Optimise your Website using Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO
You know you want your site to reflect your brand and the best of your content. There’s a lot of advice out there on what makes an excellent high-ranking site, but if you figure out early what works best for you, it’ll be a sure and steady climb up the SERPs, which is the glorious, much-coveted first page of the Search Engine Results Pages. Page one is where you want to be!
The process of optimising your content or site structure is mostly to help search bot crawlers, as they roam the web and comb through your website. The first thing these bots do is to read the first few lines of code, and through that, they can identify and assess your site, whether it is relevant and worthy of listing, at the top of its index. And this optimisation process is what we call Technical SEO.
Needless to say, good Technical SEO has nothing to do with the content creation side of your website, but when done right Technical SEO helps increase the chance of your content becoming visible in the search results. Early auditing and spot checks will streamline your site allowing it to rank better and even prevent future issues that may cost you time and money fixing.
Technical SEO is all about setting up your website correctly, checking its framework for errors and internal links, so that search engines can crawl through and index your website efficiently. Good technical SEO is mainly about site structure. When you contract the team at 1768degrees.com we undertake Technical SEO as standard. As a business we started with why. Why do our clients need a website – and the answer was simple – to get found by customers, to provide a professional presence and to grow their businesses. So to meet this ‘why’ – we include technical SEO as standard in all web design work.
There are steps that you can take to make sure you have a good Technical SEO:
- Enable your site’s SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
SSL is all about keeping things private and encrypted. More importantly, SSL maintains that all communications and links between your website and its users are secure. Plus you get high up on the ranking points of search engines if your SSL is deployed. Google expect websites to have a SSL regardless of whether card details are captured or transactions take place on the website.
- Optimising your Meta Robots tag or robots.txt files.
Meta robots tag is a snippet of code that prompts search engines on what to do. They set up the crawling parameters on how to index your website.
- Get Rid of the 404s
You think by now the 404 messages from the early era of the internet should be a thing of the past. Apparently, broken pages and links that redirect nowhere still abound. If there are many pages on your site that don’t exist, the search engine will penalise your site. Do a thorough audit of broken links and set-up your 301 redirects. By using a 301 your once broken links will now redirect to somewhere useful within your website.
- Speed Up Website Load Time.
If your site is taking too long to load, don’t expect users to stick around. The search engine considers your loading time into account as this also affects your bounce rate.
Remember: good technical SEO is all about making sure your website is crawlable and index-worthy!
Once website crawlability is guaranteed, we can now proceed to the next two widely used SEO techniques:
On-page SEO: Picking your Keywords
On-page SEO is all about optimizing your content, making it appealing to search engines. Search engines give importance to the use of keywords, keyword phrases, and relevant links. On-page SEO means to do everything you can to follow a search engine’s formula for prioritisation, which includes the use of tags, meta description, keywords, and even images.
To identify which most people use keywords or keyword phrases, you can avail the services of companies that help starters with SEO, or you can put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer. The goal is to identify which keywords get searched by people the most and to integrate these keywords into the content of your website.
Let’s say the phrase most people use in their search boxes is Website Services in Whangarei. Find ways to put this set of keywords into your content, but try to avoid redundancy. The biggest sin that puts off most readers is placing the same keywords at every sentence and hoping this type of redundancy makes for acceptable SEO. It is not. Overly redundant keywords are annoying and undermine your readers. Also, it sacrifices the integrity of your site’s authority as a good source of information. The best way is to use your target keywords and synonyms of those keywords in the right context.
Making the Most of the Meta Title and Meta Description
So what happens when you search? When you search for Website Services in Whangarei, you will see texts in blue in the search results. This is what we call the title tag. All texts under the title tag are what we call the meta description. You following this?
So try to maximise the use of the title tag by including the primary keyword phrase and the meta description that declares what your website is all about. The meta description is what will attract people to click on your link. The more people click to check out your website, the more search engines will notice that your web page is relevant. It will start to prioritise your page when people look for Website Services in Whangarei.
Now let us talk about content. The headline of your web content is referred to as the H1 tag. It is ideal to use the primary keyword phrase Website Services in Whangarei as part of your headline. You should help search engines crawl through your content, and integrating keywords is one way to do this. You can also incorporate the primary keyword phrase in your URL.
An example of an excellent H1 tag in this case is- The best digital website services agency in Whangarei. It is direct and concise. It has your target keyword and geo-location. When you show up in the searches your agency will be competing for clients in the area of Whangarei, New Zealand. But if your SEO strategies are so good and consistent, you will crawl up the rankings and your site will also appear in the top pages for best digital website services agency.
With H1 tags, people make the mistake of using headlines such as ‘Welcome’ or ‘Hello world!’
This happens when they are quick to move on to other things, hoping they can circle back to this task with a better meta description, but it gets forgotten and buried in the long run.
It is likely that to make your web page more engaging, using images are of great help. This is where an image tag is also useful. You can use your primary keyword phrase as the file name for your image, and you can put images near essential keywords. Often images spring up faster in the searches if they are appropriately tagged, besides using the image tag, use the keywords in the naming convention of your image. Example: Website_Services_Whangerei_NewZealand.png
Off-page SEO: Build your Link Juice
Off-page SEO is a quick look at your website’s social credibility. The stronger your social signal, brand mentions, and backlinks from trusted sites, the more you’ll be prioritised by search engines.
Off-page SEO is pretty much like campaigning; it’s mainly trying to get the attention of the bigger fish, which are the big industry and high-rank niche and industry sites. The goal is to get them talking and backlinking your site from their pages. If you’re a smaller fish, you can always try to win them over with honest, good quality content. Yes, the White-Hat way. There are many ways to promote your website outside its boundaries include link building, social media marketing, email marketing, and the use of advertisements.
With Off-page SEO, you have to put in the time to connect and spread content outside your website so that you can rank higher in searches. You can’t just be heavily reliant using On-page SEO, and you also need to step up your off-page SEO strategy.
SEO Consistency is Key
Good SEO can do wonders for your brand and your website- it is the best shot you have at turning casual visitors to potential customers. Optimizing your web content with On-Page and Off-Page SEO techniques will not only help customers find you, but they will get to know what your brand stands for, which includes all of the fantastic products and services you have to offer.
