What is SEO, and why does it matter?

SEO is the shortened acronym for Search Engine Optimization. That catch-all term refers the set of best practices and triggers that cue search engines to understand not only what your website is about, but also how its contents can help your potential customer.

Optimising your website with the right information is what SEO is all about. There’s more to optimising a page than simply writing about your business. In fact, it’s often the parts that go unseen that matter the most!

That’s where we come in! We’re here to help you design your site with SEO in mind – starting today, with the humble blog post you’re reading.

Let’s look at 9 key indicators that you’ll want to target for the best SEO practices. Then we’ll break each down to explain why they matter and how they work.

 

• Keywords, including variations and density
• Keyword-friendly URL
• Meta-descriptions and title tags
• Scannable, helpful content for easier reading
• Internal linking
• External linking to authority sites
• Optimized images using alt-text
• Speed of page loading
• Varied multimedia to help dwell time
• Bonus: social sharing links

 

Why On-Page SEO Improves the User’s Experience

Each of the mentioned tips work like an individual puzzle piece. When you optimize your website, using each of the smaller pieces, it creates a complete, cohesive picture to Google and other engines’ search crawlers (the robots that come onto your site and read its content, feeding information about it back to the search engine). So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at each piece.

 

1. Keywords are King

Keywords are one of the most important factors when building your website. As a digital marketing agency, often our first role is to find out what keywords and phrases clients want to target. We then try to keep those key words and phrases at the forefront of our minds, both when we’re designing websites and creating the online marketing campaigns to promote them for our clients.

That’s how important keywords are – they really need to guide everything you do in an online capacity. They’re the main signal to search engines about what your site actually does.

In the past, people abused search engine algorithms by stuffing their chosen keyword or phrase into an article hoping to rank well. And, at first, it worked! You’d read a website with a white background that might have a key phrase repeated multiple times in invisible white text in the background!

Needless to say, what worked in the past can penalise your site now. What you need is a natural balance of not only the right keywords, but keyword phrases, and semantic or similar words like relevant synonyms. This shows the search engines what your site is about, while incorporating a good user experience for your potential customer. There’s an oft-heard mantra in online marketing circles – “write for humans, not for search engines”! It’s a good rule of thumb.

2. URLs matter

We highly suggest that you use a keyword friendly URL that isn’t long, and that makes sense. If you can’t read and understand what the page is about from the URL, you’ve gone wrong somewhere! What’s easier to read:

your-site/this-pages-purpose

or

your-site/theotherdayidecidedtocreateaninsanelylongtitleformypostxyz?

This makes a good experience for readability when a customer searches for your website and is a concise way for your page to be indexed.

Another small but subtle way to ensure that it’s crystal clear to our robotic crawler friends that you are an authority in your field, and that your site is logically organised for users to be able to find relevant information.

3. Meta-descriptions and title-tags

Remember how we spoke about “invisible elements” earlier? Well, here’s one of ’em! One of the important aspects of your site is what’s called the metadata of your posts and pages. The most important metadata is your metatitle, and its accompanying meta description.

Apart from those who find you via search, your metadata is information that most of your website users are probably not going to see – but what they don’t notice, search engines do.

Here’s some of our metadata, for our homepage. I searched ‘Saint Digital’, which is why that part appears in bold. The purple bit is the metatitle; what’s below it, the meta description.

Metatitles, and their accompanying meta descriptions are keyword focused descriptors that send signals about what a particular page or post is about and shape how your website appears in Search Engine Results Pages. It’s a small blurb that describes the page using specific wording.

On-page title tags act the same way. We enhance specific headlines and sub-headings using title tags in HTML – for example, H1 tags for the main title, and H2 for subheadings. These are indicators that are used in one of two ways. The first way is by saying to the search engines, “this section is important – pay attention to these words first”.

Search engines don’t read content word by word, left-to-right, moving down the page like we humans do. They look for the most important content first, then read what’s next. H1 tagged content is your page’s main focus, so it takes precedence. You can have title tags from h1 – h6, ranked in order of priority. Search engines will even read bold text and italic text before they read normal text. It would be bizarre for a human to read text in this way – but robots don’t play by the same rules…

NB: This may or may not be what search engine crawlers do on your site. We genuinely don’t know.

Here’s one more (slightly more complicated) – way to speak to search engines. If your site features very specific types of content, there are ways you can tag this so search engines interpret them and displays them differently to other types of content. For example, if you’re a recipe website, you can include script on the page that helps Google present your site a little bit differently:

The specific tagging rules for these are too complex to go over here, but this is called SCHEMA mark-up – and you can find out the ins and outs over at Schema.org (or just hire your friendly neighbourhood digital agency).

4. Scannable, user friendly content

While you want to add relevant content that both engages and educates your potential customer, you also want the actual reading experience to be enjoyable. With enough whitespace, an easily legible font size, and a non-cluttered appearance, your reader will stay on your site longer, which is a key indicator to Google and other search engines that your website was helpful to the user.

User intent is a huge component in keeping readers on your site. By answering questions, being genuinely helpful with information the user is looking for, you’ll score big points with search engines. Another tip is to use bullet points, and multiple sub-headings. People tend to scan content more than read it straight through. Make that process easy for them, and you’re onto a sure-fire winner.

5. Internal Linking

An often overlooked component of SEO is links. You can be doing all the right things, but without important linking structures, you’re missing a vital piece of the puzzle. Internal linking is when you link from an article or page on your website to another article or page on your website. In this instance, the links go to other important and relevant information within your site.

An understanding of this is crucial, and you’ll hopefully notice that we’ve tried to put this into practice right here at Saint Digital (hey, whaddayaknow? There’s a link!). Good internal linking is crucial to a well-rounded SEO strategy as it helps lead search crawlers around your site. It’s a good way to show search engines that you really do know your stuff, and that you’ve got a broad core of expertise in whatever it is your site is about.

Once again, however, it’s important to make sure those links make sense. You can’t just shoehorn a link to something irrelevant in a completely unrelated article. Comment spammers do that all the time, and you bet your bottom dollar that Google is wise to their tricks.

The best internal links are those that make logical sense – a hyperlinked phrase to ‘Nike trainers’, for example, that does indeed point to a page dedicated to the famous ticked sports shoes.

6. External Linking to Authority Sites

By linking out to authority sites in your industry, search engines see that you’re trying your darnedest to be helpful to your reader – another big plus.

The important piece of this information is that it must be relevant and should point to an authority site. For example, when you’re trying to learn about a health condition, would you be more comfortable with a site sending you to Mayo Clinic or NHS Choices, or Uncle Bob’s Miraculous Home Recipes to Improve Your Health?

Choose big, trusted websites and a little bit of the trust search engines place in those same sites will be accorded to you, too.

7. Optimised Images

Remember how we talked about invisible factors that help your website rank in the search engines? Here’s yet another of those. You see, our robotic friends from search engines cannot read images like humans do. They just see a mass of coloured pixels, without seeing what it’s all supposed to mean!

That’s why image alt tags are so important. They’re one of those little tricks that allow you to add your relevant key phrases in, and search engines love them because they help form an idea of what your image is depicting.

WordPress makes it easy for you to set the alt text as you upload images to it. And yes, we even added an Alt tag for the image above. Alt-tag-ception.

That’s not all – you’re also improving your user experience by including alt tags for your images, because they’ll help people who need extra accessibility to understand what your image is about if they can’t see it. And finally, it’s another way to let Google or other search engines know that not only is this keyword or phrase important, but that your picture is relevant to the topic you’re discussing on the web page.

8. Speed of page loading

If you’ve ever been frustrated waiting for a page to load before, then you already know how important a quick loading page is. People have short attention spans, and if there’s too much lag for a page to load, potential customers can and will move on to another site. Search engines measure this in something called a bounce rate, as well as tracking the time each user spends on your site.

You might also hear the expression pogo-sticking. If somebody clicks the link to your site in a search engine result, then quickly leaves, it’s an indicator that you didn’t or couldn’t deliver the information that the reader was looking for. Remember, the user experience is critical, and if an engine like Google sees somebody go to your site, only to leave immediately it sends a signal that you’re not the right page for that key phrase. You have to do your very  best to make your site as engaging as possible.

9. Varied multimedia to help dwell time

Dwell time is just like bounce rate, but it’s the Force to bounce rate’s Dark Side (if that makes sense). Dwell time is good. You want somebody to come to your site and stay, because you have the information they were looking for. This is also called page stickiness, meaning that like Velcro, your reader is sticking around and engaging in your web content. It’s useful to them, which means you’ve done your job well as a webmaster.

One of the best way to do this is by varying the multimedia you offer to your readers, ensuring it caters to all types of learners and abilities. You might consider including video or audio files, infographics, or slideshares. In doing so, you’ll offer a maximally well-rounded experience.

BONUS: Stay social

If it makes sense, you should also place social share buttons on your site, giving people the easy option to share the things they like about your webpage. If your content is great, this alone will be a powerful method to market your webpage. You leverage “social proof” when people share your content. The message being delivered to your user’s social network when they share your content is a way of saying, “if others like this webpage, they must be doing something right”, which will send yet more users your way.

When your content has been shared a fair few times, that sends a powerful signal to search engines that it’s high enough quality to share, which is another trigger to the search engines, telling them that your website is relevant to a particular key that your user searched for.

Don’t Overlook the Value of On-Page SEO

When it’s all said and done, that might looks like a massive list of items to incorporate, but when you understand the broader picture of on-page SEO, you’ll start to see how it all comes together, and will naturally begin producing future content with good SEO in mind.

We hope this guide was helpful in explaining not only what on-page SEO is, but why it’s important for your business website. By taking the time to work each of these elements seamlessly into your website and content, you’ll be on your way to not only an improved customer experience, but better placement in search engine rankings.

If you’d like to enlist our help in building an on-page SEO strategy (as well as a fair few more advanced tips and tricks beyond the scope of this article), don’t hesitate to speak to us for a free consultation on your website.