Having an SEO optimized website is not only important for your website online visibility. SEO optimization is here to serve your visitors, users and customers and of course your marketing and sales efforts, which are crucial to your business success.
Yoast defines SEO as the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. Additionally, SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results.
So, the question here is: what efforts do you need to make in order to make your website SEO optimized and loved by search engines? In this article, I’ll talk about onsite SEO efforts.
General SEO optimization
The following are crucial for General SEO optimization.
- Meta Title is an HTML tag that defines the title of your website page. It shows your page title in search engine results. It should be a concise description of the topic of a given page
- Meta Description is an HTML tag providing a short summary of your page. Meta description is used by search engines for identifying a page’s topic.
- Keyword usage – the keywords you use for your website need to be well planned and researched. When planning the keywords for your website pages, you need to understand what your target audience is talking about, so you can design content accordingly.
- <h1> and <h2> Headings status – The H1 tag is the most important heading on your page and it could be the title of the page. The H2 tag, on the other hand, is the second most important heading on your page. Both H1 and H2 headings are not visible to users, however, they clarify the purpose of your page to search engines.
- Image Alt – Using relevant keywords and text in the alt attribute helps users and search engines interpret the subject of an image better.
- Website Links – broken links are not good for your website since they negatively affect the user experience and website’s ranking. So, make sure there are no broken or dead links. Additionally, make sure your website uses SEO friendly URLs (i.e. website pages need to contain relevant keywords)
- Social Media – Social media integration is becoming an increasingly important ranking factor for search engines, so make sure you set up social media accounts for your business and connect them to your website.
Additional SEO optimization tips
- Website loading speed – Make sure your website elements are displayed correctly, and you’re your website load speed is fine. Neither visitors nor search engine crawlers like slow websites.
- Mobile friendliness – I could not stress enough the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. Again, it is crucial both for your users and search engines.
- Website security is another important item you need to add to your SEO optimization checklist. Installing an SSL certificate ensures an additional authentication layer between client and server, which is highly recommended. We have recently published a post on why websites need and SSL.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned points are the most important for your website SEO optimization. When working on such projects for our clients, we score over 90 out of 100 points of SEO check-up score. The work we have done for our client, Derwent Healthcare, who provides therapy chairs, body analysers & blood pressure monitors helped them achieve a score of 92.
