On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) is the practice of optimising web pages content in order to rank higher on search engines like Google. Common on-page SEO tactics include, but are not limited to, page title, metadata and content optimisation, internal links and URL structures.

On-page SEO is very important for your website to boost ranking on Google. According to moz.com “The way your page is optimised can have a huge impact on its ability to rank”.

At MobiWeb, when we tackle on-page SEO, we focus on three essential factors:

1. Technical factors including the quality of your website code, making sure you are not blocking crawlers from indexing your website. And your web pages load as fast as possible.
2. High-quality content that is relevant, interesting and engaging. Every content asset on your website should be useful and answers the users search queries.
3. Improve user experience by making it easy for your target audience to understand your website and how to use it. Your website’s visitors should always know where to click and how to navigate through your different web pages.

Off-page SEO (also known as off-site SEO) simply refers to all of the actions that you do away from your website to improve its search engine rankings.

Backlinks are a major part of off-page SEO, and that is because of PageRank (PR) which is, according to Wikipedia, is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. This algorithm looks at the number and quality of any backlinks pointing to your website to determine how important and popular or trustworthy your site is.

Even though some SEO consultants and experts see PageRank algorithm as an outdated concept that has no place in today’s SEO, but Google confirmed that it’s still a ranking factor but it is not the only one used by Google.

Other important off-page factors besides backlinks are, NAP citation, brand mentions (linked and unlinked), Google My Business (a free business profile from Google), reviews, and social signals which, according to Google, are not a direct ranking factor because they are easy to get manipulated, but genuine social media shares and posts have a positive influence on rankings.

• First, it keeps your website fresh with new content published on regular bases.
• Second, people will spend more time on your website resulting in a higher dwell time.
• It also gives you the chance to target and optimise your content for long-tail keywords which are extremely important for any SEO campaign.
• Plus, with blogging, you can create more useful and natural internal links and using the anchor text to tell Google what the page you are linking to is all about.
• And one last important reason why blogging helps SEO is that publishing high-quality blog posts will give other websites and bloggers more reasons to link to your site which means more backlinks and increased authority.

Generally speaking, white hat SEO is a set of practices and techniques that work together to improve your search engine rankings while following Google’s webmaster guidelines and improving the user experience.

On the other hand, black hat SEO is everything that goes against the search engines guidelines in order to get a website ranked in a very short time. Black hat SEO tactics are unethical and breach Google’s guidelines which will ultimately lead to websites, applying black hat SEO, being penalised and banned by Google.

Maintaining white hat SEO will definitely build trust with search engines over time which will lead to more positive and rewarding SEO results. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, there are a few basic, and easy to understand, principles SEOs should follow when optimising a website including, but are not limited to:

1. As a webmaster, always make your web pages for users, not just for search engines.
2. Make sure that you don’t deceive your users, and avoid misleading content tactics such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc.
3. Avoid any tricks whatsoever to improve your rankings. Everything you do with your website should be justified and thought about before being done. Always ask yourself this simple question: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
4. Finally think about what would make your website useful, unique and valuable for your target audience.

Following these white hat SEO basic principles, you will see better results and better rankings than those who risk being penalised and permanently banned using deceptive and unethical tactics.

Please contact us to find out how we can help you develop a winning SEO content strategy that works for your business.

Web crawlers called “Googlebots” (bots for short) crawl through billions of web pages and organise it in Google’s index of the web. Once Google finds your web page, Google renders the page and analyses its content to decide where and how it should appear in search results.

“The better Google understands your website and its content, the better they match it to users looking for your products and services”

Now to improve your website crawling, you need to do the following:

1. Make sure that Googlebots can reach your web pages and that they look correct so that Google can easily understand your website’s content.
2. Always inform Google when you create a new page or update an existing one.
3. When you request Google to crawl only one page on your website, make sure it is your home page since it is the most important page of your site.

After your web pages are discovered by Googlebots, Google then analyses your page and tries to understand what it is all about. This process is called indexing. Your web page information is stored in the Google index which is a huge database of all the URLs that Googlebots have crawled.

To improve your website indexing you need to follow these steps:

1. Optimise your page titles
2. Optimise header tags such as (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
3. Create useful and quality content especially text over images and videos, even though Google can understand images and videos, but not as well as it can understand text.

Finally, when some user enter a search query, Google tries to display the most relevant answer from its index, after all, when someone searches through Google, they are actually searching the Google index, not the whole Internet, and Google uses many different algorithms to determine the best answers to the search query.

Google’s algorithms consider hundreds of factors to decide which page best matches the search query including, but are not limited to, keywords, SEO titles, and content assets.

To improve your ranking on Google you need to adopt a solid SEO strategy to help rank higher on Google and reach more people and win organic search traffic.