When I started doing SEO years ago, it required very little effort to have a website ranked first in search listings. All you had to do was make sure you included your key phrase in the correct page tags on the web page. All of these on-page elements are still required and relevant, which is why on-page search engine optimization has barely changed; You’ll still need to tell the major search engines what your page is focused on.
However, it is off-page SEO (backlinks pointing to your website or blog) that tells search engines not what your website is related to (on-page optimization will achieve this), but how central your site is in terms of what it is about, as well as how it is more valuable than the rest of the competing websites.
So, here are the things you need to win at on page search engine optimization.
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You should have a lot of good and related content, a minimum of 700 words on each web page.
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Use your keyphrase and also variants of it once or twice in the content of the page.
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Include the key phrase in the tag
, as well as the location of the meta keywords and the location of the web page header description. (But don’t forget that the description is commonly used by search engines in result listings, so make it attractive so that the user will choose to visit your website in the result listings and view your page instead of another site.) -
Also put the key phrase inside the header tags
,
and
.
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If you have images on the page, or a movie, place your keyphrase or variants of it, inside the meta tags
that belong to the images. -
Make sure that any words or phrases within the keyword meta area are also in the observable written content of the web page.
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Make sure your website has the necessary and useful pages, such as the Privacy Policy, About Us web page, Help page, Terms of Service page, 404 page, and, as applicable, the Disclaimer . Make sure there are links to these pages from the home page and all additional web pages, so that each page can be accessed from any other page with a single click.
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Increase Dwell Time and Minimize Bounce Rate – Keep your visitors on your website for as long as possible by engaging people through the use of useful content, for example a movie clip or a quiz. At the same time, integrate indented lists – Google loves bulleted lists. If visitors click after just a couple of seconds, search engines like Google will pick up on it and determine that the site is not what users want to see, and your search ranking in SERPS will drop as a direct consequence. You can see your bounce rate through your Google Analytics data (you use Google Analytics, right?).
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Keep your site load time short. The most effective strategy to avoid a long load time is to decrease the size (ie, the size in Kb and not in pixels). There are free tools available to accomplish this, such as http://www.reduceimages.com/ and http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx. This is also known as file compression.
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Include a robots.txt file and upload it to your server.
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Include an XML sitemap file and upload it to your server.
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Include a .htaccess file with code to deal with canonical URLs.
Stick to all of these basic rules, and you’ll be ready for search engine optimization best practices in 2017.