For everyone doing business online, Search Engine Optimization, everywhere referred to as SEO is common. It’s all about positioning your site or blog to get more traffic from search engines.
We are generally told to approach SEO from two perspectives:
On-Page!
This is everything you as the content creator need to do to align your content with what search engines want. It starts with keyword research and ends with optimizing your content for the target keywords.
Your web page is split into different areas and the keywords targeted have to be present in each of these areas. SEO experts will tell you to have one or two primary keywords and a couple of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) phrases.
The idea is this:
The longer your content, the more your LSI keywords and the better your chances of getting ranked for as many keywords as possible.
But which are the different areas of your webpage to focus on as content developer?
Your page title
Page URL
Page keyword
Page description
Article introduction
Image alt on articles
HTML tags like <h1> to <h6>
Article body
Article conclusion
Linking out to authority website
Now, for On-Page SEO, these are the different sections of your page to focus on while optimizing your article.
Your primary and LSI keywords used on your page properly will help search engines understand the topic you are writing about.
Note that while the description section isn’t very influential in ranking, it helps your Click Through Rate (CRT) on SERPS.
If your page description does not rightly describe your content, chances of having searchers click your entry are very slim and poor CTR can cause Google to shift your entry downward.
Off-Page!
Off-page is the tough area of SEO. Though it’s happening off your pages, it heavily depends on your pages.
It’s simply getting links to your pages, and if your pages have to naturally get those backlinks, then those pages have to be attractive enough.
But bloggers and publishers don’t wait any longer for readers to link back to their articles. This is because content marketing has become so competitive and difficult.
So what they do is go out there and fetch those links for themselves through:
Blog commenting
Guest posting
Forum posting
Creating profiles on Web 2.0 properties
Risking and buy links on sites like Fiver
Etc
The little known Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the foundation of SEO. No matter how much effort you put into On-page and Off-page, if the technical aspect is not properly setup, you won’t see matching results. Technical SEO focuses on how well search spiders can crawl your site and index your content.
The core of technical SEO is site speed and a lot of factors affect this:
Sever response time
This is a key factor when it comes to your site speed. The web hosting industry today is crowded but we have to make sure we get the best option that’s optimized for speed.
Recently, I lost over half my traffic because of poor speed. My blog speed stood at over 8 seconds which is too bad. Moving to Traffic Planet Hosting cuts down my speed to less than 2 second, which is great.
Theme coding and plugins
Your theme can be the reason behind your sluggish blog. Most of the templates out there are poorly coded, making a lot of css and js file includes and database calls. This adds up the time your server takes to respond to a browser request.
Plugins are a necessary evil. While they help us achieve different goals, most of these go a long way to weigh heavily on our blogs. You have to keep the number of plugins you have to as low as possible
Images and Graphics
We cannot dissociate images from content marketing. For some readers, blog posts or articles without pictures can really mean something is missing.
But poorly optimized images can hurt your SEO. We have them built into our themes, plugins and the content we published.
Now, as a blog owner or content creator, you may have full control over the images and pictures you add to your content. You can optimize them, add the width and height properties, etc. For the most part however, you have little influence on the icons, bullets, background graphics, etc shipped with the themes. And these help to slow down your blog.
If you’ve been blogging, creating and publishing content without paying adequate attention to technical SEO, I think my article here has thrown some light on what you should do.
Disclosure: In full disclosure, it is safe to assume that the site owner is benefiting financially or otherwise from everything you click on, read, or look at while on my website. This is not to say that is the case with all content, as all publications on the site are original and written to provide value and references to our audience.
