SEO structure starts on your website. It is called on-page SEO, and it is the part of your SEO process over which you have complete control. There are guidelines issued by the search engines, which will help you to fill out your websites SEO. Here are fifteen of those guidelines.
1 – Keyword Research
Research the best keywords for your site. Look at what your competitors are using for keywords, and try a few keyword tools. Remember to target your audience and consider all the word that they will type into the Google and Bing search engines.
2 – Put your keywords in bold
This is an old trick, but is still effective. All you have to do is highlight one or two of your keywords when they first appear on the page. You do not have to keep highlighting the same keyword; you need only do it for its first appearance. You can also use italic.
3 – Make your URLs search engine friendly
Do not name your pages (URLs) with numbers and symbols. Add in some words to make them easier for a human to read. In addition, you should try to make some of those words as descriptive as possible, and adding in a few keywords will help too.
4 – Install a SSL Certificate
Websites that are secure using https:// instead of http:// now appear higher in the search results. If you cannot install your own SSL certificate ask your host to do this for you. When it is installed, you have to make sure all your website pages are secure and not with mixed content. Also make sure that all your website version with http:// and with www. all forwarded to your new https:// URL.
5 – Organize your website
You need to make sure that your website and your menus are well organized so visitors can easily find what they are looking for. Add Call To Action and Forms to your pages to make it easy to contact you or shop.
6 – Increase the quality
Google and Bing/Yahoo are optimized to search out high quality content. Their methods for determining quality are fairly crude, but it will not help your case if your content is weak, fluffy, heavily SEOed and has multiple obvious spelling mistakes. Search engines measure how much time people spend on your website after using search. If you have a bad website people will leave it faster.
7 – Add a keyword to each page title
Your page title is a very important piece of text because it tells the reader what the page is about and it tells the search engine what the page is all about. So, you should try to add a keyword or two into the title. Just make sure the title is still easy to read for humans.
8 – Be wary of your loading and render times
The render time is the time it takes for a web page to go from white, to starting to load. A long render time will increase your bounce rate. The loading time is the time it takes from the beginning of the render, to the point where everything is loaded. A long loading time will damage your websites SEO.
9 – Optimize your internal linking
Every page should have at least three internal links on it. Three is the bare minimum, and this includes checkout pages too. Internal links are the ones that link one page to another. External links are the ones where you link your page to one outside of your website.
10 – Use H tags on your pages
Learn how to use them correctly and then apply them to your website. They show the search engine which words are important and which are not. It will help you if your web content is quite varied.
11 – Integrate social media
There are hundreds of widgets that you can add to your website. They will help you to link social media and your website. Do not put the widgets everywhere, but the addition of a few here and there will help your SEO in the long term.
12 – Optimize your images
Make sure they do not take too long to load, and make sure they have their ALT text filled out. If you are able to give them a title, then you should. You should also name your image files something SEO friendly before you upload them onto your website.
13 – Create a sitemap
Create an XML sitemap. If you have a WordPress website, you can create a nice XML sitemap with the Yoast SEO tool which will create a dynamic XML sitemap for you. Then you have to add the URL of your sitemaps to your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools account.
14 – Make your website mobile friendly
This is very important because people now do more searches from mobile devices than from desktop or laptop computers. Make sure that your website can be used easily from a cell phone. Contact forms should be easy to fill and submit. All your phone numbers should be clickable.
15 – Fill out your Meta Description tag
This is what may appear on the search engine’s results page, and is a nice opportunity to sell the content of your web page. Create this text that will make people to click on your website. You should make sure that it has keywords in it if you want to feel any positive SEO effect.
