Website SEO Optimization – Enhance Your Online Visibility  

Website SEO optimization is critical for elevating your rank and improving your visibility. Having a website alone doesn’t mean it’s optimized. What must you do to create an SEO-friendly site?

Website SEO optimization is the tactics companies utilize to help their websites rank higher on search engines. Optimization involves technical SEO, off-page and on-page SEO, link building, content optimization, and keyword research. SEO tools and assistance through SEO experts can help businesses spearhead their website optimization efforts, which will increase their leads and sales.

This guide to website SEO optimization will present clear steps to rank higher. We’ll also recommend SEO tools to add to your kit.

What Is an SEO-Optimized Website?

First, let’s expand upon the definition of SEO optimization for websites.

An SEO-optimized website gets higher Google rankings. SEO refers to the algorithmically-pleasing strategies companies employ to land on the first page of the SERPS or achieve the top spot.

Here’s a quick checklist highlighting the characteristics of an SEO-optimized website. We’ll expand on many of these throughout the guide.

• Page structures, including headers, page titles, subheads, and footers
• Optimized images
• High-quality content
• Fast loading speed
• URL formatting
• Page titles and descriptions
• Technical SEO

With roughly 68 percent of people’s online experiences starting with opening a search engine according to Ahrefs, you must optimize your site for SEO if you hope to land on an internet user’s radar.

Reputation 911 reports that a whopping 91.5 percent of Google’s search traffic is concentrated on the first page. Merely 4.8 percent of the traffic is directed towards the second page, with an additional 1.1 percent reaching the third page.

This tells us that your site might as well not exist if it doesn’t rank on the first page. No one will see it.

On-Page Optimization Techniques for Website SEO

Bearing in mind the importance of website SEO optimization, we’ll now review some on-page methods for enhancing your SEO standing.

Keyword Research

Keyword research puts your finger on the pulse of what your target audience is searching for. Your website will appear at top of the page (or close to it) by incorporating the keywords your audience cares about.

These keywords should go into your website content, including page titles, headers, and published blog content. Moderation is important. Sprinkling keywords across copy can positively influence your rank, while keyword stuffing will hurt it.

You must also naturally use keywords. The days of robotically inserting keywords into disjointed sentences are graciously over. Your website could get left behind if you use this outdated tactic.  

URL Optimization

Website SEO optimization includes all elements of your site, even the URL. Google uses Googlebots–and other search engines their own brand of crawlers–to gain context from the website. A crawler can more easily achieve this task with an optimized URL.

How do you optimize your URLs? Here are some best practices.

• Create standardized rules for your URL names. For example, if you use hyphens or underscores to separate the words in a URL, do it consistently across all the pages on your website. Hyphens are preferable between the two.
• Reduce instances of stopped words like “an,” “a,” “but,” and “or.” These words aren’t as egregious as some SEO marketers make them out to be but can still hurt your SEO rank more than help it.
• Don’t cram keywords into a URL and make it unnecessarily long.
• On a related note, reduce the number of words in a URL so it’s as easily understood as possible.
• Use lowercase text in a URL.

Image Optimization

Images break up paragraphs of copy, drive home concepts illustrated in your writing, and increase website viewership. Search Engine Journal reports that websites can experience a 94 percent influx in views by adding videos and/or images.

However, no images are better than badly optimized images from an SEO standpoint. Here are some pointers for optimizing the images across your site.

• Reduce image size throughout your website improve the site loading speed.
• Optimize your images for mobile, which is another great reason to compress them.
• Add image descriptions and names, incorporating your targeted keywords.
• Write an alt text description of what the image shows. For example, if you uploaded an image of a bat, the alt text might read, “Bat with its eyes closed and wings folded hanging upside down on a tree sleeping.”
• Upload images in PNG or JPG formats only.

Website Content Optimization

The last on-site strategy for website SEO optimization is optimizing your website content.

You can do that by incorporating relevant keywords, providing valuable information to users, and ensuring the content is engaging and user-friendly.

Let’s jump right in:

How to Optimize Website Content for SEO

Write High-Quality Content

An SEO-optimized website must have high-quality content that satisfies user intent and provides engaging, valuable information.

For example, a customer switching from a furnace to a ductless mini-split system will have a lot of questions. Producing a series of beginner’s guides on mini splits will provide the answers they seek.

Add Internal Links

Link building is a major component of an SEO-optimized website. You can begin the process by adding internal links to related blog content.

Using the example from above, you can add links to other mini-split content on your site and articles about furnaces. You only need a few links per piece of content to ensure link equity.

Internal linking will also develop a hierarchical link structure that may assist Googlebots and website crawlers when combing your site. 

Use Content Clustering

Content clustering is an SEO strategy involving grouping like pieces of content together. You’ve already found related content threads through your internal linking strategy, so piecing them together into a cluster is the next natural step.

Content clusters can elevate your website SEO into an authoritative role. When search engines deduce that your site is trustworthy, your rank will go up. Other benefits of content clustering are easier website crawling and an improved user experience.

Structure Your Content

Content structuring makes your content easier to read. Formatted headers are a must, with the title using an H1 tag, subheads an H2 tag, and smaller subheads with H3 and H4 tags, etc. You can look at this blog post to see formatted headers in action.

Bolding important points and breaking down lists into bullets are other great ways to structure your content. Watch your paragraph length also. SEO resource Yoast recommends that paragraphs are at least two sentences long.

Use Images and Visuals

We underscored the importance of visuals in content earlier. Remember to add alt tags and file names to each image, ideally incorporating the keyword if it fits.

You’ll recall that we recommended compressing images, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the images look low-quality. They’re just a smaller file size.

Add captions to your images, as this increases their accessibility and in turn can help your SEO rank.

Keep the Content Fresh

Many blogs produce evergreen content that doesn’t need updating, but if you write about a rapidly evolving topic, you may sometimes have to go back and spruce up the article.

Article rewrites or updates can rejuvenate your SEO content optimization, and they don’t require as much time or effort as producing new content.

Off-Page and Link-Building Strategies for Website SEO

Now that we’ve thoroughly covered on-page SEO, let’s switch gears and discuss off-page SEO, including link-building strategies to incorporate into your website SEO optimization.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks aren’t the same as the internal links you’ve generated with your content SEO strategy. They’re links from outside your site that tie to a web directory, webpage, or website. Backlinks are of varying quality, but your company’s site should chase the higher-quality ones.

Quality backlinks are relevant to the context of your page and come from reputable sources. They’re also used naturally. High-quality backlinks will elevate your site the soonest, while medium-quality links are okay but won’t drive results as much.

So try to make it your SEO routine to check and monitor backlinks to your website regularly. Likely, it’s not that hard with the right backlink tool. Analyze referring domains and their topics, check anchor texts and link status, etc., because this can impact your backlink profile health.

You must avoid using low-quality backlinks, as they’re perceived by Google and other search engines as spammy and will hurt your rank. 

Create Sharable Content

It’s tough to predict what will go viral, but if you always aspire to create engaging content, you can at least ensure a good share rate. Engaging content varies by industry, niche, and audience but usually informs, educates, and/or entertains an audience.

Build Your Brand

Strengthening your brand is another off-page website SEO optimization strategy to add to your playbook. As you become a brand that more people and companies wish to associate with, you’ll notice several benefits.

You’ll begin generating more natural backlinks as more parties are interested in working with you. Further, your brand visibility will increase, which could lead to a boost in your SEO ranking.

The Importance of Technical SEO

We can’t discuss website SEO optimization without mentioning technical SEO. This on-page SEO tactic involves optimizing elements of your server and website for more efficient indexing and engine crawls.

Technical SEO has many benefits. You can implement the structured data you created, increase your mobile optimization, and improve website loading speed. These collective factors can boost your SEO ranking.

In our article on technical SEO strategies, we recommended these tactics:

• Add internal links to orphan pages or those with no links.
• Check all your links to ensure they’re working and fix any that are broken.
• Search for duplicate content and consolidate or remove it to lower the risk of cannibalizing your content.
• Stop writing more than one piece of content targeting the same keyword, as this also contributes to content cannibalization.

SEO Tools for Website Optimization

If you’re searching for new SEO tools to add to your kit, the following options can accelerate website SEO optimization.

Semrush

The Semrush platform will do more of your most pressing online marketing tasks, including social media marketing, PPC, competitor research, content marketing, and SEO.

Semrush offers keyword research tools, such as keyword overviews, organic research, keyword gaps, and keyword managers. Sharpen your on-page SEO with an internal site audit and use backlink analysis tools to determine where your site needs more backlinks.

You can also sample Semrush’s content marketing, rank tracking, competitor SEO, content optimization, and market analysis tools.

Google Search Console

The next to last search engine and the one that most marketers want to rank high on is Google. Google Search Console includes reports and tools to help you better understand and optimize your Google rank.

Search analytics study your content, and you can send URLs or sitemaps for small crawls and optimize based on the results. The URL inspection tool sheds light on how Google indexes and crawls websites.

Surfer SEO

Surfero SEO is a website SEO optimization tool for keyword research and content. Research keywords or perform a keyword audit on existing content to see how to better use more targeted keywords.

You can insert any existing content into Surfer and receive suggestions on optimizing it with subheads, paragraph counts, images, and keywords. You can also write content within this platform.

PageSpeed Insights

A fast loading speed remains one of the benchmarks of good SEO, but how do you know how fast your website truly is? A resource like PageSpeed Insights will tell you. Simply input your URL and wait to get information on how fast it loads and how to improve its speed.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers a suite of tools for better SEO. You can dig deep into what your competitors are doing, including which keywords they target and the backlinks they use. You can also run site audits, research content ideas, and track your rank.

SEO Website Optimization Services – What We Can Do For You

Website SEO optimization is a must for improving your rank in the SERPS, but it can involve a lot of complicated, technical processes. The pros at Mediaboom will work closely with you to cement your SEO goals, identify gaps in your strategy, and help you overcome them so you can increase your visibility.

Contact us today to learn more or hire us for your SEO needs.