Crawling, indexing, and ranking.
This is what any website wants to achieve through SEO efforts. However, a strategic approach is essential. To build any website from scratch, it’s vital to focus on the three aspects of SEO. This article explains it and holds insights and inputs for anyone who is new to this.
3 Key Elements of SEO
There are no hard rules to sail the sea of SEO. Google has explicitly stated how it prioritizes webpages.
Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to our index.
For your crypto website to be easily crawlable, you need to converge your efforts in three aspects. Here are the three key pillars of SEO: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
A good SEO strategy would incorporate all three components. These essential elements remain constant for B2B, SaaS, eCommerce, and crypto or any personal/business website.
On-Page SEO
Optimizing elements that are visible on the webpages for users is called on-page optimization. Honestly, it is under this strategy that the guide you are reading would fall. Here are the components that you need to understand and include while framing your on-page SEO strategy. The tasks of on-page SEO activities would usually be carried out by an SEO specialist and a dedicated SEO content writer.
1. Keyword Optimization
Keywords are nothing but what users search for. You may be developing a product or launching a service for which you need to garner the attention of your audience. Understanding and finding how your audience is looking for those services and incorporating them into your content is called keyword optimization.
Keywords help search engines to understand your intent and pave the way to connect with your audience. To efficiently carry out your keyword research, focus on their metrics: search volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click, conversion rate, and return on ad spend.
2. Title tags
The title tag is the phrase that is going to appear on the SERPs page, link preview, browser tab, and AI responses. And it is the one that is going to influence your audience, whether they want to click it or scroll for another. It is not only about the users, but also the search engines and AI systems would get the context on what your page is about.
Including the primary keyword once in your title tag would help you to match it with the searcher’s intent. Keep it concise, and never do keyword stuffing. Including too many keywords in the title would have a negative impact. For better optimization, you can use the SERP keywords simulator tool and headline analyzer tool.
3. Meta Description
Meta Description has been removed from the ranking factor by Google a long time ago. Yet, it plays a key role in influencing the decision of the users and makes them click. In a survey conducted by Ignite Visibility with 500+ participants, nearly 62.9% respondents said their decision to click the link was primarily influenced by the meta description.
The goal of the meta is to summarize the article in fewer than 160 characters. If done well, it would encourage the users to click your page.
According to Google, “A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page.”
4. Quality Content
Quality content is not just that which is stuffed with information or a well-written article. Google has a different criterion to eliminate thin content and provide users with the information they want. In December 2022, the EEAT framework was released, which gave clarity on the expectations of the search engine and the audience.
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trustworthiness
If the content you generate fulfills these four criteria, you have a higher chance of appearing in the top results. While you perform blockchain SEO, focusing on educational content that empowers the audience could help you generate organic traffic.
5. Image Elements
No one wants boring content to read. Images make it more appealing and attractive to the users, which in turn would boost the engagement time of the particular page. Not only in terms of engagements, but it can also result in better reach of your websites through image search.
In 2024, it was estimated that Google indexed approximately 136 billion images. Adding alt text, using a suitable format, and following other best practices for image SEO would help your images to get ranked.
6. Internal and External Links
Providing hyperlinks on the anchor text of your website is called linking. Internal links are links to other pages within the same website. This would help search engines to better crawl and discover pages that are within your site. Users can also find it easier while they source a specific piece of information.
Linking webpages from other sites to your page is called an external link. It would add credibility and trust to your site. While adding links, ensure that you add only credible links and avoid using links to spammy sites.
Providing no-follow links would never add advantage to your site in the eyes of a crawler. This is a common practice followed by high authority websites that have too many external links. However, no-follow links should not be used for internal links, as they would interrupt the passing of link juice.
Off-Page SEO
It is a part of the SEO strategy wherein you make efforts outside your website. The primary objective of off-page SEO is to show positive signals to search engines, indicating why your site needs attention and visibility. It can be achieved by proactive link-building strategies, which are to be tactically done by an SEO specialist.
1. Backlinks
When other websites use your site’s link as an external link, it would naturally boost the authority, and this is called backlinks. Each backlink would be considered an upvote for your site, signaling that the content is valuable. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors, as they directly align with Google’s EEAT update.
The automated crawlers of search engines would discover and index pages by following the links. Thereby, when you gain backlinks, you help your site to be easily indexable by Google.
2. Business Profile
Business profiles or listings are online directories, wherein you provide your details, like name, contact details, and services offered on various sites. This is to support your local SEO efforts and enhance visibility. GMB (Google My Business) Profile is the most common platform that most businesses use here.
Through the business profile, you can project your reviews, which in turn can boost the trust in you among the audience. For better reach, you can do a listing in the following sites: Yelp, Trustpilot, Manta, LocalStack, and BetterRated. To specifically reach the crypto audience, you need to focus on aggregator sites. A few are mentioned below.
- CoinMarketCap
- CoinGecko
- ListingSpy
- Coinpaprika
- LiveCoinWatch
- CoinLore
They are primarily marketplaces. But listing your crypto tokens or exchanges on these platforms could get you high visibility.
3. Digital PRs/Blockchain PRs
Digital PRs(Press Releases) are primarily published to get featured on top media sites. By networking with journalists, brands distribute their PR for a new product or feature. When your site gets a mention on high authority sites, it boosts your SEO efforts and search ranking score.
In the blockchain world, PRs are an integral part of the marketing strategy in diplomatically handling the reputation and constantly engaging with your audiences. An effective PR strategy is essential to achieve the desired results, either in terms of promotion or reach. In the context of crypto SEO, each PR could give you backlinks and support in building authority for your site.
4. Social Bookmarking
If you want to achieve the best results in bookmarking, you need to know its purpose. Online users use platforms like Bookmark Ninja, Diigo, Delicious, and so on to organize the reading materials or sites they want to refer to in the future. While you submit URLs, ensure that you don’t spam, place just promotional links, or add irrelevant and low-quality links.
Hundreds of platforms are available for social bookmarking. Reddit, Pinterest, Flipboard, and Pocket are effective bookmarking platforms for crypto SEO, as they support active crypto communities.
5. Guest Posting
It is a practice of finding and writing articles for websites that are relevant to one’s niche. Businesses utilize this gateway to promote their product or services organically, and SEO use this as an opportunity to get quality backlinks.
Publishing content adhering to the editorial standards of a guest site with high authority would boost your SEO efforts. Here are the essential checks you need to do before starting to guest post on any site.
- Niche check: Conduct an analysis to find if they are specific to your niche or a multi-niche site.
- SEO metrics: Check their domain authority (DA), spam score, rankings, trust flow, and Moz flow.
- Check their social influence if they hold social media accounts.
- Check if they are a PBN site. Guest posting on a PBN site would have a negative impact.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO comprises the backend process that supports the search engines in discovering, crawling, and indexing. The motive of a search engine is to fetch the most relevant web pages for a search query that adds value to the users. But before that, you need to know how bots work to understand the importance of technical SEO.
The web crawler or spider is an automated bot that constantly looks for webpages and indexes them to store in its database. It discovers a page either by following links or by following the sitemap. Upon discovering the bit crawls a site and evaluates if it’s good enough to add to the library.
SEO specialists, along with the web developer or IT team, work together to fix the technical nuances of a site so that Google crawlers can discover and index the site with ease. This aspect of SEO is called technical SEO. Whether you host a crypto website or any other, below are the various elements of technical SEO that need to be considered.
1. Website architecture
A site’s architecture is how a website’s pages are interlinked or structured. Both users and crawlers can easily navigate a site if it’s well structured. A poorly structured site would impact the user experience and thus would result in a high bounce rate.
Having a logical URL structure, developing a clear hierarchy model, and implementing a strategic internal linking structure with topic clusters are the key concepts of website architectures. The best practices include,
- Build with a flat structure and make every page accessible within 3-4 clicks.
- Enable breadcrumbs navigation menu.
- Prepare category pages with a relevant layout.
2. Page Speed & Responsiveness
Here are some insights from studies conducted on page load time,
In 2006, Amazon found that every 100ms added to the load time costs 1% in sales.
Google found in 2016 that 53% of the visitors leave a site if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. 2X more revenue was found in sites that took less than 5 sec to load. It was noticed that sites with a loading time of 5 seconds got 25% of visibility when compared with sites that had 19 seconds of load time.
This is why it is essential to boost the performance of your crypto site. From an SEO perspective, a quick loading speed is a positive signal as it enhances user experience. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to optimize your page loading speed.
3. Core Web Vitals
It is a set of three core metrics that is defined by Google to measure a website’s user experience.
| Core Web Vital Metrics | What is it? | Preferred limit |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | It is a metric that measures the loading time of the largest element of the site. | It is essential to keep it below 2.5 seconds. |
| Interaction To Next Paint (INP) | It measures how fast a website responds to the user’s actions. | It is essential to keep it below 200 milliseconds. |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | The more a webpage’s layout shifts unexpectedly and disrupts user experience, the higher the CLS score. | Keep the CLS score below 0.1. |
Core Web Vitals indicate how smoothly a website can operate without interruption. It is a direct Google ranking factor that evaluates the websites performance of a site.
3. XML Sitemap
In June 2005, Google introduced the sitemap to easily find and index news websites and pages. Later in the next year, Microsoft (known as Bing) and Yahoo followed suit. It is adopted primarily to discover a new page with ease. An XML sitemap is a document containing all the URLs of pages written in Extensible Markup Language that is exclusively created for search engine crawlers.
Bots usually discover a site by following the links. If your crypto websites hold a large number of pages, then it would be difficult to ensure that every page is effectively interlinked. Publishing a sitemap would increase the visibility of your crypto site as it can be easily crawled.
4. URL Structure
Uniform Resource Locator or URL is the digital address of your webpages, which helps users and search engines to identify the context of the page. Here are the best practices for structuring the URL.
- Keep your URLs simple and short.
- Use only the primary keyword or seed keyword.
- Avoid keyword stuffing in the URL.
- Avoid using words like ‘and’ or ‘of’ to keep the URLs tight.
- Always use lowercase, hyphens to separate words, and HTTPS for security.
- Use 310 redirect when needed.
- Organize the URL with the hierarchical logic of your crypto site.
5. Robot.txt
To communicate with the crawlers and tell which pages need crawling and which don’t, the Robot.txt file is created. It is a text document that is placed at the website’s root directory.
Whenever webmasters need to purposely hide certain pages from crawlers that use the Robot.txt to do so. The above-mentioned is the basic format of a Robot.txt file. Thought appears simple, it could offer several benefits to your website.
- Navigate the bots to look only at valuable content and skip irrelevant pages.
- Can prevent excessive load.
- Can prevent bots from indexing confidential pages.
6. Schema Structured Data
Scheme Markup or Structure Data is an extra piece of information added to the HTML code to enable it to understand the content of the page. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the primarily used structured data.
Before showing the results on SERPs, the search engine crawlers look for the information on the page to check if it could fulfill the user’s intention. To make it easily understandable, the Structured Data Language is used to define properties and relationships. A wide range of schemas available for different kinds of pages.
For crypto SEO, below are a few frequently needed types.
- Article/News article
- Organization
- FAQ
- Person
- BreadcrumbList
- Product and so on.
7. SSL Certificate
Google has stated that HTTPS is a ranking signal, since security is its top priority. By installing SSL certificates, a website moves from HTTP to HTTPS, making data transfer between the user and server encrypted, and preventing the site from cyber attacks.
Security is of paramount importance when it comes to a crypto site, so clearing this step is essential for your crypto website. Other benefits include,
- It is a trust signal to both users and search engines.
- Thwarts the ISP from viewing the content and queries that come to your site.
- Helps to avoid Google penalties or getting labeled as unsecured sites.
Conclusion
A website can be defined in many ways. Technically, it is a collection of webpages, images, videos, content, and other digital assets published under a domain. But from a business perspective, it is the digital address that projects the services, products, and accomplishments.
It takes responsibility to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of the business. The above-mentioned 3 key aspects of SEO are essential for the smooth functioning of your business website in the long run.
If you are looking for experts who can build your website, join hands with BlockWoods. We are a leading crypto marketing agency, building brands for global clients.
