You have signed up for a ResellerClub account and have got yourself a slick storefront in the form of the Supersite, or already have your custom storefront and have tied in with our back-end through API or WHMCS. Your business needs impetus, visibility and presence in the eyes of your potential customers and you can get that by targeting one of the biggest sources of traffic on the web – search engines. In fact, when venturing into digital marketing for your business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be one of the first facets to explore, before you try other paid forms of online advertising.
Simply put, SEO refers to techniques that increase the visibility and reach of your website by ranking it higher in organic search results. SEO can be divided into two main areas; on-page optimization which covers everything that can be done on the pages of your website to improve the website’s search rankings, and off-page optimization which covers activity that is done on other websites which can impact the ranking of your website – positively or negatively. In this first article we will cover only the on-page optimization aspects of SEO. Now that we know what SEO means (well at least somewhat), let’s start by looking at a few things that are must-knows about on-page optimization:
Keywords – The building blocks of every successful SEO effort
Keywords can be defined as a set of labels/words/phrases that define the business objective and the content of a webpage. The most relevant and hence most important keywords for your website as a whole will then be the set of keywords that appear most often across all pages of your website.
If you want to stand out when compared to your competitors, then it is vital to invest a good amount of time and resources into understanding your Target Audiences better. This will help you narrow down specific keywords that your target group is likely to search for on Google to get to your website.
Let me help you understand this better with an example. Let’s say you are a Hosting provider in India, you would start your SEO exercise by preparing a list of phrases that are relevant to your target audience. These terms should be both brand related and generic. To organize it better, you could consider breaking your terms down into category, sub-category and specifics. For example, a category could be Hosting, a sub-category could be Shared Hosting, and a specific term would be buy hosting in India. In order to rank higher in search results, it is essential to ensure that your website contains these keywords. With targeted and relevant keywords, you can increase the click through rate (CTR) of your website, reduce bounce rates and consequently increase conversions.
Now that we have identified a list of keywords for your website, you can use them in the following 5 elements of on-page optimization.
1. Page Title
48% people click on a Search Result solely based on the relevancy of the Page Title of the website as seen on Search Engine Result Page (SERP). A Page Title, very simply put, is the first thing your potential customer sees on the SERP, based on which he/she decides whether to visit your website or not. A recommended practice is to include your brand name and specific keywords in your Page Title to make it as relevant to that particular page as possible.
The Page Title must be unique for each and every page of your website, indicative of the purpose of that respective page. This simply means that if your potential customer searches for “buy reseller hosting”, then your Page Title should contain “reseller hosting” in addition to your brand name. Moreover, a click on this Search Result should take him/her to the “reseller hosting” product page as opposed to a generic landing/home page of your website.
2. Meta Descriptions:
Meta description refers to the description of your website which appears in search engine results. Meta description should contain a brief keyword-rich description of your website focusing on the areas that your business is specialized in. Meta description has a fairly large impact on the click-through rate of your website, and hence must be given serious thought. If a searcher finds it appealing he is more likely to click to find out more information. But if your Meta Description is too generic and isn’t written too well then there is a good chance that your site will simply be ignored.
If you are using Supersite 2 refer this link to find out more about adding Meta Descriptions to your Supersite 2 for better SEO. Taking our example forward, your Meta Description could read something like:
3. URL Structure
From an SEO perspective, a website’s URL structure must be meaningful and intuitive. A good practice is to ensure URL names relevant have keywords in them, not gibberish numbers, alphabets and punctuation marks. Use the syntax given below as a thumb rule for creating URLs that search engines love.
businessname.com/topic-name
Supersite 2 allows you to customize URLs for specific Landing Pages with utmost ease. Refer to the link below to find out how you can modify the landing page URLs on your Supersite to meet your SEO goals: http://manage.resellerclub.com/kb/answer/1897
4. Page Content
We cannot stress enough upon the importance of unique, high quality, and relevant content on your website. Don’t believe us? Take a look at Google’s quality guidelines to see for yourself.
It’s important to ensure that your website content is keyword-rich, as visitor time on site is directly proportional to relevancy for their search result. This simply means that visitors are much more likely to stay on a page if they can see the terms they had searched for on it. However, it’s critical you use these keywords naturally and avoid over-using keywords for the sake of SEO. If keywords are used too frequently for the sake of ranking up in SERP’s, it can appear manipulative and result in your website being demoted or even blacklisted in search results. And hey, no one wants to read content like that, anyway.
Please note: In search engine optimization (SEO) keyword density is the measurement in percentage of the number of times a particular keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page. The recommended keyword density is said to be 1 to 3 percent. Use a keyword density tool to calculate the keyword density of a webpage to avoid over usage of keywords.
Refer to the link below to know more about content customization on Supersite 2.
http://manage.resellerclub.com/kb/servlet/KBServlet/faq1106.html
5. Images and Alt Text
You can look at including relevant keywords in a natural way in your image titles and alt text. This doesn’t have a significant impact on your search rankings, but it surely helps Google find your website in image searches, thus boosting the accessibility quotient of your website. Again, rather than adding keywords to image titles and alt text only for the sake of SEO, try and improve user experience by being as accurate and descriptive as possible with your images.
While this post is by no means is an all encompassing list of principles and tactics to succeed at search engine optimization, it can definitely serve as a reference point for you to begin your SEO efforts. Take a look at our knowledgebase guidelines to learn some more about Optimizing your SuperSite for Search Engines.
We hope you found this article useful. Stay tuned for our upcoming post on off page SEO techniques where will guide you through off page SEO activities that you can focus on.
We would love to know your thoughts on SEO in the comments below!
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