The importance of SEO on your website starts with understanding how it works and what search engine Optimization or SEO means. The main goal of SEO is that it makes life easier for search engines to find your website. And if your business relies on your website, then you need to ensure that you develop and maintain a website that is well-coded and structured with all the data needed to give your business an advantage over competitors.
On a technical side, SEO involves the elements of the website that include the page titles, headings, keywords, meta descriptions, links, website hierarchy, and a lot more. Search engine optimisation uses all the elements of the website. The elements fall under two main areas, which are off-page SEO and on-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO
You should first know about off-page SEO. It involves all the elements that can affect the website’s ranking. These are elements that owners of the website can’t control, such as social sharing (e.g. facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many others), inbound links, domain authority, and a lot more. On-page SEO are the elements that directly affect the website’s ranking, and the owner has full control of them. Some of the examples include pages, meta descriptions, and blog posts.
When using WordPress, off-page SEO is irrelevant. There’s nothing that you can do about it. On the other hand, you have full control of the on-page SEO on the platform. By using the best practices for search engine optimisation, your website will rank up and able to reach page one of the search engine results.
Website Data and Structure
The first thing that you need to consider for your on-page search engine optimisation is the main elements of the website that are not regularly edited. These are known as set it and forget it items.
Site Name and Tagline
One of the things that you need to edit is the website name. When using WordPress, you go to the Settings and then General of the dashboard. There you will find the field for Website Title. If it is a company website, then input the name of the company. If you are a freelancer, you can opt to use your full name. It is not recommended to use keywords in the site name because it will not make any sense.
The next step is to enter the tagline of the website. The tagline is a short description of what makes the website unique from the rest. You should think of a phrase that best describes what you have to offer.
It is in the tagline field where you can use the SEO tricks that you know. You should include keywords that are relevant to your business. The use of the keywords must come out as natural i.e: the description makes sense when read by the visitors of the website.
