Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential part of online visibility and your overall website success. At its core, SEO can be categorized into three main types where each one is playing a crucial role in improving the performance of a website and the ranking position in search engines. You can use a range of SEO strategies to optimize your site for an increased visibility through more traffic and drive quality users to your site. Here are three SEO tactics that can help your website and ranking. 

On-Page SEO – building a solid foundation

On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual web pages to improve their rankings. This type of SEO is all about optimizing each element on the website to simplify the process of being found by search engines.  It improves the organic traffic that comes to a website and it revolves around the content and the HTML structure of a page.

Key elements of on-page SEO include: 

• Keyword optimization: Conduct a keyword research to find out what some relevant terms in your niche are. The goal of keyword research  is to find out what potential visitors might use in a search bar when they’re looking for a product/service in your niche. After you find relevant keywords, try to put them in your content in a natural way – just like titles, headings and meta descriptions. This will help search engines understand what your website is about and what key elements are relevant. 
• Content quality: Regularly add new content to your website and make it engaging, informative and relevant for your audience. This will also help you stay on top of rankings and make users come back to your website. A great way to do this is writing blog/news posts or publishing special deals on your website. 
• Meta tags: Meta snippets act as a preview for users and they influence the click rates. Make sure you have compelling title tags and meta descriptions that reflect the content of your pages. 
• URL structure: Avoid long URLs and URLs that contain numbers. Create a clean URL that includes relevant keywords, this will improve the user experience and the crawlability of search engines. 
• Internal links: Linking from one page to another helps search engines understand the structure of your content and improves the user navigation. You can link to blog posts you’ve published, for example.

Off-Page SEO – building authority and trust

While on-page SEO focuses on optimizing your website’s individual pages, off-page SEO is focusing on factors outside your website that impact its visibility and credibility. You can think of it as maintaining public relations with other external websites. With the right strategies your bond with other websites will strengthen after time and this will help you with building up authority and appeal.

The key components of off-page SEO are: 

• Backlinks: High-quality backlinks from reputable websites are crucial for building authority. Search engines see backlinks as an indicator that your content is valuable and trustworthy.
• Social media: Sharing content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can increase your website’s visibility and drive traffic to your site. 
• Online mentions and citations: Being mentioned or cited by authoritative websites in your industry can boost your site’s credibility. Consistent information across online directories also contributes to local SEO.
• Brand mentions: Even without a link, mentions of your brand across the web contribute to your online presence. 
• Geographical relevance: Local businesses must show that they’re local so being found in local look-up pages can help customers verify your physical location. 

Technical SEO – for a great user experience

Technical SEO focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspects of website optimization, making sure that search engines can crawl, index, and understand your content right. It helps building a strong foundation and structure and it improves a website’s readability. Technical SEO is like an invisible force that keeps a website running smoothly and makes sure it is well- received by moth users and search engines. 

Key elements of technical SEO include:

• Site structure: An organized site architecture helps search engines to recognize the difference between similar pages, such as product pages, service pages, etc. 
• Site speed: Faster-loading pages contribute to a positive user experience and are favored by search engines. Optimize images, use browser caching, and leverage content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve your website’s speed.
• Mobile-friendliness: With nearly everyone browsing on their phones, there is no way around mobile-friendly websites. If your website is optimized for mobile devices, it will be improving the user experience and your website will also be favored by search engines. This will contribute to higher search rankings. 
• Crawling and indexing: Create and submit a sitemap and use a robots.txt file to tell Google how to crawl and index your site. These files will tell search engines which URLs they can crawl and more importantly, which ones can get ignored. 
• Structured data markup: Implement structured data (schema markup) to provide search engines with additional information about your content. This can improve rich snippets and improve the display of your content in search results.
• Duplicate content: Search engines aim to deliver diverse and valuable results to users, so having duplicate content can confuse their algorithms and potentially impact your site’s ranking.