This article contains some of the most useful, on-site SEO recommendations. Learn more about what you can tweak on your website in order to improve your SEO ranking.
Create Long and Unique Content
There is a saying that “content is king,” which refers to the importance of quality content for SEO optimization. Unique content that covers a specific topic, in-depth, ranks much better in search engines, so direct your time and effort accordingly.
Use Keywords in Appropriate Places
SEO ranking of a website can be significantly improved with the right keyword placement. The keyword should be located on the following places:
- URL
- Title tag
- Page title (which should be wrapped in H1 HTML tags)
- Page content (ideally in the first 100 words and a few more times throughout the text)
There are a lot of SEO analysis tools that can detect whether these parameters are optimal.
Use LSI Keywords
LSI (latent semantical indexing) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between concepts found in the content. Google usually gives better ranking to the pages that are rich with these keywords.
Having that in mind, LSI keywords should be scattered over page content. Although the writing process is mostly manual, there are some tools, such as the LSI keyword generator, that can help you create a list of synonyms for the desired keyword.
Make Website Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendliness became an SEO factor in 2015, when Google introduced it to its algorithm as a ranking criterion. One of the most important aspects of mobile friendliness is responsive design, whose main characteristic is that your website content should adapt to the width of the user’s screen, thus improving the browsing experience of the users of mobile and tablet devices.
More details about what Google considers a mobile-friendly website can be found after analysing the website with Google’s page speed test.
Use SEO-Friendly URLs
There are two SEO factors which are related to the URLs:
- Keywords — they should be present in the URL — position closer to the domain name is better
- URL length — shorter URLs rank better
That basically means that you should use URLs such as yourdomain.com/page-title-goes-here instead of yourdomain.com/post.php?id=101. Most popular CMS software and PHP frameworks support SEO-friendly URLs by default. However, if you have one that does not, or you are developing a custom application, check tutorials like this one.
Optimize Internal Linking
A good internal linking strategy offers a couple of advantages:
- It makes it easier for search engine “spiders” to index the pages on your website
- Improves user experience when navigating and finding content on the website
- Internal links “pass link juice” between pages. A good ranking page that links to another page will improve the ranking of that other page (i.e. it will pass link juice to that page)
The ideal structure of internal links should have a pyramidal form. Minimizing the amount of links between homepage and any other page on the website improves the flow of the link juice.
On the other hand, don’t do anything that might prevent search engine spiders from accessing your links. This includes links in JavaScript, iframes, Flash, links shown after form submission or links pointing to inaccessible pages.
Improve Website Speed
Fast loading speed not only improves SEO ranking, but also user experience. A few studies have confirmed this hypothesis. One study found that 57% of visitors close the page after waiting 3 seconds for it to load, while Amazon has concluded that an increase of 100ms in page loading speed would lead to 1% higher revenue.
Fortunately, there are a few things that can be easily fixed to achieve better website performance. For more information, check out this article.
Conclusion
Although these recommendations can improve your website ranking alone, it is advised to combine them with off-site SEO techniques, such as link building, to achieve even better results.