What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on search engine result pages (SERPs), by adding search engine friendly elements into a website. There are two types of Search engine optimization on-page, and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to website elements which comprise a web page, such as HTML code, textual content, and images. Off-page optimization refers mainly to backlinks (links pointing to the site which is being optimized, from other relevant websites).
Here are some basic techniques for SEO (On page optimization)
Use most effective title tags
Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the < head> area. Title tags are considered as the title of the chapter of a book. It tells people and search engines what your page is about.
Title tags are also part of what makes people decide whether to visit your site when it shows up in the search results. The title tag should contain important keywords to help the search engine determine what the page is about.
Below are some tips on how to write optimized title tags:
- Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.
- Keyword Placement: Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title tag (most to least). However, if you’re working in a language that reads right-to-left, then it is reversed, and it would be least important to most important.
- Keyword Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes).
- Include both product- or service-related keywords and your company’s brand name.
Meta description
A meta description helps describe your page to search engines.
Important tips for good Meta description tags:
- Use keywords in your meta description tag.
- Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple syntaxes of your key words.
- There should not be more than 150 characters in a description metatag of a single web page.
- Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page is different and stands a better chance of being found if you place a good title and description on it.
Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO
Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords is very important for a successful SEO campaign.
For instance, if you have a site about Training institute, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword “Training Institute” or “Institutes in pune”. Instead you could try and focus on keywords like “Software testing institute”, “Selenium testing Institute”, “Automation testing Institute”, “Manual testing Institute” etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult, it’s best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords.
Add ALT tags to your images
Just like the visually impaired, search engines can’t see images on websites. Even if an image has text embedded within it, search engines are unable to crawl that text. So by not creating alt attributes for each and every image on your site, you lose a huge opportunity to be as visible as possible online.
Search engines use the information that alt text provides to determine the best image to return for a search query. This is a great way to bring new visitors to your site and it helps to increase your rankings with the search engines.
Create a sitemap
In the world of SEO, the search engines indexing programs – known as “spiders” – play the important role of analyzing new websites (or new content added to existing websites) and adding their content to the lists of pages that can be displayed in response to user queries.
By creating sitemap you are helping spiders to index your website. Sitemap is nothing but a page listing links to all other pages on your site. There are many free as well as paid tools that can generate these important pages for you.
Build internal links between pages
Creating internal links which connect your different pieces of content are always helpful for spiders to index your pages.
Below are some tips for internal links
- Make the text within the links descriptive using the target keyword.
- More than six internal links in the body text is too many. Don’t overdo it.
- The total number of links on any page, including the navigation, should never be more than 75-100. Anything beyond that is too much.
- Put this links within the body. It is strongly believe that links within the body copy are weighted more heavily than links within the navigation.
- We should check which landing pages have maximum searches/visits then we can interlink these pages on our inner pages.
