W ith more and more businesses deciding to buy SEO services to get the online marketing advantage, it’s more than ever to get your SEO basics right. After all, competition is going through the roof and unless you are well versed with your SEO knowledge, you won’t really stand a chance to beat it.
With that said, let us dive straight into learning some of the important on-page and off-page SEO factors.
On-page SEO basics and most important factors
As you have probably heard over and over again, unless your on-page SEO is perfect, your off-page SEO may not yield desired results. However, to your surprise, on-page SEO involves a lot more than you think.
We will now be taking a look at such highly useful and important on-page SEO factors that have the potential to give your site a real SEO advantage so that the off-page SEO manages to rank it pretty well.
Content
When it comes to on-page SEO, content is probably always going to be the most important thing to take care of.
If you are a business, you might want to come up with unique ideas, allowing you to write fresh and engaging content as well as think of interesting and unique titles. You also need to make sure that the information you are offering through your content is genuinely useful. Doing so will help increase the engagement considerably, and may as well pave way for a lot of natural social shares and impressive returning traffic stats.
Including SEO optimized images and videos is definitely a huge plus, and besides making your content more engaging, helps optimize your site better.
Basic on-page factors
After taking care of the content aspect of your site, you need to move on to ensuring that it has the important and basic on-page factors in place. Such factors include:
- Creating URLs that include important keywords, explain what the content is about, and so on
- Ensuring the loading speed is fast enough, as a very slower one will annoy visitors and increase the bounce rate
- Make sure your site is index-able by checking the code or the robots.txt file
- Submitting the sitemap for quicker indexation
- Using SEO friendly plugins
HTML editing
This is usually the most ignored part of most SEO projects. Just like the content, the HTML is quite important as well. One needs to make sure that their important keywords are included in headings, sub headings, meta titles, descriptions, Alt tags, and so on. As a lot of people still do this, let us mention that bolding your keyword or writing it in bigger fonts doesn’t help at all, or ensure a better on-page SEO.
Internal linking
Internal linking is a little complicated but extremely important aspect of a sound on-page strategy. Besides helping achieve the desired rankings quicker, it also allows the users and search engines to navigate your site better.
It includes links at the top, in the sidebar, in the content, and so on. However, while doing internal linking, make sure a particular post doesn’t link to the same page twice. If it does, consider removing one of the duplicate links or making it no-follow. The reason you need to do this is because it may get counted as spam by the search engines.
Factors specific to local SEO
If you are doing local SEO, your approach needs to be a little different than while targeting keywords on a global level. The most important thing would be focusing on the areas that you will be targeting. What this means is that you will need to include the area name with your keywords, or find keywords specific to your area.
So for example, you might want to target keywords like “photographers in California”, “wedding photographers in New York”, and so on, while targeting local keywords.
Besides this, it would also probably be a good idea to list your site and details on local directories. Finally, including the city and state in the meta descriptions, headings, sub headings, and so on seems to be a must while doing local SEO.
Off-page SEO
After learning about some extremely useful on-page SEO factors, let us move on to understanding things which matter the most while doing off-page SEO.
Link-building
Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Well, what’s not so obvious is the fact that one needs to have a completely different and unique approach to link-building nowadays than they used to a few years back. Things have changed drastically, and the old, shady link-building techniques have become obsolete and even dangerous.
Getting straight to the point, using blackhat link-building practices are a bigger gamble than ever. They may still get you to the top though, but the problem is that they may not help you last there long enough. Furthermore, when Google decides to take on you, you will be awarded a massive penalty.
Hence, resorting to whitehat link-building practices seems to be the way to go. Guest posting on niche relevant and authoritative sites is surely one of the best whitehat ways to quickly bump your rankings without compromising the safety of your site.
Using social media to your advantage
Although social media isn’t exactly related to off-page SEO, it can still mean a steady stream of targeted traffic if used wisely. After all, that’s what we are after.
However, the reason using social media is not something most of the marketers are comfortable with is that it requires a lot of creativity, out of the box thinking, and a really unique approach. In other words, it’s quite a challenging process. However, it definitely pays well for all the hard work, if one does it right.
The first step would be to recognize where your target audience is, or which platforms they use. You can then come up with a plan to establish yourself as a brand on those social media platforms. It’s also important to avoid being over-promotional, and keep a pretty healthy balance between informative, useful posts and promotional ones.
Including images and videos in your content would definitely increase the engagement. Marketers using a blog can do this easily. Having one allows one to achieve considerably effective results anyway.
A final word
After understanding all the basics and important factors related to on-page and off-page SEO, you will probably be in a much better position now to come up with an effective yet safe SEO plan for your site. Achieving top rankings isn’t exactly very difficult, but maintaining it surely is.
