As a beginner SEO professional, knowing what counts for page ranking in search engines is essential.
There are several factors to consider when optimizing a web page, they can be described as on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages of a website for higher ranking while Off-page SEO is focused on earning links to a website from external websites to increase the domain authority of the website.
Both on-page and off-page SEO is important. For instance, domain authority (DA) is the relevance of a website for a subject area or industry, and this has a direct impact on its ranking in search engines. When you earn links from other sites to your site, your DA score increases.
Similarly, the quality of the content on a website, how one links to another, keywords usage, page speed, meta tags, and other on-page factors make it easier for search engines to find relevant content from your site.
So when optimizing a website for higher ranking in search engines, it is important to consider the following among other things:
- Links
- Keyword/s
- Meta Tags; Titles & Description
1. Links
Three types of links are essential for SEO: backlinks (inbound links), internal links, and external links (outbound links).
Backlinks
Backlinks are links coming to your site from other websites. It is the highest page ranking factor because when other sites link back to your site, search engines believe that your site provides useful content so it ranks your site higher.
You can earn links from other websites by growing your brand’s reputation through engaging content, strategic guest blogging, listing in online directories, social media activity, and more. You can also spy on a competitor’s backlinks and replicate whatever they do.
Internal Links
Internal links are links used to give search engines information about the structure of a website. The more links you give to a webpage on your website, the more valuable search engines see that page for ranking. Internal linking also helps web crawlers to find and index pages on your website easily.
External Links
The role external links play is that it helps the web to work faster as crawlers don’t “get stuck” on your site while navigating the web. Although this plays a little role for your site SEO, Yoast SEO advises that you place at least one external link on a page for the general good of the web.
When linking to external sites, focus on linking to authority websites in a specific industry because it gives your content some credibility, and contributes to the user experience, which is another page ranking factor.
2. Keywords
Target specific keywords or keyphrases when building content for SEO. The standard is that there should be at least one focus keyword around which the content of a page is built. You can use SEO keyword research tools to research and analyze keywords before you decide on the most suitable one.
Websites are ranked based on organic keywords, so the number of such keywords that your website is ranked for the better for SEO. See the domain overview for Moz.com on Ubersuggest below for example:
Each organic keyword has its search volume, a metric that signifies how many people are searching for the keyword in a month. It is important to build content around popular search terms to record high monthly organic traffic for your website.
Another important keyword factor to consider is keyword density, which is based on the number of times a keyword appears on a page. The ideal keyword density on a webpage is between 1–2%.
3. Meta Tags, Titles & Description
Meta tags are snippets of texts that are used to tell search engines what a web page is all about. They don’t appear on the web page but they are in the page source code. They appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), web browsers, and social networks.
If you are using Yoast SEO plugin or similar tools on your website, you will see a section on each page where you are to input your SEO title (≤ 60 characters), the meta description (≤ 160 characters), and focus keyword(s), See the example below from WPBeginner:
Both the SEO title and meta description should contain the focus keyword. From the example above, it is obvious that the keyword/keyphrase is “best coffee shops in New York City.”
Apart from meta tags, another important on-page SEO ranking factor is image alt tags, which provide a text alternative to search engines for your images. It is advisable to use the focus keyword at least once in the alt tags of any of the images posted on a page.
Conclusion
There are many other things you can do to make your page rank top in search engines, but you will learn them with practice. However, if you implement the suggestions above, you will notice a significant increase in the ranking of your websites in search engines. But remember, SEO takes time to work, so be patient!
