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A very important part of getting traffic to your website is ranking on search engines like Google and Bing for keywords that are relevant to your business. To rank on search engines, website owners need to make a few changes to their website to ensure that it conforms with search engine optimization (SEO) practices.
When onsite optimization is done properly it tells the search engines what the page/website is about and what keywords to show the website for. While there are many changes that can be made on a single website, I will only go over the 3 most important changes (in my opinion). The three most important things for onsite optimization are title tags, url structure, and page content.
Title Tags
Title tags are one of the most important things to properly optimize for on site SEO. Title tags are a small snippet of code on the website that acts as the title for the entire page. This title tag will not show up on the page when someone is reading it but is usually shown in the tab or top of your web browser. The title tag is also used as the title that shows up on a Google search page; the title tag is the blue link of each result.
The easiest way to edit these title tags is to download a WordPress plugin (assuming that your site is built on WordPress). There are many plugins designed to help you optimize your pages but the one that I would recommend is Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. This plugin will allow you to edit the title tag for each page and will show you what your link will look like on a Google results page.
Best practice for title tags is to use your keyword in a phrase that describes what the page is about. Don’t stuff the title tag with only keywords, use a phrase or very short sentence that describes what the page is about while using your keyword in that phrase.
URL Structure
The url structure is also very important for SEO because search engines use that to determine what the page is about. In WordPress, you are able to change the url (aka: permalink) for any page or post with the edit button beneath the title on the post/page editing page.
Best practice for url structure is the same as the title tag. Use a very short sentence or phrase with your keyword in it which describes what your page is about.
Page Content
Page content is very important because search engines can not see a website or page they change only read code and words. Search engines put a large importance on content to determine what the page is about.
Best practice for page content is to write quality content about your topic/keyword which would be interesting for readers. Ensure that you have a minimum of 250 – 300 words on each page and that you use your keyword 1 – 3 times. Do not add extra instances of your keyword beyond what is necessary, this can actually hurt your SEO if the search engines determine that you are using too much.
Conclusion
If any website owner will optimize the title tags, the url structures, and page content on their website, that will put them in a very good position to begin ranking for their keywords.