page
There are some simple but often-overlooked steps you can take to set up your whole website for search engine optimization (SEO).
How to Optimize Your Website for SEO?
Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) are continuously improving upon their approach (algorithm) to provide their users the best results (answers) that can be as close as possible to their search queries (questions). Here, SEO comes into play that focuses on optimizations to make SEO-friendly websites that are useful for the users as well.
Many people consider SEO (search engine optimization) as a technique of manipulating search engines to rank a particular website higher up in search results. But, the reality is altogether different as the main aim of SEO is as follows.
To optimize your website for enriched user experience.
Providing your website to the search engines for consideration.
Let’s look into the most useful SEO optimization techniques to optimize your website for better user experience.
This is the evergreen law that is the core of SEO optimization. Search engines are very fond of fresh and unique content that is useful, informational and educational to the users. Even users also tend to engage with such quality content that solves their problems or answers their questions.
So, you must focus on publishing high quality content on your website or blog. Diversify your content and make it more engaging by mixing textual content with visual content. Images, videos, infographics and slideshows are more engaging and sharable among users.
Keywords are the driving force of search engines. And, the search engines give due priority to the placement and density of keywords in your website. Proper placement of keywords in proper amount is necessary to let the search engines know that your website is relevant to this keyword.
Try to optimize your website for a maximum of 5 different keywords. Also, make sure that they are present at right places – title, introduction, ending and at some instances in the middle part of webpage.
The keyword density on a webpage should not be more than 3.5% and less than 2.5% as exceeding this limit would be considered as keyword stuffing and may even be penalized, and anything less than this might not get your website discovered by the search engines.
Use of proper meta tags (meta title and meta description) is very critical from SEO point of view. As it conveys about the content of your website to both the search engine and the user. Proper meta tags will bring your website on top of search results and thereby compel the user to click on it.
Only use alphanumeric characters, commas and hyphens in your website meta, as all other special characters are unreadable to the search engines. Also, use separate and unique meta tags for separate webpages.
Also make sure that you use meta attributes for all images on your website as well. This will covey some information about the images to the search engines and also let these images be found in image searches.
This is also very important – the meticulous selection of the anchor text for hyperlinking. Search engines consider the anchor text to be the short description of the destination URL. Also add the link title to covey additional information about your webpage.
So, make sure that the links to your website are hyperlinked on proper anchor text with a descriptive title.
Backlinks from other websites show that your website is credible and highly authoritative. This is further boosted when your website get backlinks from trusted websites in your niche. To get backlinks from high rated websites, you have to publish very useful content.
Share your posts on social media platforms to increase their visibility. Use forum posting and commenting on relevant sites with a backlink to your website.
Let the backlinks build in a natural way and always refrain from purchasing backlinks, as this is considered as negative practice and your website may be penalized for this.
Having an SEO optimized domain name for your website is very much advantageous and results in great SEO benefits. Keep the following rules in mind while selecting a domain name for your website.
Maintain consistency with domain names – Make sure that both www.yourdomainname.com and yourdomainname.com point to the same website, by redirecting the latter to the former. Otherwise, search engines will see two different websites and that will undermine your SEO efforts.
Get an Old Domain Name – The domain age matters in SEO, so it would be very much beneficial if you can get an old domain (premium domain name) that has been around for quite some time. But, do verify that the domain was not misused by its previous owner, so that your website does not get penalized.
Use Sub-Directory Root Domain Names – Naming your webpages using sub-directory root domains (www.yourdomainname.com/new-page) is much better as compared to sub-domains (newpage.yourdomainname.com). And, it also provides much better opportunity to optimize the URLs.
Use keyword in your URLs – Search engines give priority to websites having related keywords in their domain name and other URLs. Try to get a keyword specific domain name and include page specific keywords in the sub-directories.
8. Try to Make Website Navigation Easy
A website that is easy to navigate not only guides a search engine to crawl and read all your website pages, but also creates a great user experience. Use the following best practices to optimize your website for easy navigation.
The above mentioned tips are the basics of SEO optimization. On proper implementation of these tips, your website will have a solid foundation of SEO. Since SEO is a continuous process, keep your website updated for search engines by optimizing it with these basic rules.
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