10 SEO Steps to Optimize your Site for Better Ranking
Search engines are the biggest platform to grow your online business in which people are looking for? If your site wants to rank in top search engines, you need to follow the guidelines of search engines for better organic traffic and better SERP results.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO became the core fundamental part and essential for search engines to rank properly on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. Every website is to be optimized properly without violating webmaster guidelines. Because the page should be a natural and clean SEO site to the visitors who are interested in the topic.
If you see the SEO strategy, the Search Engine Optimization is divided into 2 categories of optimization: On-Page and Off-page optimization. Where On-Page is completely optimized within the site but Off-page is a promotional part of the website to various niche sites, social media, directories, guest posting, press release, and much more.
But in this article, we focus on On-page optimization concepts to get more visibility and get organic traffic in search engine results.
10 SEO Steps to Optimize your Site for Better Ranking
1. Develop your site with good cms system
Actually, there are 100’s of content management systems in which some of them are open source and some are paid cms software. If you planned to develop your website with CMS then you can go for free open source cms software like WordPress, drupal, Joomla etc.
These are widely used open source content management to run an online business, personal blogs, without having much technical knowledge and also many developers contribute free add-ons or plugins to make your site more flexible. The software can be downloaded freely from their respective sites without registration and it is created by authorized community developers all around the world. Give a try on of the top content management system like WordPress / drupal / Joomla and start your online business
Check This
7 important SEO plugins for WordPress to improve online presence
2. Identify and choose SEO optimized theme
Once you have identified the type of content management system for your business or blog. It may be WordPress, drupal or Joomla or any other cms as per your requirements. The cms offer a number of optimized themes that suitable to your business, blogs or e-commerce sites, etc.
If you want your website to look great including content, images, sites so you need to have well-optimized quality themes. For example, check the Links
2016's Newest Premium Wordpress Themes from Themeforest
50+ Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes 2016
WordPress Themes Loved By Over 371k Customers
The WordPress is most widely used content management systems all over the world. Many different community developers have contributed wonderful themes to WordPress community for freely in order to build strong online presence for both technical and non-technical persons.
In order to improve the quality of a site, many beautiful themes are available online and can be installed on your site within few seconds. The developers who have built this themes are well optimized for responsiveness including laptop, mobile, and tablet etc.
3. Write Great content
You may probably think that what should I write on great content about? If you writing a blog post on a particular topic, the blog post should solve the problem on what people are looking for. Only it requires a great understanding of the industry, creative ideas, basic knowledge on the topic to write.
Need More:
The 12 Essential Elements Of High-Quality Content
i) Keep researching on topic:
Research for top bloggers related to your niche, understand the technique on writing quality content related to your niche. Just keep drafting content from various sources and make a unique design in writing to be presented to the readers.
Once you understood the subject, develop a strong and creative topic related to the niche where it helps to the readers with meaningful results.
How to Research a Topic: 9 Steps with Pictures
Find a purpose of your blog that you are writing high-quality content related to the industry needs or not. The key concept is to make visitors attracted by the topics and build an audience to your blog.
In order to Attract visitors, the blog owner should be updated constantly content every few days to make look site fresh to the readers and search engines. Because there are no tricks to be played with search engines for increasing organic traffic, the only way is to build your audience by giving a valuable information to the visitors who are searching for?
Write a great valuable content for the readers with well graphical images, so that the readers feel very interesting to read your entire story without closing immediately the site. Readers visualize more graphical images than the just content, so keep update images wherever related to your topic.
4. Interlink your web pages with anchor text
Interlinking is one of the key factors for SEO ranking because it passes authority from one page to another page in order to keep web page ranking higher in search engine results. Always interlinking between web pages is done by anchor text keyword wherever relevant in the content.
If you take an example of the blogging site, website owners link their pages using anchor text with the long tail keyword. The main reason it is done because search engine robots find crawlable links to make them busy in faster indexing and ranking in search results. Also, it is helpful to the readers on which they find similar niche trending information
Check the links present in site using link analyzer tool
Interlinking should be done by both techniques like linking pages internally and externally using anchor text to make sure robots keep crawling your site frequently and boost your rankings.
If you see How much important interlinking is
- Help easily to navigate pages without confusion
- To make search engines crawlable faster and indexes to help visitors find relevant information related to the keyword on what they are looking for?
- Search engines frequently visit and update the latest information to the database based upon the keyword frequency used on the site.
- If more relevant links updated on the site, the more the search engines will take interest and reduces the bounce rate of your site by ranking in the top search engine results.
Note: Always check for broken links and over linking pages to meet necessary SEO requirements as per search engine guidelines.
5. Optimize Images wherever Possible
You may already think why everybody is talking about images optimization and how it is important? Images are most often remember by the people than the text, visual images are stronger to remember because it increases memory capacity by 50%. Next provide alternate text for each image.
What I have explained just now is only about the presence of images in the real online world. Ok, now let's focus on image optimization how to be done
Key recommendations of Image optimization
- Images always to be posted on site using PNG format, because it takes a small amount of memory space than compared to other types of image format. And also it makes loads faster web pages without waiting much time for the visitors
- The image should be optimized with alternate text or called alt tag optimization using long tail keyword smartly to rank better in search engines. Because its adds SEO value to the website and increases chances of finding exact images in image search engines.
- Along with alt tag make sure your image file name is optimized with the long tail keyword. It would help users understand your image name while searching.
- If you are using thumbnail images, make sure it takes less load time. If your thumbnail image dimensions are big, resize them using image resizer tool and compress the images to load faster
6. Duplicate Content Issue
Duplicate content is one of the main issues of SEO. So the search engines penalize if the site has duplicate content on the page URL. Because search engines find difficult to show to the users which version is real for indexing and ranking.
Search engines always prefer to go one version of Url format either www or non-www version in order to avoid duplicate content. Not only this type of SEO URL issues we have, there are other types of URL page issues to be taken very seriously for easy SEO optimization.
Nowadays search engine algorithm became very intelligent to find spam SEO sites vs original sites. Not only search engines find these issues, but it is also focusing on duplicate content within the site. Imagine, having similar content on different versions of URL will lead to a problem in SEO growth and fall in rankings over a period of time.
Duplicate content can be fixed if the following measures had been taken at beginning stage or check your content with plagiarism checker tool for uniqueness.
i) Fix dynamic URL type issues
Suppose if the site opens the same content with different versions of URL’s like
Original URL
yourwebsite.com/post
Duplicate URL’s
yourwebsite.com/?post=1
yourwebsite.com/?post=2
yourwebsite.com/?post=3
For this type of you can rewrite using .htaccess method, use htaccess mod rewrite tool(http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/index.php) to convert dynamic url’s to static url's
ii) www and Non-www URL's
According to search engines like google, bing, and yahoo. Web pages that open with both www and non-www versions of url’s will be treated as duplicate pages. So that it would hurt SEO growth of website having both versions of url’s
For an example, the site yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsite.com open the same webpage, you will be thinking as different. But in the case of search engines, it is similar www and non-www URL versions.
To avoid the negative results in SEO, use the htaccess 301 redirect code
***********************************************
//Rewrite to www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com[nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
***********************************************
The above code will help you solve the non-www and www versions of URL by redirecting all non-www to the www versions. Hence it is best practice to make site URL SEO friendly to search engines and the visitors
If you want to generate 301 redirect code use(htaccess redirect)
iii) Canonical issues
If you are not able to solve www and non-www URL issues, the canonical method is the alternative method to solve this issue. HOW?
It is very simple to use the canonical tag, it specifies the original URL page to be used in given page. By implementing canonical tag, search engines will take as single original page and indexes properly for the visitors. This avoids the duplicate page issues in the website.
Let's say you have a site yourwebsite.com, but site will open with www version called www.yourwebsite.com, then create a canonical URL http://www.yourwebsite.com by placing a small HTML code in head section of your code
http://www.yourwebsite.com
The above code will help you solve the duplicate content using the canonical method, suppose you are running a PHP based site. Just copy the code below to solve SEO issues for PHP based site
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; ?><?php echo parse_url( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH ); ?>" />
If you developed a website using top content management system like WordPress, drupal or Joomla. Then you will have big issues with the website, because the CMS are built by the large community of developers around the world to make website cleaner, faster and SEO-friendly website, you can find a huge variety of themes for business or blog, add-ons for optimizing website more efficiently etc.
Hence it is a completely open source to use the cms for business, blogs or any other according to your needs. Click the below cms scripts and download for free
7. Optimize Meta Tags to Increase More Visibilty
Meta tags are one of the most important parts of SEO website optimization because it is understood by all search engine and displays only title and description to the visitors on search engine results page
If Meta tags are implemented on the web page, it tells about the page to search engines on what the page about? Since meta tags are placed in header tag of HTML code but not visible directly to the users.
10 Important Seo Meta Tags needed for Everysite
The 2 important meta tags optimization is title and description tag
i) Optimize Meta Title Tag
The title is the first SEO meta tag optimization to be done as per SEO technique, without proper meta title search engine will not have proper information about the site to be indexed.
The only impact on the title is, will be part of search engine rankings only if a long keyword placed in the title but according to the web page content. Because this is the first appearance of search engine results page to be shown when a user types a keyword in google search box.
As you already know the title tag appears after the utf-8 meta tag which is present in the header section of HTML code. The minimum length of the title tag is 70 characters according to latest updates of google 2016.
If your tag exceeds more than the length of the original length, the search engines will truncate the remaining length and will not appear on search engine results page. In order to avoid this kind of mistakes, please write a short and understandable title within 70 characters of length.
Keyword + Title = Optimized Meta title
<title>Please give title text here with long tail keyword</title>
ii) Optimize Meta Description
Meta tag description is the second most important element of on-page SEO, when meta description appears on results page it tells about the content of the page on what the page about?
The description doesn’t have much impact on SEO rankings, but when a correct keyword are placed in description tag it helps to increase maximum click through rates(CTR) for that particular page.
When a user searches on google for information, the google search engine identifies all the relevant sites and displays on search engine results page. If your description matches with the keyword, it will display to the visitors by highlighting the words on the results page of description.
To create meta description you need to focus on 4 main things
- Use a long keyword in description
- Give clear information
- Add catchy words on description to get more visibility and clicks
- Make sure description readable
If you need to create meta tags check this link
https://www.coolseotools.com/meta-tag-generator
Meta description length
According to latest updates of google 2016, the maximum length of the meta description should be around 280 characters. If the length of characters exceeds, the search engine will ignore and truncate the remaining text.
Syntax:
<meta name="description" content="Here is your webpage meta description that displays on search engine results page.">
iii) Meta Keyword Tag
Since from the year 2014, Google has removed meta keyword tag in algorithms that do not have any SEO impact on search engine rankings. Only it focuses on keywords in webpage content, so I am not going to discuss meta keyword tag.
8. Learn how to Create Sitemap for site
What is sitemap?
The sitemap contains a list of pages of a particular website, the sitemap will either be in XML format or HTML format file to be submitted to search engines for faster indexing in an easy way.
How to create a sitemap?
The easier way to create a sitemap is by using sitemap generator tool. The tool automatically scans all the pages in your site and create an XML file to be submitted to search engines.
If you need to create sitemap with just click of a button, use the XML Sitemap Generator Tool
How to submit an XML sitemap to google?
In order to know how to submit XML sitemap to google just follow the Steps below
- Login to google webmaster and select your website
- Click the crawl on left side bar
- Click the sitemap that appeared on crawl
- Then, click on the top right side called add/test sitemap.
- Give the path of sitemap in the box.
- Then click submit, and your sitemap has been submitted to google
9. Use Robots Properly
Here there are two types of robots i.e robots txt file and robots meta tag
Robots txt file - It is text file name robots.txt, the purpose of this file is to tell the search engines which pages to index and which pages to block(means not be indexed). Robots txt file should be handled very carefully otherwise it will block the pages from indexing on search engines
Case1:
The below shown is a default robots txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Case2:
If you want to block all pages from indexing
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Case 3:
If you want only particular page to block from search engines
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page
Case4:
If you want to block entire folder from indexing on search engine
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder
Robots meta tag:
Robots meta tag is another way of indexing pages or no indexing the pages to search engines.
It should be placed in header section of other meta tags
How to create robots meta tag?
The robots meta tag can be created by name attribute called robots and the content attributes.
The content attributes majorly are index, noindex, follow, nofollow.
There are 4 combination types of meta tags can be created
The below tag explains, search engines will index the page and follow the links in page frequently
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>
The below tag explains, search engines will index the page and does not follow the links in page
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”>
The below tag explains, search engines will not index the page and follow the links in page
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>
The below tag explains, search engines will not index the page and no follow the links in page regularly
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
10. Submit Website to Google and Bing webmaster
Every time you create a website or page with proper design, content, images and should go to publish online.
In order to index the pages, you need to submit your website or web pages to google, yahoo and bing webmasters. So that all your pages will be indexed properly and track the progress of pages
To submit your website to Google Webmaster, click the link below
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1
To Submit your website to bing and Yahoo webmaster, click the link below
https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
