If you’ve read our article on why you need SEO, then you’re probably taking steps to optimise your website. Now, this process can be rather overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to do everything yourself because there are just many different terms that you may not understand. This can make working your site’s SEO infinitely more difficult as you’ll need to be working with these terms constantly to improve your site.
To help you out with this, we’ve put together a list of the most important SEO on-site elements along with a brief definition that should help you when it comes to optimising your website:
Keywords
You can’t talk about SEO without talking about keywords. Keywords are terms that are added to online content to boost your website’s rankings on search engines. Now, they aren’t random and are found through the use of keyword research that takes user searches and commercial intent into consideration.
One thing that you have to be wary about when using keywords is to make sure you avoid keyword cannibalisation. This is what happens when you target one keyword and use it on many of your pages. Doing this causes your pages to compete with each other, which means that they won’t rank as well as they should.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions play an important role when it comes to SEO. The Meta description is an attribute within your Meta tags that are specifically made to describe your page. This is that snippet that users see when they search for a specific term.
Failing to add a Meta description will cause search engines to pull an excerpt from the body of the page instead, which could negatively affect your click-through rate. For the best results, you’ll want to make sure that you’re using important keywords that show up on the page in your Meta descriptions. Similarly, remember to keep the descriptions at around 135-160 characters long, as search engines automatically cut off those that are longer than that.
Links
Links are the backbone of any on-site SEO, as your use of links can make or break your search engine rankings. When it comes to these, there are three important types that you need to know about when it comes to SEO: inbound, outbound, and internal. Take note of the following details:
- Internal Links: These are links that direct users to other pages on your website and help them and search engines find content. One strategy you can apply using internal links is to add a high-authority link on one of your pages to bump up its search engine rankings.
- Inbound Links: These are links from other websites that link to your website. Websites that receive many inbound links tend to rank higher on search engines as they are recognised to be an authority on a specific subject. Now, it’s important to note that you can’t just make a bunch of websites to link back to yours as search engines also consider the quality of the inbound link. Inbound links from sites that are considered to be high authority sites will make your site rank better, as compared to sites that are of poor quality.
- Outbound Links: These are links from your site that link out to other websites. Now, you may be wondering how linking to other sites helps your website. What you need to understand is that linking to sites that are considered to be an authority on a certain subject will help your site rank better on search engines.
Conclusion
We hope this information proves to be useful when it comes to helping you optimise your site. While SEO may seem overwhelming in the beginning, it won’t be long until you get the hang of it. Feel free to refer back to this article if you ever need a quick refresher on these terms, and consult with SEO experts to help guide your process!
The SEO Room has helped many clients transform and maximise their online platforms by improving their search ranking. If you’re looking for the best SEO company in Perth to help you achieve your business goals, get in touch with us today to learn more about our services!
