SEO’s Role and Factor in Better Rankings?

You have a website and still have not adopted SEO as a strategy for ranking factors. Then you are making a big mistake, as SEO plays a vital role in bagging a good rank on Google’s SERP.

Firstly, let’s know what is SEO?

SEO that stands for search engine optimization, is a digital marketing strategy developed to increase website rankings and visibility on the search engine result page. The better you optimize your website according to most used keywords, the more your website will be visible when the user enters that keyword in his search query.

The main two types of Search Engine Optimization Factors are:

• On-Page Optimization
• Off-Page Optimization

OFF Page SEO Factors-Off-page optimization is not regulated by page coding. Off-Page SEO activities include the promotion of the website out of the website that helps in SERP ranking improvement.

Off-page SEO factors:

• Link Building
• Local Citations
• Social Presence

Link Building:

Link building is defined as building links with your website. The main aim is to get as many links or votes so your websites can rank higher. Link strategy is used to decide how much your content is relevant. Links also have different types, namely: –

Outbound Link-Outbound links are links on your website that are pointing to other websites or webpage on a different domain. In, Outbound linking always tries to establish relationships and links with websites of your niche.

Inbound Link-  An inbound link is a link from an external domain pointing towards one of your pages. Also, can be explained as “this is a link to your website which will connect your pages internally.”

While building a link, following things should be kept in mind:

• Getting links from pages related to your niche carry more relevancies for search engines.
  
• Try to get links from websites having good Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Alexa rank.
  
• Getting links from a home page of a linking domain carry more value and strength than those on one of its pages.

Local Citations: Local citations are online mentions of your company which include your business address, contact information, and in some cases, your website. For local citations, you can create the “Google My Business” page. Also, set up various business profiles on industry-related directory sites.

Social Signals: Social signals can be explained as sharing your images, texts, videos on social networking platforms. Gaining a large number of social shares does help your search engine rankings. It helps in attracting and engaging your website’s targeted traffic on social media platforms and increasing your traffic reach. It is an efficient method to engage and attract traffic.

What to do–

1. Create your social media accounts. Like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
2. Build your website and blogs to track social traffic.
3. Set up sharing buttons & links o your social media profile.
4. Create engaging and social buzz posts and campaigns.

ON Page SEO Factors – On-page optimization is a technique used to the optimized site through page coding. On-page optimization (or On-page SEO) means the changes you can implement on the websites and gain enhancement in rankings. Changes can include content optimization, site architecture, title and meta description, and increasing page-load speed.

On page SEO factors:

• Content Optimization 
• HTML Optimization
• Site Architecture

CONTENT OPTIMIZATION:

One of the most important SEO ranking factors is content optimization. The content of the page should be keyword-oriented, as the Google search algorithm also relies on keywords. Content should be appealing and attractive and also designed according to the users’ perspective. Following types of content to be mention in websites-

• Fresh content– Another tip for optimizing your content is to be constantly posting new content. Google Search engine robots and your readers love fresh and new content. Content freshness can be increase with regularly updating the latest and trending content.

• Deep and wide- Deep topic mainly focuses on one subject and be very specific about it. It can be interesting, factual, and very informative to users.

• User-Friendly Content- User-friendly content is one that is easy for visitors to understand and get information quickly and easily on any device, it also helps in increasing traffic and ranking.

• LSI –It stands for Latent Semantic Index and in simple terms, these are word phrases that have the same meaning as your main keyword. 

HTML OPTIMIZATION:

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language is a coding language and has become the universal language of the web. It is used by Google for crawling and understanding your website content and give rank according to relevancy.

Title tag: A title tag is an HTML element that is used to specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages and try to tell what a page is all about.

Meta Description tag: The meta description tag consist of 145-155 characters long that give a small introduction about the content of the page. Description tags contain the information that is displayed on a search engine results page beneath the title link and contain keywords in its description that were searched by users in the search query.

Heading tags: Heading tags range from H1-H6 and used to differentiate between heading and sub-headings of page. The heading tag is used in HTML to define headings of a page H1 heading can be used just once in a page whereas H2 can e used multiple times on a page.

Anchor Tag: The anchor tag defines a blue color hyperlink, which is used to link from one page to another web document or other pages on the web.

Alt Tag: ALT tags or ALT attributes are “alternative text ” for an image, used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.

Canonical Tag: In this, we knew that sometimes search engine robots get confused when they see multiple copies of the same content so canonical tag helps the bot to tell/understand which one is real and which one is duplicates. A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical“) is a method through which we can inform search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. The canonical tag also resolves problems caused by identical content appearing on multiple URLs.

SITE ARCHITECTURE:

Site Architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they’re looking for on a website. A well-defined site structure makes the job of search engine crawlers easier and this means doing smoothly indexing process and more chances to get higher rankings. Following ways through which we can optimize the site.

URL Structure: 

The URL must be descriptive but simple at the same time. This helps in keeping the site organized is a technique under which we optimize the URL structure of a website page to make them more descriptive, user friendly, and understandable by the search engine crawlers and by the users.

1. Shorter is better, and they will rank well on search engines.
2. Use only 1 or 2 keywords per URL. These should be your target keywords.
3. URLs should be easily read by humans.

l SITEMAP CREATION: A sitemap is a blueprint or a tour guide that explains the organizational structure of your website. A sitemap pages help search engines and people find pages. In sitemap we can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the arrangement of your site content.

ROBOTS TAG:

The robots tag is used to restrict access to crawlers on selected pages or links. Through robots tag, we can restrict the crawler from indexing or following.

1. By indexing, we mean taking the snapshot, labeling, and storing the snapshot of the website in Google database.
2. By putting “no index” in robots tag we can restrict the crawler from taking snapshots and storing it in the database however we allow the authority to be passed.
3. By “no follow” we mean the authority won’t be passed but the crawler may take a snapshot and store it in the database.

l PAGE SPEED IMPROVEMENT:

Page Speed is the measurement of time that a WebPages take to get load. A page’s loading speed is determined by several different factors, including a site’s server, page file size, and image compression, video sizes. Some of the page speed improvement tools: –

1. Page Speed Insight
2. Webpage Test
3. Slow

MOBILE OPTIMIZED SITES:

Mobile-friendliness refers to how a website looks and performs when someone views it on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly sites provide good user experience by using a responsive design that is easily adjustable so that it looks good and well-formatted on every screen size.

Conclusion:

SEO practices are evolving and growing at a great pace. It’s necessary for you to evolve along to ensure survival and growth of your business. It’s quite clear that SEO is a necessity if you have got your brand online.

AUTHOR BIO

Preyanshi Dwivedi is a digital marketer who works as an SEO Executive and enjoys developing and working on WordPress websites. Love doing OFF-page and ON- page optimization. Write blogs, which enhances my content optimization skill and also design banner and images using Canva. A dedicated and enthusiastic person always indulges in work.

• Full Name: Preyanshi Dwivedi
• Email ID: preyanshi19@gmail.com
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