How to Perform On-Page Optimization?
On-page optimization encompasses all technical and content components of your website visible to both visitors and search engine bots. To achieve maximum performance in this area, your site’s infrastructure must comply with SEO standards. Technical infrastructure, user experience, and content quality are interconnected elements.
Indexing
Your website being indexed by search engines is one of the fundamental building blocks of the SEO process. Although paid and free pinging services are available for indexing, the healthiest method is natural indexing. You can speed up the indexing of your pages using the “URL Inspection” feature through Google’s Search Console tool. If you are producing content on a weekly basis, you can use this feature for a period to ensure Google bots visit your site. As long as you don’t experience server-based issues and consistently input content, your pages will be indexed automatically.
In the past, tag usage had a significant impact on SEO. Today, excessive tag usage can harm your site. Therefore, try to use at most 2-3 tags per content. Properly used tags increase your index count, boosting your visibility in search engines. If your site has 404 error pages, identifying them and reporting them to search engines is a critical step. Broken pages both lower your site authority and cause potential visitor loss.
Robots.txt
For search engine bots to crawl your site correctly and quickly, a robots.txt file must be created. Through this file, you can specify which pages you want indexed and which ones you want to block from crawling. To check the existence of your robots.txt file, simply type yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. The presence of this file is an important signal indicating that your site is search engine friendly.
Domain
A domain address is the digital identity of your website and brand. Especially if you are planning a keyword-focused SEO campaign, domain selection provides a significant advantage. For example, if you are targeting the first page for keywords like “Alacati hotel” or “Alacati hotels,” a domain like alacatihotels.com gives you a serious starting advantage. Search engines prefer short and memorable domain addresses. Additionally, securing your site with an SSL certificate increases your reputation with search engines. The importance ranking of domain extensions in the Turkish market is as follows:
- .com (Has the highest priority globally)
- .com.tr (The most prestigious extension for the Turkish market)
- .gen.tr (Valuable due to being a TR extension)
- .net
- .org
- Other TR extensions
- Other extensions
Domain Age
The history of the site where SEO work will be performed directly affects the efficiency of the optimization process. Search engines place more trust in sites that have been active for a long time and consistently produce content. It is recommended that a site planned for SEO work has been actively publishing for at least 6 months. Conducting aggressive SEO efforts on a newly launched site may cause you to get caught in spam filters.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a critical tool that enables search engine bots to easily discover all pages and recent updates on your site. Ideally, your sitemap should have an auto-update feature. If automatic updating is not available, don’t forget to manually update it each time you add new content. Creating sitemaps separated by category, content type, or date increases crawl efficiency.
Canonical URL
Having the same or similar content on multiple URLs is considered duplicate content by search engines and negatively impacts your site. To resolve this issue, you can use the Canonical URL tag to inform search engines which page is the original content. Also known as Rel Canonical, this tag prevents content and URL conflicts, protecting your site’s SEO performance.
Breadcrumbs (Navigation Path)
It is an indispensable navigation element especially for e-commerce platforms and multi-category websites. Breadcrumbs allow visitors to easily track their position on your site while also helping search engine bots better understand your site structure. This feature, which improves user experience, also makes a positive indirect contribution to your SEO performance.
Example: Home > Real Estate > Residential > For Sale > Residence
Broken Link Connections
Links directed to your site from other websites are considered a type of reference by search engines. While quality reference links positively affect your ranking, broken or harmful links can seriously damage your site. Therefore, you should regularly examine all backlinks pointing to your site and identify and disavow harmful ones through the “Links to Your Site” section in the Google Search Console panel.
Mobile Compatibility
With the rapid increase in smartphone usage worldwide, search engines have begun prioritizing mobile-friendly sites. Google’s mobile-first indexing approach is the clearest indication of this change. Sites that do not display properly on mobile devices experience a decline in search results. A website with responsive design that adapts to all screen sizes is an absolute necessity today.
Page Speed
Page loading speed has increasingly growing importance in SEO efforts. Slow-loading sites cause visitors to leave the page quickly, resulting in a higher bounce rate. Over time, this can turn into ranking loss. With the Core Web Vitals update, page speed is now evaluated as a direct ranking factor. Before starting SEO efforts, you must test your page speed and make necessary improvements.
Design
Website design is one of the factors that directly affects SEO success. Your site must be coded in compliance with modern web standards. Search engines prefer user-focused designs created with current technologies. Old and unnecessary code fragments negatively affect your site’s performance, so keep your codebase up to date.
It is important that tables, schemas, and visual effects are coded with CSS rather than JavaScript. Search engine bots cannot always correctly perceive content created with JavaScript. Therefore, critical design elements should preferably be coded with CSS. Also, check your site’s compliance with W3C standards to ensure it works properly across different browsers.
Internal Links
Internal linking between pages on your website both improves user navigation experience and enables search engine bots to crawl your site better. For medium-sized sites, using 60-120 internal links is recommended. For large-scale sites like e-commerce, news portals, and major blogs, this number can be much higher. What matters is that internal links are placed in a meaningful way that adds value to the user.
H Tags (Heading Tags)
Heading tags are one of the most powerful tools in SEO optimization. These tags, listed as H1, H2, H3, H4, create the hierarchical structure of your page. H tags must be used in the correct order on every page. The main heading should always start with H1, and subheadings should follow as H2, H3. Creating a regular and meaningful heading structure without breaking this hierarchy is of great importance for both users and search engines.
Title (Page Title)
The page title is the most important element that makes users click on your site in search results. You should create an attention-grabbing title that summarizes your content and includes high search volume keywords. Putting yourself in the shoes of a searching user and answering the question “What words would I use if I were searching for this topic?” is a helpful approach. Title length is recommended to be kept between 50-60 characters. Longer titles appear truncated in search results, for example being cut off as “Social Media Consulting | Social Media Service…..”.
Meta Description
The meta description text is a short text section that appears right below the page title in search results and summarizes your content. It should be 140-160 characters long. Don’t forget to naturally place your target keyword and its variations in this field. However, it is essential not to disrupt sentence flow and readability when placing keywords. Writing an informative description that encourages users to click increases your click-through rate.
Content
Content on your website should be comprehensive and informative texts that provide value to visitors. You need to produce content that keeps readers engaged from beginning to end and answers their questions. In SEO-friendly article writing, the keyword and its variations are determined and naturally distributed throughout the content. Each page should have at least 300 words of content. Highlighting important sections with bold or italic text, including paragraphs and subheadings increases readability.
Keyword Density
Determine the primary keywords your website will focus on and shape your content around these words. Keyword density is an important metric that helps search engines understand what topic your site specializes in. Keeping keyword density between 4% and 5% based on content length is a generally accepted approach. A natural usage should be adopted without going to extremes.
Image Alt Tags
To rank higher in image search results and drive traffic through images, don’t neglect adding alt tags and descriptions to all images on your site. Search engines cannot read images; therefore, alt tags are a critical SEO element that informs bots about what the image represents.
How to Perform Off-Page Optimization?
Off-page optimization, the most critical stage of the SEO process, constitutes approximately 60% of total SEO work. When applied correctly, off-page SEO efforts significantly shorten your time to results. The foundation of this process is built on backlink building strategies.
The Relationship Between SEO and Backlinks
The most common mistake in backlink efforts is the misconception that getting a large number of links is always beneficial. Quality matters more than quantity. Getting backlinks at regular intervals from sites that are relevant to your industry, authoritative, and trustworthy is the best strategy. If no visitors are coming from the links you receive, you benefit only to a limited extent from the SEO value of those links. To evaluate a site’s quality, first check whether its content is regularly updated. You can examine the site’s traffic data and authority score using various SEO tools. Google News-registered news sites are among reliable backlink sources.
Text Link Work
Text-based links are the most commonly used backlink type. They offer the ability to set titles, allowing you to highlight your target keywords. Text link work has the strongest impact in keyword-focused SEO efforts. The most important rule to follow in this process is to have a maximum of 3 link exits from a single article. Excessive link exits increase spam risk. You can find the types of links you can use in text link work below.
Promotional Articles
Promotional articles are text-based advertising content that introduces your website and services to potential customers. It is recommended to obtain these articles from sites related to your industry, Google News-registered news portals, or trustworthy personal blogs. A quality promotional article both increases your brand awareness and contributes to your SEO performance.
Blog Promotions
You can create industry-specific pages on popular blog platforms like Blogspot, WordPress, and Tumblr, share valuable content about your area of expertise, and naturally add your site links to this content. Blog promotion efforts are one of the effective ways to provide backlink diversity.
Forum Promotions
Forum platforms where your target audience spends time are valuable channels for promoting your brand and obtaining backlinks. However, it is important to only promote on quality forums with an active user base. Natural and value-adding posts produce more positive results for both users and search engines.
