It’s time to get SEO on page

If you have hired a mechanic to work on your car, you first give the keys to the technician. If you have hired an SEO agency to boost your online presence, you must first give your new SEO professional the login to make modifications to your website. Because? Google’s algorithm and its continuous changes indicate that the page content and structure of your website are essential to gaining market share online.

SEO boils down to on-site and off-site strategies. Surveys show that SEO experts find on-page strategies to be the most effective strategies for SEO. These on-page strategies include, but are not limited to:

• Development of new content
• Content optimizations (making sure the right keywords are in your content)
• Title tag optimizations (the tag that tells Google the main purpose of your page)
• XML sitemap and metadata optimization

The most effective offsite strategy, link building, still requires an SEO-minded onsite strategy to work. Here are some reasons why all SEO can be seen as a return to on-page and on-site optimizations:

A platform to talk to Google

Remember that content is king. Google needs to know what you stand for, what you are. That’s why all of your best content should go to your site first and then be distributed or marketed through social media, social bookmarking, content syndication services, and other content channels. This sends a clear message that you own the content and associate it with your brand. To avoid duplicate content issues, try setting up a cross-domain rel=canonical tag to let Google know that your site’s version is original.

Google wants to be able to easily crawl and understand what’s on your site. That is why the structure of your site should be mapped to the possible categories and subcategories of keywords that are important to your business. Be sure to use the correct keywords so that Google can understand what your pages are about. Cluttered or overbearing HTML code can be a hindrance to otherwise SEO friendly websites.

A base for links

There is no link building without the right content. And the more diverse and better your content, the more natural links you’ll get. If you’re trying to build white hat links, it’s going to be hard to do without the right information architecture that addresses all the potential questions your customers might have at different stages of the conversion funnel. It is essential that the link is made with a strategy that makes sense. Linking to your home page is unnatural if it takes the user to a page that doesn’t answer the question you expected it to answer. So, if you’re trying to rank for “link earnings,” make sure you have a main page about link earnings, and then child pages that address long-tail queries or keywords around the main term.

Off-page keywords are just that: keywords that aren’t on your site.

Google’s most recent algorithm update, Penguin 2.0, devalued the importance of exact match anchor text (hyperlink text with exact keyword phrases that point to your site). In fact, websites were penalized if they had too many exact match links. What does this tell us? Google cares more about the keywords found on your site than the keywords found on the sites of others that point to yours. Linking should be primarily about utility. Does the link direct the user to a relevant destination URL based on the context of the article and the hyperlink text?

With the unpredictability of Google link algorithm updates, relevant on-page content is the most sustainable strategy for SEO. External strategies put the power of those changes in the hands of others. Of course, off-site strategies are essential for community and interactive algorithm signals, which are important to Google. But those community interactions are likely to be more positive and more frequent if you have content on your page that encourages discussion, content that shows that you are a true leader in your industry. After all, to the online customer, your website is your resume.