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Welcome to the second part of the SEO series at The Hub@TTU. If you haven’t already, check out the first part of the series to gain a better understanding of what search engine optimization is.
In the first part of this series, we learned about how search engines operate and the specifics they look for when delivering results based on different keywords. In this installment, I will talk about on-page SEO and why it is a crucial element to solving the question on marketers’ and Web designers’ minds: How do I get a website ranked No. 1 on search engines?
On-page SEO:
On-page SEO refers to, you guessed it, everything you see on the Web page and some things you can’t. However, before we learn the specifics of on-page SEO, it is important to target your Web page toward a niche audience. Once you find your target audience, research everything you can about it and what it looks for in a website. These two aspects are crucial to the SEO process and often get overlooked. Doing your homework beforehand will give you a clear idea of what you want your website to be and what you want it to achieve.
Once you firmly understand your goals, now we can focus on optimizing your Web page. Search engine crawlers look for these characteristics when delivering relevant results:
• Valuable content
• Ease of access
• Effective user experience
• Keyword relevant
• Social media interactivity
• Responsive on mobile devices
• Meta information
If your content is not valuable or relevant to your niche target audience, then search engine crawlers will find no reason to showcase your website over another one. Search engines have gotten better at identifying if a website is genuinely made for a target audience, and not to promote yourself. If your content is unique, multimedia-rich and authentic, search engines will place more importance on your website.
Making sure that your website is easy to find, for both humans and crawlers, is of high importance as well. Your website should be easy to find, without having people click on link after link to finally find what they are looking for. This notion applies to crawlers as well, considering they are the ones doing the actual searching. The more links and unnecessary information between your website, people and crawlers, the less likely it will be ranked. Save them the trouble, will you?
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User experience, or UX for short in the industry, is vital to obtaining a happy audience. Let’s put things in perspective here. Would you rather read a manual that is text-heavy and difficult-to-read, or one with bullet points and allows you to quickly scan for information? Would you rather use a clunky app that freezes and crashes, or another app that displays your information quickly and has few glitches and bugs? I hope you answered the latter for both questions, since that is exactly what your audience will want when experiencing your website. If your website looks sharp, is easy to navigate and allows for quick information scanning, your audience will want to stay on your site and come back to it in the future.
Choosing the keywords you want your website to focus on is important for both your audience and crawlers. This is an area where previous research is important, since understanding your audience’s motives when searching for information will dictate what your website offers. Once on your website, your audience should be able to quickly identify if they are on the page they want to be on.
As for crawlers, consistent keywords that appear in your text and meta information will help them in determining the relevance of your website. If your audience searches for “Lubbock car mechanic,” and your car mechanic website fails to include that keyword in your text and meta information, then your audience will never find it. Oh, and one more thing: “Lubbock Car Mechanic” is not the same keyword as “lubbock car mechanic.” They both may take you to similar results, but capital letters and lower-case letters can sometimes throw off search engines and therefore make up different keywords.
Over the years, social media has sprung up as another area on-page SEO relies on. Including visible social media-sharing buttons is vital in helping your website and information reach your audience — and even some outside of it. If your content is worthy to be shared by people, then you will get rewarded in the search engine rankings.
The ways people view websites and information has expanded from personal computers to mobile devices, and it will continue to do so in the future. Creating responsive websites, meaning ones that scale perfectly from one platform to another, will get rewarded in the search engine rankings. An example of a responsive website is your’s truly, The Hub@TTU. You can click and drag the borders and corners of your web browser, and the content will automatically scale to the new dimensions. You will find that our website perfectly fits the dimensions of your mobile device as well. How convenient!
Last but not least, meta information is another aspect of on-page SEO, but one that sometimes you cannot see. To take a look for yourself, right click on a page and choose the page-source option and look for meta information. Here’s a list of important meta information:
• Title tags – In short, the words you see on a tab in your browser. They usually are between 50-60 characters and mirror something like this: Keyword | Brand Name
• URLs – This is the address of your website. Include keywords and strive for compactness. www.yourwebsite.com/my_first_SEO_post is better than www.yourwebsite.com/MyfIr_sT_SeoPoST123.
• Meta Descriptions: The description that appears underneath the title of your website on a search engine results page. The search engine will fill it out automatically for you; however, it is best you do it manually by yourself. Use between 150-160 characters and be keyword specific.
• Headers: Headers help make your information clearer, and following the hierarchy of H1 (Header #1, the big header) through H4 (Header #4, a much smaller header) allows for easy scanning.
This is a broad overview of on-page SEO and its importance in determining search engine rankings. For part three of this series, I will explore on-page SEO’s brother, off-page SEO and explain their relationship and relevance in website optimization.
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About Julien Demers
