Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to rank for in your pages is still valuable. And the single most impactful place you can put your keyword is your page’s title tag.

While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic.

The first step in search engine optimization is really to determine what it is you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying the terms people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.

There are three main technical components of a website that can be optimized:

• Server speed:
  As website load times are considered by search engines as part of their evaluation for ranking purposes, speeding up server response times is an important part of on-page optimization.
• Source code:
  An efficient source code can contribute to improved website performance. Superfluous functions or code sections can often be removed or other elements can be consolidated to make it easier for the Googlebot to index the site.
• IP addresses:
  These can be used to find out if, for example, you have a Bad Neighborhood issue. Ideally, you should always have a unique IP address for each web project. This signals to Google and other search engines that the website is unique.

Content, in this context, doesn’t only refer to visible on-screen elements like texts and images. It also includes elements that are initially invisible, such as alt-tags or meta information.

• Text:
  For a long time, text optimization was conducted on the basis of keyword density. This approach has now been superseded, firstly by weighting terms using WDF*IDF tools and – at the next level – by applying topic cluster analyses to proof terms and relevant terms. The aim of text optimization should always be to create a text that is not only built around one keyword, but that covers term combinations and entire keyword clouds in the best way possible. This is how to ensure that the content describes a topic in the most accurate and holistic way it can. Today, it is no longer enough to optimize texts solely to meet the needs of search engines.
• Structural text elements:
  This covers the use of paragraphs or bullet-point lists, h- heading tags and bolding or italicizing individual text elements or words.
• Graphics:
  All images are important content elements that can be optimized. They can help to increase the relevance of the content and well-optimized images can rank on their own in Google’s image search. At the same time, they can increase how attractive a website appears to users. Appealing image galleries can also increase the time users spend on the site. File names of graphics are one part of image optimization.
• Videos:
  Much of what applies to images also applies to videos. SEOs and webmasters should pay particular attention to ensuring that audiovisual content offered on their pages can actually be viewed by users.
• Meta-tags:
  Meta titles, as a page element relevant for rankings, and meta descriptions, as an indirect factor that impacts the CTR (Click-Through Rate) in the search engine results pages, are two important components of on-page optimization. Even if they are not immediately visible to users, they are still considered part of the content because they should be optimized closely alongside the texts and images. This helps to ensure that there is a close correspondence between the keywords and topics covered in the content and those used in the meta tags.

Internal linking can be used to guide a bot’s visit to your domain and also to optimize navigation for real users.

• Logical structure and crawl depth:
  The aim here is to carefully structure menus and to ensure that a website hierarchy contains no more than four levels. The fewer levels there are, the more quickly a bot is able to reach and crawl all sub-pages.
• Internal linking:
  This determines how link juice is managed and distributed around a domain and can help increase the relevance of a sub-page regarding a particular keyword. A good sitemap is one of the most important on-page SEO basics there is, and highly relevant, both for users trying to navigate around the domain and for search engine crawlers.
• Canonization:
  Ways of avoiding duplicate content include the appropriate use of existing canonical tags and/or assigning pages with a noindex attribute.
• URL structure:
  This aspect involves checking whether search-engine-friendly URLs are being used and whether the existing URLs are logically related to one another. URL length can also be looked at as part of on page optimization.
• Focus:
  Pages that don’t contain any particularly useful content and can be considered meaningless for the Google index, should be tagged with the robots metatag “noindex”, which will prevent them being included in the search results.