Search engine optimization is a techniques to improve the website’s visibility in search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines get basic information of a webpage from meta tags, use content and other factors to decide relevancy in the search query. You can use there different ways to optimize a webpage for search engines:
- On-page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Black Hat SEO
The first two methods explain the correct ways of optimization and the last one explains the ways to avoid.
1. On-page SEO
There are many elements on any webpage – visible as well as invisible to users on the browsers. The visible part is the structure of your content. Having a unique and great content in a structured manner is the first step in SEO. This will not only help search engines but also enhance user experience like readability.
Remember SEO is always a dynamic topic, at this point of time even the content readability affects the ranking of your site. Use heading from H1 to H6 and arrange the content in the order of priority. The content under H1 tag is considered as more important compared to the content under H6 tag.
There are many invisible content available as part of a webpage. You can right click and view the source of a webpage to find all invisible content. There are many tags used within the <head>…….</head> section of a page. These are called meta tags used to inform search engines about the summary of the page content.
Here are the on-page details you should optimize from SEO point of view:
Page Title
Page title is the first line shown in the search result pages. This is also shown in the browser window. Ensure to have an attractive title for each page on your site.
It will help tempting the users to click on the search results and landing on your content. Remember the poor titles will spoil the good content and also the hard work behind the good content.
Page URL
After the title, URL is the second line shown in search results. The URL should be meaningful and descriptive for all your pages. Some experts advise to remove the stop words like “and”, “as”, “with”, etc. from the title. But it should have much impact on the ranking, so you can keep those stop words as it is. Especially when these stop or connecting words may change the meaning or important in the title, keep them to serve the purpose.
If you have breadcrumbs then Google and Bing will show the breadcrumb structure instead of the URL of the page. It is highly recommended to use breadcrumbs if your content management system supports it.
Meta Description
This meta tag is used to add the summary of a webpage. This is shown under the page title in search results. In addition to title and URL, also ensure to have an attractive meta description for your pages.
Currently Google increased the snippet length up to 320 characters for the meta description in search results. This is a good way to show the summary of your page as a long paragraph with few sentences.
2. Off-page SEO
While on-page SEO focuses on creating and optimizing the content, off-page SEO focuses on increasing the popularity of the content. Search engines give more weightage to the pages having good external links from quality sites. When you have good content ensure to spread the words by requesting the other website owners to link to your content.
There are many acceptable ways to create links to your site. For example, you can provide your site’s links in relevant forum if that helps the users to solve the problem. Some people consider using social profiles also part of off-page SEO. Ensure to have Facebook and Twitter pages for your site and spread the popularity through your friends.
3. Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO are the techniques NOT to be followed to improve the search engine ranking. Nowadays, search engines like Google are very smart and will penalize your site if you follow black hat techniques.
Below are some of the techniques you should avoid:
- Using small font sizes to hide the content from users. Also, using white color font on white background to hide content.
- Providing misleading information in the title and meta description which is not relevant to the page content.
- Building unnatural links to your site by comment spamming and paid link exchanges.
Conclusion
Building an established site will take many years of time. So spend quality time in building your site using on-page and off-page SEO techniques. Trying to become popular quickly using black hat methods will make your site disappear from search results and spoil all hard work.
