Important Parts of SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most popular digital marketing techniques that send traffic to your site through organic means. It improves your ranking in relevant search engine result pages (SERPs). However, you must first understand what makes great content effective to make effective SEO content.
The best way to do this is to break down the parts of SEO and figure out how to improve each.
On-Page SEO Elements
To start, SEO has two main parts, the on-page elements, and the off-page elements. The on-page elements contain the main page’s content, internal links, and tags. This part is one of the most important areas of the entire SEO process because it helps optimize your site for search engines’ “crawlers” or bots.
Writing excellent, high-quality content with perfect keyword placement isn’t enough when trying to appeal to your site. In fact, there are still a few things you must consider when optimizing your SEO content. So, to help you, here are a few elements you need to work on:
Links
Links are a vital part of SEO content that allows search engines to determine that your site is a good reference worthy of citation. In addition to this, you should be mindful of three types of links.
- Backlinks. Also known as link building, backlinks are links from other websites that redirect to your site. If you ask Gorilla 360, one of the leading digital marketing agencies, link building is one of the most challenging parts of the SEO process. However, you don’t have to dwell so much on this if you can outsource third-party companies with significant affiliations to assist you.
- Internal Links. Aside from backlinks, internal links are also vital when writing your SEO content because this allows you to send users to the other pages of your site, which means keeping them longer. The time a user spends on your site tells search engines that your site is helpful and valuable.
- External Links. On the other hand, external links are connected to outbound links from another domain. This might contradict the internal link, but external links allow search engines to assess your site as valuable and high-quality because you’ve referenced another site, especially if you’ve linked to another excellent-quality site.
Page Title
The page title (also called title tags in SEO) is another crucial element of SEO. By definition, the title tells users what they can expect in what they’re about to read.
As such, you should formulate a title tag relevant to the topic, and it must be closer to the target keyword. On top of that, a good SEO title must only be less than 60 characters; that’s direct and specific.
Meta Description
The meta description is a short description that can be seen below the title tag in the SERP. It doesn’t directly impact your rankings, but it has a significant factor in whether users will click on your site or not. That’s why you must write compelling and helpful descriptions telling users about your content in 160 to 165 characters. It would also be best to have the target keyword in your description, like your title.
Page URL
If you’ve observed in search engines like Google, their search results include a title, link, and description. When enhancing your SEO content, you must also emphasize the URL. Although Google also changes its system, and URLs don’t play as significant a role as before, it still does help in improving your site ranking and making your site rank better in search engines.
Image Alt-Text
Image in articles or blog posts is also an important part of the SEO content. Pages that have relevant images show better performances than those without. To optimize this element, you must first name the image’s filename to your target keyword. After that, you should also utilize alt-text so that you can tell the search engines more about what your image is about.
If you’re adding alt-text to your SEO content, you must keep it less than 125 characters and ensure to make it as descriptive and specific as possible.
Site Speed
Last on this list is the site speed of your website. In case you didn’t know, the ability of your site to load quickly also plays a significant role in SEO ranking. Search engines, like Google, value user experience, and slow sites only negatively affect the experience. Whether mobile or desktop, you must ensure that you can improve the site speed and reduce web loading.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the activities that happen outside your site, which helps your ranking. Furthermore, your off-page SEO is directly related to your Domain Authority (DA) score. DA is a search engine ranking score that allows you to measure your site’s success in search engine results.
You don’t have much control over off-page SEO compared to on-page SEO. Still, you both need it when trying to make your SEO work. Still, there are a few things that you can do to improve your site’s DA and rank better in SERPs.
Final Thoughts
Everything may sound technical and complicated, but at the end of the day, SEO is still one of the most effective ways to naturally collect traffic to your site. Thus, investing your time in learning its elements is a small sacrifice for a good investment return, though you always have the choice to outsource excellent marketing agencies. Nonetheless, knowing something about your marketing technique can greatly help your business.
