Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great addition to any online marketing effort. Proper implementation can lead to amazing results, with a higher search engine ranking leading to an increase in traffic (website visitors) and sales.

Of course, the opportune place to be when someone is looking for the types of products, services, or information you offer is at the top of their search results. This is what SEO is all about.

Let’s look at the factors that affect on-page and off-page SEO and how these can impact your search engine rankings.

On-Page SEO

• Add a title tag. You will need this on every page of your website, as this will show the search engines and your visitors what the page is about. It should be 70 words or less and include the keyword or key phrase that you want to rank for.
• Write a meta description. This is not always needed and is often ignored by the search engines. However, you can use it to explain in more detail what the webpage is about. Include the keyword or phrase within this description too.
• Create sub-headings. These make your content easier to read, plus helps improve your search engine rankings. You can use them to add additional keywords and key phrases into your content. This shows the search engines that you believe them to be important to your content.
• Build internal links. This technique can be powerful and may be strong enough to rank individual pages without any external (off-page) SEO. Just put a link in your smaller articles to a longer, more authoritative piece of content. This helps the longer content to rank higher.
• Use image name and ALT tags. Give each image on your website a name that includes your chosen keyword. When indexing the page, the search engines may rank these images when people search for that particular keyword.
• Avoid over-optimizing. When creating the content for your website, it’s important not to over-optimize the content. This means that it will benefit you to sparingly use the main keyword while including related keywords and phrases. You may be able to rank highly for these other keywords as well.
• Make your website mobile-friendly. These days, most searches and social media traffic will come from mobile devices. So, it’s important that your website works properly on mobile. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, this will impact your user experience, and therefore your ranking signals, negatively.

Off-Page SEO

• You must build trust. Trust has become an important ranking factor. It shows the search engines that what you say is accurate and that visitors can trust your content. To develop trust, build high-quality backlinks from other trusted sources and ensure that your content is high quality and accurate.
• Build backlinks. Most SEO experts gain backlinks by building relationships with other websites. It’s crucial to avoid spamming your links or building them too quickly. This could result in your website becoming de-indexed, which is essentially being banned from the search engines.
• Get social signals. According to some SEO experts, getting likes and shares from social media may have an impact on your search engine rankings. So, it makes sense to create the most valuable content you can and share it with your own social media accounts, where others can like and share it too.

Now that you know what on-page and off-page factors affect your SEO efforts, you can make any necessary changes to your website, leading to a boost in rankings and sales.

Just remember that SEO takes time to work. It won’t happen overnight and may take many months for you to see the fruits of your labor. However, this effort will be worth it once you’re continuously getting targeted traffic from the search engines, with the sales that come with it!