On-page search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any website, but what many people don’t realize about SEO is that it’s generally a long-term, highly hands-on strategy. Basic SEO strategies include title tags, meta descriptions, image optimization and backlinks, but to make an impact on search engines, you need to step up your SEO game.
Along with your on-page SEO practices, here are the other areas of SEO you need to pay close attention to.
Keyword Research
You are probably thinking, “Wait, I thought this was one of the first starting points for SEO?” While you would be correct, we want to make sure you understand how thorough your keyword research needs to be. Not only do you need to find keywords that are related to your users’ search intent, but you will also need to see what your competitors are doing too. By doing this, you will understand how they are implementing their SEO strategy – both on and off their site.
While there are plenty of tools out there that can help you accomplish this, our favorite lives within Moz. Their Keyword Explorer tool is one of the best SEO tools around, as you can take any URL and discover all the keywords it ranks for. On top of that, you can compare that website with up to two other sites to see where specific keywords rank against your website and two competitors.
Here is a screenshot of the Keyword Explorer with our website:
Once you have a grasp on the competition, you will be able to make better choices for your keywords.
Purge Your Duplicated Content
Duplicated content will hurt your rankings, and if your website is filled with it, finding and changing all of that content can seem daunting. Tools like Screaming Frog and Siteliner can not only help you find this duplicated content on your website, but broken links too. It’s definitely worth making a priority if you have a large website!
Clean Up Your Noindex, Tags and Archived Pages in WordPress
These types of pages can cause a lot of headaches for WordPress sites if you do not optimize them properly. To discover how many pages your website actually has, perform a Google search using “site: YOUR DOMAIN NAME” to help you see how many pages you have indexed. Here is an example of this:
The red box indicates how many pages Google has indexed from our website. If you perform this same function on your URL and the number seems way too high, you could have a significant issue with duplicate content or other problems. Finding these can be easily done in Screaming Frog or other tools.
Tune Up Your Site’s Speed
We’ve talked about this plenty of times before, but site speed is still an important ranking factor for websites. Maile Ohye of Google stated, “2 seconds is actually the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability. Meaning that that’s what users like to shop with. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.”
If you can get your site to load in under a half-second, you are going to come out on top of your competitors. While it may be a challenge, it’s certainly possible. Here are some tips to get you started on tuning up your website’s speed.
SEO will only become more competitive as time goes on, and if you’re cutting your efforts short to only on-page SEO, you’re only going to experience greater hurdles in the future. Take the time to execute a full-fledged SEO strategy for maximum exposure!
To learn more about SEO, contact the GreenMellen team!
