Using SEO Best-Practices to Improve Your Online Presence

In order to have consistent results in attracting visitors, you have to constantly optimize your website. Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is one of the best methods to maintain a healthy inflow of visitors and generate leads. There are a lot of tools that already give you a solid foundation for effective SEO. For example, many websites are built with WordPress, which has been developed and maintained over the years. WordPress also has a big library of plug-ins and tools that can be built into your website to increase incoming traffic.

SEO in general can be split into two major categories:

• on-page optimization
• off-page optimization

On-page Optimization

On-page optimization represents everything you can do directly on your website. It is targeted towards algorithms, e.g. crawlers of search engines (like Google, Bing). Using the following optimizations, your website can be identified and categorized accurately by the crawlers:

• Titles, descriptions and meta tags
• Keyword placement
• URL structures
• Improved website speed
• XML sitemap
• Website responsiveness, including mobile version

These are regarded as the essential on-page optimizations any website should undergo. Search engines will correctly display your content to the desired target audience and will rank your website higher.

Further, creating anchor pages is also a great SEO technique. Anchor pages contain content with extensive description on one of the main products or topics in your niche. For example, if you offer courses on design, one of the anchor pages can cover the use of Adobe Photoshop or any other tools used in the domain.

This represents relevant and highly valuable content to potential visitors and search engines will rank them as authoritative and push them up the ranks of the search results. Usually anchor pages cover the topic in detail, have a clear structure and are well written. In order to extract maximum value out of anchor pages, try to link them whenever possible — on your homepage, blog posts. Linking internally between pages of the same website is also regarded as important in your SEO efforts.

Off-page Optimization

Off-page optimization is all about generating links from other sources than your website. This includes SEO activities beyond your website, like social media accounts, guest blogging or any other activity that will link back to your website.

You should post relevant articles with quality content, guest posts and press releases on other websites or other web channels. This will widen the sources of your traffic and will be a sign to search engines that your website is highly relevant.