EDITS.WS

Tag: link building

  • What is on-page SEO?

    In SEO, there are on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page SEO factors are aspects of your website that you can optimize for better search rankings. It’s about improving things like your technical set-up, your content, and how user-friendly your site is. In this post, we’ll explain all about on-page SEO and how it differs from off-page SEO, and we’ll talk about some on-page optimizations that can help you to rank better.

    On-page and off-page SEO: what’s the difference?

    Every SEO strategy is focused on ranking as high as possible in the search engines. To do this, we all try to design and develop a website that Google’s algorithm — and people! — will love. That’s basically what SEO is about. The factors in Google’s algorithm can be divided into two categories that will determine the ranking of your website: on-page factors and off-page factors.

    On-page SEO factors all have to do with elements on your website. For instance, things you work on to improve your E-E-A-T also fall in this category. Some of the most important on-page SEO factors are:

    • Your site set-up and technical features, site speed in particular
    • The quality of your content and use of keywords
    • How do you use additional media, such as images and videos
    • Your site structure and internal linking
    • Structured data and search appearance
    • Your URL structure
    • User experience

    Meanwhile, off-page SEO looks at what happens away from your website. Some off-page SEO factors include:

    • Relevant links from other websites leading to your site
    • Social media activity
    • Business and map listings
    • External marketing activities

    Pro tip: Find out more about on-page SEO with our front-end SEO inspector! You can use the front-end inspector tool in Yoast SEO Premium to explore the SEO data, metadata and schema output for pages on your site. It’s a great way to get to grips with your on-page SEO.

    Importance of on-page SEO

    On-page SEO consists of all the elements of SEO that you have control over. If you own a website, you can control the technical issues and the quality of your content. We believe you should be able to tackle all of these factors as they’re in your own hands. Remember: if you create an excellent website, it will start ranking.

    Focusing on on-page SEO will also increase the chance that your off-page SEO strategy will be successful. Link building with a crappy site is very tough. Nobody wants to link to poorly written articles or sites that don’t work correctly.

    How to optimize on-page SEO factors

    1. Make sure search engines can crawl and index your site

    If you’re unfamiliar with crawlability and indexing, here’s a quick explanation of what it is and what it has to do with Google. To show your page in the search results, Google must first know about that page. It has to be indexed by Google, meaning that this page has been stored in their index. And for that to be possible, you must ensure you’re not blocking Google from indexing your post or your whole site. So check if you’re not unintentionally doing that (we still see this happening!), and ensure your site is indexed.

    Although this isn’t technically a ranking factor, getting your site into the search results requires it, so we thought it should be included here.

    2. Invest time in creating quality content based on solid keyword research

    Why do you think people visit your site? Most likely because it contains the information they’re looking for. Therefore it’s essential to write excellent content that corresponds with their needs. Search engines like Google also read your text. Which site ranks highest for a specific search term is primarily based on a website’s content. That’s why your content should be informative, easy to read, and focused on the right keywords that your audience uses.

    Aside from creating quality content, you must remove or remedy low-quality pages. So-called thin content can harm your SEO. Take time to find these pages and do something with them occasionally to keep your content in good shape.

    Learn about writing high-quality content in our Ultimate guide to SEO copywriting, or take our SEO copywriting training course.

    3. Improve your site speed

    A significant on-page ranking factor is site speed. Users don’t want to wait for pages to load, so Google tends to rank fast-loading sites higher. If you’re unsure how fast (or slow) your site is, check out your Core Web Vital scores using the report in Google Search Console. This helpful tool will point out areas where your site speed can be improved so you know what to work on.

    If you’re tech-savvy, you can probably handle this on your own. If you’re unsure where to start, our Technical SEO training can help you.

    4. Get your site structure and internal linking right

    A good site structure helps Google (and users) understand your site and navigate your content. And when it comes to making that site structure, internal linking is the way to do it. Firstly, you must channel many internal links to your most important content. We call those pages cornerstone content. Secondly, you should tidy up pages that aren’t getting many (if any) internal links. Those pages are what we refer to as orphaned content. It would be best if you decided whether to improve those pages and add more internal links pointing to them or remove them altogether.

    Yoast SEO Premium has two SEO workouts to help you improve your site structure and internal linking. Using the workouts can help you to make big improvements quickly, so give them a go!

    5. Optimize your use of images and videos

    You’ll want to include images on your site to make it attractive, and maybe some videos too. Doing that wrong can harm your SEO, but doing it correctly comes with some SEO benefits.

    High-quality images are usually large files that can slow your site down, and that’s a problem. Using smaller image files and giving them descriptive names, captions, and alt tags will favor your SEO. Plus, there are additional benefits. For one, you’ll make your site more accessible, so it’s helpful for a wider audience. And for another thing, you’ll have a chance of your images ranking in the Google Image search results. Read more about these topics in our posts about image SEO and alt tags.

    Adding videos to your site is a bit more complicated than images. And ranking your videos on Google (or YouTube) comes with its own set of challenges. We’ve got a great series of posts all about video SEO, if you’d like to learn more about optimizing in this area. There’s also a dedicated Yoast Video SEO plugin, if you’re serious about getting your videos ranking.

    6. Create a persuasive search appearance

    How your site looks in the search results is vital for SEO. While the search results aren’t part of your site, the things you do to optimize your search appearance are. Therefore, we consider SEO titles, meta descriptions, and structured data part of on-page SEO.

    Optimize your SEO title and meta description, and then add structured data for results that stand out

    Optimizing the text for your search snippets is fairly straightforward. Adding structured data can be trickier. Good to know: Yoast SEO can help with all these tasks. With checks and previews to help you, getting your SEO titles and meta descriptions right couldn’t be easier. And when it comes to structured data, Yoast does all the hard work for you — all you need to do is select the content type and fill in the blanks.

    7. Make your URLs SEO-friendly

    A well-crafted URL structure helps your on-page SEO — it’s like giving your web pages a good road map. Think of it as a friendly address that guides search engines and invites users to explore your content. Creating SEO-friendly URLs makes it easier for humans and search engines to understand what your page is all about. Opt for concise and descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords, as they provide a clear signpost. A clean and organized URL structure enhances navigation, making it easier for everyone to understand your website. Don’t forget to keep it short and readable.

    8. Design an excellent user experience

    The last thing we want to mention is user experience. Simply put, users need to understand your website easily. They should be able to find what they want in a heartbeat. They should know where to click and how to navigate through your site. And your site should be fast! A beautifully designed website is nice, but you should make it your top priority to create a user-friendly website first.

    If you want to learn more about combining SEO and UX to get more people to your site, we’d advise you to look at our other articles on user experience. Or check out our all-around SEO training course.

    To conclude

    We’ve talked about the most important on-page SEO factors. First, ensure that your website works correctly and that your technical SEO is up to par. Secondly, create content that is user-centered and focused on the right keywords. Thirdly, work on the usability and speed of your site to help users and search engines around your website.

    As these factors are all a part of your site, you can work on them to ensure your on-page SEO is top-notch! That being said, do remember to also work on your off-page SEO. Although you may not have total control over these factors, you can still put some effort into creating that exposure on other sites too!

    Read more: What is off-page SEO? »

    The post What is on-page SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is link building?

    Link building is an essential aspect of SEO. It helps search engines to find and rank your pages. You can write the perfect post, but if search engines can’t follow at least one link to it, it will most likely wait forever in vain for visitors to admire its outstanding content. For Google to find your post, it needs links from other websites. The more links, the better. But, beware, the quality of links does matter! Not every link is as valuable as others. Even worse: some links could negatively affect your site. Here, we’ll explain how link building works. We’ll also guide you to more in-depth articles if you want to learn how to do it well.

    Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!

    Simply put, a link, or a hyperlink, is a connection between two pages on the internet. With a link, you can refer people to a page, post, image, or another online object. Links exist for people in the first place: with a link, you can easily “travel” from one web location to another.

    But links serve search engines too – search engine robots follow links to discover pages on the internet. This is called crawling. For a robot to find your website, you’ll need at least one link to it from another website that was crawled already. Making sure you get that first link is one of the things you need to do when you launch a brand new website.

    In the coding language HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:

    <a href=”https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/”>Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress</a>

    The first part contains the URL you’re linking to. In this case, it’s the URL of the Yoast SEO plugin page (https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/). The second part (Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress) shows the clickable text that you’d see on the page. We call this piece of text the ‘anchor text’.

    Internal and external links

    There are two kinds of links that matter for SEO: internal links and external links.

    Internal links are links on your website connecting your various pages together.

    External links, otherwise known as incoming links, are links that other people place on their websites to refer their users to your pages (or the other way around). People working in the SEO industry describe these external links as ‘backlinks’. If other websites link to your pages, you’re getting backlinks from them. On the other hand, you’re giving them backlinks if you link from your pages to theirs.

    Internal linking isn’t the same thing as link building. In this post about link building, we’re only looking at the process of getting other websites to link to your pages. Also known as getting ‘backlinks’ from other websites.

    Anchor text

    The anchor text serves two purposes: it should describe what the linked page is about and entice people to click. A link with a well-crafted anchor text has two advantages:

    • more people click on it, leading to more direct traffic, and
    • it will help search engines understand what your page is about, possibly leading to more traffic from search engines.

    Of course, you can’t control the anchor text used when others link to your site. But you can use anchor text to improve your own internal links.

    Link building refers to the marketing efforts to get links from other websites to your website. It’s seen as one of the most powerful tools to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Google’s Andrey Lipattsev even confirmed in a Q&A session that backlink is an important ranking factor.

    This makes sense when you think about it. If a page gets a lot of high-quality backlinks, it should/must be a good page. Therefore, search engines will consider it a popular or meaningful page, and they’ll rank it higher.

    It’s good to realize that not all backlinks are equal in value. Next to that, since getting links from external websites is a strong ranking factor, it creates an issue for the SEO industry. That is: websites would try shady link building techniques to get more backlinks.

    Links aren’t all equal. Some links are way more valuable than others. For instance, a link from an authoritative website, preferably topically related to yours, is worth more than a random link from a small website nobody knows.

    Let’s say, if you have a restaurant, you’d rather get a link from a restaurant review (on topic) on The Guardian website (high authority), than a link from your aunt’s horseback-riding school website. This makes choosing sites you’d love to get links from easier. But at the same time, it makes it a lot harder to get those coveted high-quality links.

    Shady techniques

    Because link building isn’t easy, lots of shady link building methods emerged in the past. People tried to game the system, for instance, by buying links from link farms. That’s why link building has got a somewhat nasty reputation.

    Consequently, Google intervened with serious penalties as a result. If a page gets lots of backlinks from websites with a questionable reputation, it can completely disappear from the search results. So you’re better off avoiding these risky link building tricks. If you play it fair and smart though, you can gain a lot from link building.

    Now we get to the million-dollar question: what should you do to get those valuable links?

    We believe in a holistic link building approach. You’ll have to create a website that people want to link to. It sounds so simple: Create high-quality, funny, original, or exceptional content people want to share. But how do you do this?

    First and foremost, find out who your audience is. Who are you trying to reach with your content? Then, think about what kind of content they need. What information are they looking for and what kind of questions do they ask? Which words do they use? And, what kind of websites do they visit?

    If you can answer these questions, it will be easier to create content that fits your audience’s needs (for instance, by using the principles of content design). Also, when you’ve created that page with valuable content for your audience, and you know which websites they visit, you’ll have a starting point for your link building activities. That is: you can start reaching out to those website owners.

    That’s what link building is, in a nutshell. It’s about reaching out to other parties and sharing your article with those that might be interested in sharing it too. That’s why it’s key to target the right niche. This help to decrease the number of people you’ll have to contact and increases your chances of actually getting a link.

    People will only link from their website to yours if it’s in their audience’s (or their own) interest. Convincing them to link will only happen if your product or content really is exceptional. Offering to let them try or use your product (if you have one) for free might help convince them. And always make sure to contact them personally, as this will lead to better results. Read all about this process in our step by step guide to link building.

    Have you got the basics about link building and want to take it a step further? Then we’d advise you to read this article with advanced link building tips by Kris Jones. You’ll learn which tools you can use to find out which sites already link to you and what you can do to get more of those. Find out everything about broken link building, reclamation link building, the so-called skyscraper technique, and more.

    Pssst… if reaching out really isn’t your thing, you can always start with some “internal link building”: fix your internal linking structure! But ideally, you should work on both internal linking and link building to improve your site’s SEO.

    The post What is link building? appeared first on Yoast.