But what is On-Page SEO?

On-page, SEO is a practice of optimizing every page of the website, in terms of the content of the website as well as their HTML code, in order to get high ranking in the Google searches. Since the SEO algorithms keep on changing, you need to keep up with the changing technologies and strategies of the SEO as well.

Here is the latest on-page SEO checklist for a website which you need to follow to get good results in terms of the ranking of your website:

1) Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippets or small describing elements which tells the Bot what the web page is all about. For the SEO of a page, you must include and define all the meta tags in the HTML code of the web page. These tags are not visible to the end user of the website, but to the search engine. So these are really important for the ranking of a website. The meta tags used in SEO are:

• Title tag: This is the same title tag, which appears on the browser tab, and is written in the head tag of the HTML code. The same title also appears on the SERPs. It has to be keyword-friendly, and every page should have a unique title. By default, the character length for a title is 50-60 characters (600 pixels).

• Meta Description tag: A Meta Description is the summary of your content on the web page, having a character length between 140 to 160 (920 pixels). You must write SEO-friendly and unique content for the description, having the important keywords in it.

• Meta Keywords Attribute: This attribute includes every keyword which is relevant to your content on the webpage.

• Alt tag: Alt or alternative tag is used with the images, and it is really important that you use this tag in every image on your site. The bot cannot read the images, but it can read the Alt tag. So the Alt tag helps the bot to understand the content of the image.

From the SEO point of view, the mentioned tags are the most important ones and must be included in every page of a website. There are other meta tags, including Robot Meta tag, Canonical tag, Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards), Responsive Design Meta Tag, which are used only when required.

2) Heading Tags

The Heading Tags are used in HTML for defining different sizes of the headings on a webpage, starting from H1 (the biggest) to H6 (the smallest). While using the Heading tags, you must write content-relevant headings including the appropriate keywords, as these help the search engines to analyse what your content is all about.

3) SEO-friendly URLs

A keyword-friendly URL of a webpage helps the bots as well as the humans to understand the theme of the landing webpage and improves the site’s search visibility. The maximum URL length is 512 pixels.

4) The Content

“Content is the king”, this has been repeated millions of times, but it goes only to unique and relevant content. For better SEO of your website, you must update the content in the form of blogs or articles, regularly. Never forget to add important keywords to it and maintain the proper keyword density. Since you will be updating the content regularly, the bot will get to know about it and will crawl your website faster.

5) Optimize Your Images

Optimizing the images of a website is the most important step to be taken during the process of SEO. Image optimization includes adding a caption to the image, resizing it without compromising its quality, and most importantly, using the alt tag along with it. Like the other content, the image must also be unique and relevant to the context of the web page.

6) Speed

The speed of a website is the major factor in increasing the bounce rate. Since people have got access to the faster internet, nobody wants to wait for a website to load for too long. The average load time for a website or a webpage must be optimized to 3-4 seconds, and not more than that.

7) Mobile-Friendly

According to the latest researches, people are more active on their smartphones, and it is the only device providing maximum engagement. Mobile-friendly websites rank better in the SERPs. So make sure your website is mobile friendly and easily accessible.

8) Free Reporting Platforms

Tracking the traffic on your website is a really important part of SEO. Google has provided free reporting platforms, Google Analytics and Google Console, to track the performance of the website on the Google searches. Google Analytics helps you to track the location of a user, the page on which the user has been active, as well as which type of traffic it is, i.e., referral, organic, paid (display and search), direct, social, etc.

On the other hand, Google Console helps in tracking the source of the backlinks you get, the status of Sitemaps as well as Robots.txt, the performance of the clicks, impressions, CTR, average position of the search queries, webpages. With the help of Google Search Console, you can also track the country and the device from which the traffic is coming. It can also check the errors like the 404, blocked pages by Robots.txt and shows which page is indexed and which one has been crawled.

9) XML Sitemap

The Sitemap of a website helps the crawlers to follow all the webpages of your website through their links. So from the SEO point of view, it is important to create and update the sitemap of a website as to index your website, the Search Engine must see all your webpages.

10) Robots.txt Is accurate

A part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), Robots.txt tells the web robots on how to crawl and index a particular webpage. It is created through the webmasters, and every time the search engine is about to visit your website, it will check the Robots.txt file.

11) Site Architecture

A better site architecture of a website helps the crawlers to move from one page to another quickly and make a copy of every page. Those copies of the web pages are stored in the index, and whenever the users search for something, the crawler checks it in the Index.

12) 404 Pages

The 404 appears when a user enters a wrong URL, or the website does not have a page with the same URL, it had given to the text, on which a user had clicked. Getting the 404 pages is not bad, as it does not always appear because of the fault of the website owner. But at the same time, it can be a turn off for the site visitors and can hurt the SEO of the website.

First of all, you need a great design for your 404 webpage. To prevent the visitors from clicking that back button on receiving the 404 error, you must add several informative links on the 404 page, such that the visitor does not leave the website. The reason being, if the visitors go back to the Google searches due to the occurrence of the 404 error, and click other links in the searches, it indicates Google that your content is not adding any value and if it happens repeatedly, your ranking is hurt badly.

13) SSL Plugins

Most of the people are not sure that the data they post on various websites is secure or not. It happened only a few years ago when Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal. But still, only 1% of the websites have implemented this SSL certificate on to it. The HTTPS brings extra security between the browser and the server, adding an additional layer for the security of the data like the credit or the debit card information. This helps the site visitors to trust the website, and share their personal information on it.

14) Structured Data

Like the SSL, most of the marketers are not aware of Structured Data, or we say Schema.org, and only a smaller percentage of website owners are using them. With the help of Structured Data, you can control how your website, and its other entities, must appear in the SERPs. The Structured Data helps the search engine to understand the content of your website and display search results in a specific format. You can manage this result format and show the highlights, like good reviews as the snippet, for the search results. This makes the search results look richer, and this is why these richer results are also called rich results or rich snippets. Since Structured Data helps the search engines to understand your content better, it helps with the ranking of your website.

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Lack of Well-Written Content: There is a sea of eCommerce websites on the web, and here, your content will help you make your own place. You must prepare the content after proper research on the product and highlight its main features. A well-written content may not be entirely responsible for grabbing all the traffic, but yes it definitely will make people be more attentive towards what your website is trying to sell.

Improper Keyword Research: Keyword research is one of the most crucial tasks in SEO. So not performing the same for your eCommerce business, can be a huge risk and lead you to failure. So doing proper keyword research is the prime thing to do for a good SEO ranking of your website.

Keyword Stuffing: There are a few major components of the content on the website, including the headings, meta descriptions, product descriptions, the real website content, etc. Most of the people think that more they use the keywords in those, the more the chances be that the website will be ranked higher in the SERPs. But this is completely wrong. Keywords are important, but stuffing the content with the keywords will lead to spam.

Duplicate Content: Whether it’s SEO for an eCommerce Website, or for any other website, duplicate content is never going to help you get the desired traffic. Even most of the products in a category are similar. So you need to create a distinct title as well as the description for the product, that defines the product in an attractive way. Try to write a keyword-friendly title and a keyword-friendly description for the product such that the product gets crawled higher on the Google search.

Not Using Social Media Platforms: Thanks to the Smartphones and the easily accessible internet that people spent most of their time scrolling on the various social media platforms. This habit of people has resulted in making big eCommerce companies to use the same for showcasing their products on them such that they can now reach more people with lesser efforts.

Marketing is what your eCommerce website is supposed to do, and using the various social media platforms to endorse your products and services will be an addition to your marketing strategy.

Lack of a Blog: Content is the king and what else would be the better way of getting more content onto your website than setting up a blog. The context of the blog and the articles in the blogs must be relevant to the service you are providing through your eCommerce website. The articles in it can be from your technical team or from the famous influencers, such that updating the blogs regularly will lead your website to more traffic.

Compromising the Security: The eCommerce sites hold the most sensitive data of its user, including their name, email address, address as well as the payment method and its details. So the security is the major concern you have to take notice of. If you are hosting an eCommerce website, you are bound to provide the highest of the security to data of your users.

So, you must adopt SSL security encryption, most preferably, Extended Validation SSL (EV SSL) certificate and HTTPS for your e-commerce website.

Poor Website Loading Speed: You must admit that unless it is too important, you can’t stay on a website that has a poor page loading speed. Most of the people go off the website within merely 8-10 seconds, if it does not load faster. They might wait for a while in case they really want to get the information stored on the page, or in case of an eCommerce website, there is a huge sale on it. So with a poor website load time, you cannot expect any new person to stay on the website and wait till it is loaded properly. So you must optimize your page loading speed, in order to make the shoppers stay on your website.

No Product Reviews: The user reviews are really helpful in hiking the SEO ranking. Genuine product reviews play a vital role in the success of every eCommerce website, as the reviews are the best way to ensure the authenticity of your products. The better the reviews, the more you are able to build trust among your customers. Lack of reviews may create doubts in the mind of shoppers, and there are high chances that might decide on not investing in a certain product or service on your website.

So, you must have a feedback form on your website that the buyers can fill after they punch in the successful delivery of the product, or you can send your buyers personal automated emails for the feedback.

The competition in the eCommerce industry is growing day-by-day, and there is no time to make mistakes. Even if your product is an outstanding one, you must focus on the better SEO techniques and keep yourself updated with Google’s algorithm to attain higher search engine ranking.

The post 9 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid for the Growth of Your eCommerce Website appeared first on Xornor Technologies.

While most non tech people understand the concept of web, users and traffic, they fail to understand why their newly created website is not getting enough traction? Why even after months of launch the website is struggling to garner decent user base.

It is then they hear about SEO, the medicine to end their traffic woes. Unaware of the SEO and its implications, most end up getting poor professional help and guidance. SEO is a crowded space and you need to be pretty sure that you are engaging qualified SEO professionals or agencies.

While you will get white hat and black hat SEO professionals, you should always go for white hat SEO to reap long term benefits. SEO is a free traffic and if done well, it can beat any other paid marketing.

You should keep following things in mind while hiring a SEO professional or agency because hiring a wrong one can make you pay for years given the strict algorithmic changes being done frequently to Google Search Engine:

• First understand your SEO requirements. Though both on-page and off-page SEO is equally important, you should always go for fixing on-page SEO first.
• Always check credentials of SEO professional or agency like years of experience, websites handled and the team.
• Discuss deliverables, strategy and approximate timeline. It should start with SEO audit or on-site technical SEO audit.
• If someone suggests fruitful SEO results in days, don’t hire. SEO takes months to yield good results.
• Do discuss link back strategy. If the agency or individual professional promises hundreds of link backs from quality websites for dirt cheap price, think twice. Quality links don’t come cheap.
• Remember, good and experienced SEO professional or agency would never guarantee first page SERP ranking. They will surely try to get there.
• Do discuss weekly and monthly reporting to make sure that you are abreast of changes done to your website.
• Do discuss content strategy for on-page and off-page SEO improvements.
• Discuss payment terms; fixed or pay per hour.

SEO is not one day job, so don’t expect overnight results. It’s an ongoing thing and needs careful planning, strategy and execution. Keep things mentioned above to hire a SEO expert that can take your website to next level.

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