Last Updated on August 12, 2019 by Timothy Ephraim
When you start a blog or a website, you will hear a lot of new, unknown terms. One of them might be SEO. It is a very important thing which might be given importance. SEO is not magic or luck which happens overnight It includes lots of planning and hard work. While Google search ranking is based on over 200 factors, they do not disclose all the factors. Here we are listing the basic and most important on-page SEO and off-page SEO techniques which you should work on.
1.On page optimization
On-page, optimization is an important thing. It involves keyword research, Meta tags and meta description etc while getting started with SEO of your website, you should start with on-page SEO first. Here are some important things you need to do.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first thing you should be given importance. Rather than writing an awesome article and posting it, you should do your keyword research to rank better. You should choose a longtail keyword which is easier to be ranked and optimize your content for that keyword. Your post’s permalink should contain your keyword and it should also be in your content(In the first paragraph or within first 100 words). While doing this, keep an eye on your keyword density (Yoast SEO plugin can be helpful for this).
Meta description
You should have an optimized and catchy meta description which will attract users to click on your website. If you do not enter a meta description of your post, the first few lines of your post will be used as the meta description and that might not tempt users to click on your website or blog.
Here is an example which shows a meta description.
Content quality and length
Google( or any other search engine ) is looking to give the best possible result for their user queries so quality content will always rank better. You should always keep your posts fresh and better to rank well. You should always be careful to provide better content for your users.
Length of your article is important too. Your post should contain at least 800 words. More words mean better ranking. Some SEO experts suggest that your article should contain more than 2500 words. Some even go beyond that and suggests 5000 words per article.
Internal linking and external links
Do interlink between your posts. It will help users to navigate easily and search engines to index your content well. Linking to authority sites is also boots your authority and increases your search engine rankings.
Sitemaps
Adding an XML sitemap will help search engines to index your website effectively. All Leading SEO plugins such as Yoast and AIOSEP provides XML sitemap facility.
Image Alt tags
Image alt tags are necessary. Search engine spiders still cannot read images and they understand image from the alt tag. Do add image alt tags to all your images.
2.Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO also contains many factors. As the name implies, it is off the page and should be done outside your website or blog. This typically involves link building, social shares and optimizing website for better speed.
Link building
Link building is actually an off-page SEO thing. But it is important that is the only reason why we list it here.
Your website needs backlinks to your website and building backlinks to your website are known as link building. Without backlinks, it is pretty hard to rank in search engines and to gain search traffic.
By earning more links to your website, you are telling google or Bing that you have a better, good content which should be ranked well in search results.
There are many ways to earn backlinks such as commenting, guest posting etc. One famous link building method is skyscraper link building explained by Brian Dean. There is another method called broken link-building method explained by Neil Patel, an SEO guru.
Fast website
Nobody likes slow website so are search engines. Most users will leave a website if it takes much more time to load. It is the same for Search engines too. You will get better search engine rankings if you have a fast loading website.
To make your website load fast you can implement various methods such as caching (See our list of best WordPress caching plugins) and Optimizing images etc. If your website is still slow, time to switch to a faster web host.
You can take us as an example, our another website for which we were using a famous shared web host(Which we do not recommend) and our website was loading really slow. Later we switched to Interserver shared hosting and our website loading speed increased considerably. Now we are on a managed Hosting plan from Boomhost and we are happy with the performance.
Read | Our list of best Shared web hosting providers
Read | Our list of Best WordPress hosting providers
Read | Our list of best VPS hosting provides
Social Networks
Social shares are also another factor which can be helpful to get better SEO ranking. If you have better, quality content, which will often get more shares and likes on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Which will increase your SERP ranking?
You should adopt various methods to get more social shares such as Facebook and Twitter shares. Which will be useful to get better search engine ranking and social traffic as well.
Conclusion
SEO is easy but it can be hard for the beginners. All you have to do is to follow these things. ( Obviously, these are very basic things). Make sure that you are following these basic things well and keep doing your SEO. It needs more learning and you can also experiment with different techniques to find what works well for you.