5 Technical On-page SEO Hacks to Increase Organic Traffic
The SEO landscape is a constantly evolving field, however, at its core, it is still essentially all about improving organic traffic to generate more leads and sales. It is easy to fall into the trap of spending more time increasing the number and quality of backlinks and in turn neglecting improvements to the technical aspects of a website. However, by making particular on-page SEO changes to your website you are positioning yourself in a far superior position to acquire organic traffic.
This article will detail four beneficial technical SEO hacks that can help you gain more inbound organic traffic.
Leverage Internal Links for Better On-page SEO
One of the best on-page SEO tactics to use still is internal linking. Essentially an internal link connects one page of a site to a different page on the same site. When done correctly internal linking will help pass link juice much more efficiently across the inner pages of a website.
How can you improve internal linking?
- Create lots of authoritative, actionable, and high-quality content. Having more content available will allow you to easily create a lot of internal links.
- Don’t always link to the homepage. Instead, link out to deeper pages that otherwise have fewer links. The more internal links you have to your important pages, the better chances you will have to get them ranked higher up in the search results.
- Follow Wikipedia if you are looking for an inspiration for relevant internal links. Contextual internal linking is far better than linking done at the bottom of the content.
- Use relevant, natural, and do-follow links. Unnatural links that are not beneficial to the users but created for the sole purpose of internal linking will have a reduced CTR and time on page thereby reducing the overall importance of the website.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Web Crawling
Google has now moved to a mobile-first index. When carrying out a technical site audit, it is important to review whether Google Smartphone crawler is able to properly index the contents of the site.
How do you get a mobile-friendly site?
- Perform a mobile-friendly test and use the “Fetch as Google” option from Google to check for any issues.
- Look at the mobile usability report under the search console to check any mobile usability issues detected over time.
- Use Tools like Screaming Frog to simulate mobile bot search behavior and make sure that the mobile pages are rendered properly.
- Conduct a log analysis and block spam bots so as to allow easy access to search engine crawlers.
Use HTML Tables for Direct Answer Queries
Google likes to give direct answers to the searchers. If your web pages provide direct answers to the commonly searched user questions related to your niche then you have an excellent chance of diverting good traffic from the direct answer box results returned by Google.
In order to make use of this, you need to begin by identifying the question-based search queries than by preparing answers in a tabular form by making use of HTML tables and structured data. This will make it easier for Google to understand the content of the page and display it directly in the search results.
Increase the Word Count of Blog Pages to 2500-3000 Words
If your objective is to rank for an informative search query like “how to optimize for SEO”, then you will need to have at least 2500 words of content on your page.
Snapagency did a survey and discovered that blog posts with a word count of 2500 words or more received the maximum number of social shares. Thus, the best blog post length that you should always aim for is 2500 words.
When increasing your blog post word count do not dilute the quality with irrelevant or repetitive information. Keep your content informative and always add value so that your website visitor stays with the article and reads the whole post!
Regularly Update Your Sitemap for On-site SEO
A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your website specifically to inform Google and other search engines about the organization of your website content. Search engine web crawlers will read this file to more intelligently crawl your website. It is therefore important that whenever you add a new blog post or a new page that you also then update your sitemap XML file properly so Google can fully index your website accurately.
Of course there are many other On-page SEO hacks that will improve your rankings, however, these five are often overlooked and when used correctly can be highly effective. Having strong On-page SEO is crucial to any SEO campaign; it essentially acts as the foundation to then build on with link building (Off-page). In summary, the more your On-page SEO is optimized the more effective your link building campaign and overall SEO performance will be.
About the Author
Jamie Fitzhenry is the founder of Grizzly, a digital agency based in Bristol, UK.