Small changes can go a long way when it comes to the art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO); minor changes you can implement immediately that help to differentiate a website that’s good, to one that is fantastic. And the good news is – you don’t need to understand or know everything about SEO to reap its rewards.
With Google clamping down on unnatural link building techniques and the ever-changing algorithms constantly on the rise, it’s crucial to keep your onside optimisation tactics up-to-date. Since SEO has shifted towards the benefits of content marketing, on site optimisation has become a lot more important. How is your site living up to the latest? Here’s 4 onsite tactics you may not have considered in the past, but should definitely be implementing today!
- Internal Linking
Onsite optimisation, based on solid keyword research, has always been the foundation of SEO – but link building practices are still essential in keeping up with Google’s algorithms. Whilst internal linking is one of the most overlooked and undervalued tactic in SEO – you’ve got to be so careful links are relevant, properly optimised and definitely not overstuffed.
Internal linking is a great way to promote a healthy flow within your site, for both readers and major search engines like Google. Depending on your site, you can start by linking products to products or products to relevant categories and vice versa. It’s important too, that whenever you post a piece of news or a blog post you ask yourself how you can link other relevant pages to your piece. Blogs and news content are a prime source of pulling link juice so look for related post plugins to prompt readers to other sections of your site, top post widgets in your side bar and categories.
- Update Your Meta Title
Meta titles and descriptions are a crucial element of your site’s content – so it pays to make sure it’s up to scratch with Google’s updates. Both metal titles and descriptions help to boost the click through rates to your website from the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) so it’s important they are accurate, appealing and relevant to your site. Because they help search engines (and readers) understand what your page is about, you’ll want to include keywords relevant to the content of your web page for both.
In the past, Meta titles were generally 65-70 characters long but now the character count is 55. If your title tags exceeds this, it won’t fit into the results page properly. You can use this tool by SEO mofo to ensure your title tags and description fit, and gain a good understanding on how it will look at a quick glance to readers and search engines. For title tags and descriptions to be beneficial, avoid keyword stuffing and keep them unique and descriptive. Each Meta title and description should be different for every page on your site too.
- Ensure You Have Schema Markup on Street Addresses
A microdata that makes it easier for major search engines like Google to interpret the information on your page, this relatively new form of optimisation is one of the most powerful yet least utilised SEO tools. Using a similar process to rich snippets, Schema Markup is a code that you put onto your site to help search engines return more relevant and informative results to the user.
As the content on your website gets crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders, it will then get returned in search results. The difference is, websites that use the Schema Markup code some of this content will get indexed and returned in an altered way. This is because the code tells the major search engine like Google what the content actually means – not just a bunch of random words.
Super beneficial for articles, local businesses, events, reviews, products and so much more, Schema Markup doesn’t require a whole lot of code knowledge to use. To start with the basics, adding the code to your business street address and website address is imperative.
- Outstanding Blog Content
Having an outstanding and up-to-date blog on your website won’t just provide an opportunity for internal link juice, but it’ll give readers (and search engines) something to keep coming back too. Not just any content will do though – if you really want to impress your audience and significantly improve your SEO you need to be creating content that’s useful, relevant, complete, emotionally engaging and quite simply – astounding.
Your content should be made easy to share to entice readers to spread the love, well researched and of course – complete with appropriate internal links. Where possible, it’s a great idea to include a link or two to high profile sites that will provide your reader with additional (and relevant!) information. This will give your fantastic content an opportunity to be picked up on by other websites and readers too. Content marketing has exploded in popularity and benefits over the years, so it certainly pays to have an outstanding blog on your website to reap the rewards.
About the Author:
This article is written by Jayde Ferguson who writes for White Chalk Road – a specialised SEO and Online Marketing Company based Perth. You can catch Jayde on Google+ or LinkedIn to discuss this piece.
