On Page Tricks to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
On page SEO takes everything on the page into consideration, from the title of the page all the way down to the forms for your comments or user generated content. However, if you are just starting out blogging, then most of the SEO terms you come across seems like a bunch of gibberish.
The better SEO techniques you use, the better ranking you will have overall. Though we all can’t be as versatile as Wikipedia, we can learn a lot from the online encyclopedia.
So, let’s dive in and get your website SEO techniques up and running.
It All Starts at the Title and URL
With WordPress, when you title a post it develops a permalink for that title; give or take a few additions like having the date as part of the URL. In that sense, WordPress gives its users a helping hand.
A good URL will show the hierarchy involved for the page, which search engines will use to determine the relevancy of that page. To illustrate:
https://yourwebsite.com/life/life_with_kids/puberty
http://yourwebsite.com/cat=21/p=317?
Search engines will read both of the above imaginary links, and weigh it for how relevant it was to the search term. Even us mere humans can see that the first link will probably be something about puberty; what exactly we will have to read the post to find out. Unless, we happened to use other keywords that included puberty.
In the second link however, we really have no clue, and this hurts the SEO factor for that page. It may have the best information available, but with a poor URL we may never see it.
Then it’s the Content
The content is the meat and potatoes of your page. A good practice is to use your specific keywords that you want to rank for early in the post rather than later. Research is showing that longer posts aren’t going to be the bane of your website, but rather might actually be a better candidate for higher ranking than those short blurbs. Everything that you use for content has some weight to the overall SEO of the page.
Images do two things for your SEO. Firstly they make it easier on your users to digest the content, which causes them to stay on the page. The longer they stay the better, because search engines do see that. To them, that piece of content is more relevant to the keywords the user searched for.
Secondly, everything about that image; from the name to the alt text can use your keywords to help bolster the SEO. While it may seem like a pain in the neck to name the image, fill out a description, a caption, meta description and alt text for one image, it really does help how the search engines see your content. Do yourself a favor and fill it out completely.
Videos are seen in much the way. Since it is easier and wiser to host your videos in places like YouTube of Vimeo, you may get some leeway in how the link looks. This does take some time however to get verified accounts. Once verified, you can embed videos that contain links with your specific keywords instead of the normal alphanumeric links either of them like to use by default.
Interlinking also help your SEO efforts. While this is impossible when you’re brand new, over time you can start building your own internal links. An easy example to illustrate this is to look at the Wikipedia, almost everything in the content section of the page will take you somewhere else within the Wikipedia.
Outbound links are also vital to your SEO techniques. The more credible the sources you are linking to, the more relevant the search engines see your content being. It acts like a way to boost your own, and their rankings in a single go.
Then you have meta descriptions that you yourself really should write for even more SEO potential. You will have to work within a character limit of 160, in which you can further plug your keywords.
Your site speed also plays a huge part in SEO. If it takes to long to load, users will back up and try again. If you are an ecommerce site, this translates into lost revenue. Use a tool to test your site and get insight where you can improve your speeds.
Miscellaneous Additions
The overall readability of your content will have an impact on your users, which explained earlier will have an effect on your SEO. In a sense, you are aiming to enlighten and entertain your target audience who can easily grasp what you are describing, while still being able to connect to those who are unfamiliar with your content.
Getting a backlink can also help your SEO techniques. Where they come from however plays the largest factor. While having a known big site like Wikipedia link to you is like winning every lottery worldwide at once is great; it will more often be other websites within your niche. Those are good to have, as they will help you in the long run. However, the worse the website is that is linking to you, the worse your rankings will be. So be careful.
Mobile matters, even for SEO. Google has been indirectly penalizing websites that are not optimized for mobile use. With everything that WordPress offers its users, it’s quite hard to have a non-responsive website built on WordPress. Good job!
Summing It Up
Every element on a page gets indexed by search engines. Everything adds just a little to your overall SEO. Use the tips written here to get the most out of your website.
We hope you found the above promoted content as entertaining and helpful as we did!
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