Get Your Website Noticed: Essential Onsite SEO
Get Your Website Noticed: Essential Onsite SEO
As you may know by now, SEO (or search engine optimisation) isn’t just one technique. It’s a series of techniques and disciplines designed to make your website much more “Google-friendly” so that it’s featured closer to the top of any relevant search engine results page.
Those techniques are largely separated into two categories: onsite and offsite. We believe that onsite is the most important of the two and, as such, it warrants a little closer study and understanding. Here, we’ll break down what it is, how it works, and the benefits of it.
What is onsite SEO?
To understand onsite SEO is to also understand its counterpart: offsite SEO. Simply put, with onsite SEO, you’re optimising aspects of your website and its different pages. In comparison, offsite SEO focuses on ways you can improve your search-engine friendliness outside of your website, such as through other websites, blogs, directories, and so on.
Onsite SEO has the benefit of making your website much easier for search engines to interpret, so that their bots can crawl your website and properly categorise it. However, the factors that comprise an onsite SEO strategy also tend to make your website more accessible and convenient for your visitors.
This entire category of SEO techniques could be said to be about helping both search engines and users understand your website, make sure that it’s seen by the relevant web users, and to make sure that it’s useful for those users.
How onsite SEO works
Again, onsite SEO is not a single technique, but rather a discipline of different techniques and factors all working together to make your site both search engine-friendly and user-friendly. As such, SEO should be looked at like a machine of different components all working together.
Google rewards a machine that works how it wants it to and penalises machines that don’t. For instance, secure websites get an SEO boost, unsecure websites. Google and other search engines frequently update their algorithms, so how you should prioritise your SEO efforts will change a lot over time. It’s not something you should do once and forget about it, it’s sometimes you should return to and manage.
As such, not everyone can agree on what elements of SEO are most important or best practice. However, the following are consistently factors of an onsite SEO strategy to consider:
• Content: By now, you’ve probably already heard that content is king. Indeed, it’s an essential part of an SEO strategy, but it’s not all that matters. The content on your website has to be relevant to not only the keywords that users are typing in, but what their intentions are. Content should also be valuable, addressing their concerns, questions, and interests. Content should also be well-formatted and organised.
• Mobile-friendliness: Responsiveness is becoming more and more important to search engines and users alike. Your website should be designed in a way that mobile device users of all kinds (smartphones, tablets, etc.) can use it effectively. In many cases, websites will have alternative mobile pages set up that are designed to better used by those visitors.
• Structure: When we talk about search engine friendliness, we mean this. Your website should be organised in a way that’s easy for search engines to crawl, often achieved by using sitemaps. Website security, page load speed, interlinked content and clean, short URLs also help improve website structure.
• User Experience: If you try to make websites designed to appeal to only Google, and not your visitors, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Google looks at engagement stats like how many pages visitors visit, how many bounce off the first page, and how many click throughs to the next step. As such, your website needs to have the user and their experience in mind.
The benefits of onsite SEO
• Much better chances of appearing closer to the top place on local and general search engine results pages
• More organic traffic to your website as a response
• SEO also improves the user experience of the site, meaning greater chances of conversions and happier visitors
• No need to pay for ads, SEO keeps working once implemented, so long as you keep up with it
• SEO improves website visibility, which can help build brand recognition and PR potential
Simply put, onsite SEO is an essential part of any modern online marketing strategy. At Direct Submit, we’re more than happy to help you give your site the revamp it needs to reach Google’s standards and, thus, reach many, many more people than you currently do.