What Is On Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
Friends, On-Page SEO is the technique to improve the overall structure of your blog post and rank higher in Google and other search engines. In the article, you will learn what is On-Page SEO and how you can improve your ranking using it.
Usually Google algorithms use three main factors to rank your website- On page SEO, Off Page SEO and technical SEO.
On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) refers to the practice of optimizing web pages to improve a website’s search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. In addition to publishing relevant, high-quality content, on-page SEO includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images.
Learn more about What Is SEO?
What is On Page SEO?
There are three types of SEO you need for a well-rounded organic search strategy: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. By breaking down your strategy and thinking about SEO as these three categories, it will be much easier to organize and execute your optimization plans.
On Page SEO is the process of optimizing a single web page in order to rank higher in Search engines and get more relevant traffic for free. On Page SEO is completely in your hand and it’s totally up to you, how you optimize your web page using OnPage SEO techniques.
What Are the Most Important SEO Ranking Factors?
- A Secure and Accessible Website.
- Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
- Mobile Friendliness.
- Domain Age, URL, and Authority.
- Optimized Content.
- Technical SEO.
- User Experience (RankBrain)
- Internal Links.
Basically On-page SEO includes content elements, site architecture elements, and HTML elements which is the source code of your web page.
What On Page is Important?
On-page SEO helps search engines analyze your website and the content connected to it so that it can identify if a searcher’s query is relevant to your site. Google is constantly updating their algorithm so that it can better understand a searcher’s intent and deliver search results that meet that user’s needs.
On Page SEO is important. It tells Google what type of information you provide to your visitors and describes your website in the eyes of search engines.
Ultimately with On Page SEO you can improve the overall structure of your site for both human and search engines.
Solely writing and publishing content is not enough. The most important work is to optimize it properly to make it easy to understand for both the user and search engines. So you can get more visibility online and get more traffic.
Every part of On Page SEO is totally under your control. That’s why it’s becoming easy and important.
On Page SEO Elements
These are the important On Page SEO elements that are required to be optimized to improve your overall On Page structure.
- High-Quality Page Content
- Keyword
- Page Titles
- Headers
- Meta Descriptions
- Image Alt-text
- Structured Markup
- Page URLs
- Internal Linking
- Mobile Responsiveness
- Site Speed
1: High-Quality Content
Content is the king. Without content, blogging is not possible and with low-quality content, blogging is totally a waste of time.
I know you’ve heard that before, but it bears repeating because Google’s bots search for content – quality content. Briefly, quality content is content that addresses your audience’s needs, wants and desires.
Note, content is for users not search engines. Write content with the human reader in mind. Google favors new, original, and frequently updated content, which tends to attract visitors. More visitors attract Google bots to crawl your page, resulting in higher rankings.
Friends, Content is the heart of your blog and On-Page SEO. It tells about your content to both users and search engines.
Your very first step is to write quality content and find the relevant keywords for your content. Conduct some research using tools such as ahrefs, semrush etc and write content.
Here are few things to note while writing content-
- Include long and short tail keywords naturally. Also put some synonyms instead of using the same keyword again and again.
- Add engaging and relevant images or other visual media.
- Your article must solve the problem of your audience.
- Must optimize your content for CTA. So your content also converts your visitors into your regular customers.
This includes good quality and original content that consists of blogs, articles, info-graphics, and high-quality pictures. A website with low-quality images and poor content has no chance of surviving in the competitive online world.
Keywords
Keywords play a central role in search engine optimization. Searchers type keywords or keyword phrases into a search box. Placement and usage of keywords matters. Generally, the closer to the front of your content – the first 100 – 150 words, works well.
One quick word of caution. Do not overuse keywords or Google will flag you for keyword “stuffing”. Keywords should not make up more than about under 3% of overall page content.
Selecting keywords searchers use, helps you write useful and relevant content. A free tool to use in finding keywords to guide your content strategy is Google Keyword Planner. Familiarize yourself with this tool, and you can begin writing compelling content.
If you want the best and fast result then you can use a paid tool. I know these tools are expensive but you can get them by group buy tool at a very cheap price.
Keyword Density
Friends, Keyword density is the most important factor of this checklist, especially since recent Google algorithm updates. Keyword density refers to how many times your keywords appear in your content and is expressed as a percentage.
For example, say I was optimizing this article for “on-page SEO checklist”, my article was 1,000 words long and I mentioned on-page SEO checklist 20 times, my keyword density would be 2%.
I would not go above 2% anymore! Google can and will penalize you for “keyword stuffed” content. No-one really knows that magic number, but a conservative goal is 1.5-2%.
2: Page Titles
A unique title and a Meta description is necessary to distinguish your website details from other websites. During the search results, only the main gist and title of your website is visible to the users. Therefore, it has to be short yet descriptive.
The title should always include keywords. It’s the most important on-page ranking element. And for best results, you should use keywords towards the beginning of the title. Of course, the title should be relevant to the content of the page.
A page title is one of the most important elements of your blog. It indicates to the user and search engine what they will get into the article. To ensure your page rank for your relevant keyword make sure to include your keyword in the title of your content.
Here are some point to note while writing a content-
- Keep your title under 70 characters. More than 70 keyword titles can get cut off in the search result.
- Don’t just stuff your keyword in the title. The more keywords in the title are more your title will look spammy. Also, the search engines are smarter enough to find out the spammy titles.
- Make it relevant to the page.
- Include your brand name in the title.
3: Headlines
Headlines the body tags, which also can be referred to the tags such as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5. H6. These tags help organise your content for both the human and search engines. The more heading your content has, the easier it is to scan for your visitors.
And on the opposite, relevant keywords help search engines to understand your content more deeply.
Unique content! No On-Page SEO checklist should be complete without it. If you are plagiarizing material you will get no credit for it. The reason being is Google gives credit to only one piece of unique content – the first page it comes across and indexes.
It holds this page in its indexes and if it finds highly duplicated content on another website at a future time, it will not consider that page as part of the search engine results.
Write unique, interesting, helpful material and implement all the points of this on-page SEO checklist into your posts, and you will be ahead of the pack already!
Meta Tags
Don’t be put off by the name; WordPress makes it very simple to administer Meta Tags. There are 3 simple fields to fill in – using the Simple Meta Tags plugin.
Meta Title – Include your Keywords in here – this will be the main title your visitors see when searching in the search engines – so make it appealing and make it stand out!
Meta Description – Very important. This is a short description of your content your visitor will read in the search engines. Include your keywords and again make it appealing.
Meta Keywords – Make sure you include your keywords. This one is not so important, just reinforces to the search engines about what your page content is based on.
Meta Tags are still one of the most important parts of this SEO checklist, not so much for rankings, but because potential visitors are going to base their decision to visit your site or not on the title and description they see when searching for your content.
4: Meta Descriptions
Each page has a meta tag that serves to describe what your page is all about. It’s a summary that Google uses to describe your page on the search results page.
Take advantage of this summary description by writing a benefit-oriented copy. Write meta tags for human readers, not search engines. And each page should have its own unique description. Don’t use one meta description for similar pages.
Meta descriptions are the short introduction of your content that appears under the title of your blog in the search results. It’s not an essential component for the On-Page SEO but it can make your content more clickable and increase your ranking.
Here are some elements that can make your Meta Descriptions more relevant.
- Keep it under 160 characters.
- Include your keyword in the Meta Description.
- Use complete sentences in your meta description.
- Avoid alphanumeric content such as %, &, $ etc.
5: Image ALT Tags
Formatting a website is the main feature of On Page SEO. Optimisation of original images using ALT tags and giving importance to main content over secondary content, these things are looked after during formatting.
Without correct formatting, a website loses its sheen; all primary and secondary content would be jumbled and mixed up.
For now Google is not capable of reading images but it can understand your image using the ALT Tags. ALT tags tells Google to understand your content and also the image.
- Always add a descriptive ALT Tag in the image.
- Make your image as well as the alt tag relevant to your content.
- Keep it under 125 characters.
- Use keywords properly, don’t just stuff.
A part of the on-page SEO checklist many people forget, but is very easy to do. This refers to the alternative image tag. When you insert a picture into WordPress, you have a field option called Alternate Tag Image Text.
Make sure to include your keywords here, if you have multiple images use different iterations of keywords, for example, an on-page SEO checklist, a checklist for SEO, and on-page optimization checklist, and so forth.
6: Structures Markup
Structured markup is important. It optimizes your source code to make it easier to understand for Google. With structured Markup Google can easily find the elements on your page and know about them to show them up the search results.
Structured Markup usually includes the rating, snippets and other general details about your Business.
7: Page URLs
Uniform Resource Locator – URL structure is the most crucial part of any On Page SEO strategy. The permanent links i.e. the URL of every page are used to describe the web pages to both the search engines and the visitors.
A URL has to be factually correct and very relevant to the website theme. It should also be short, crisp, and expressive. Your page URLs must be short and clean. Keywords in the URL can affect your ranking in a positive way.
Here are some few points to make your URL more friendly.
- Don’t put the extra unnecessary word in your URL.
- Only use one to two keywords.
- Your page URL must be SSL proactive, it gives a positive signal to Google.
8: Internal Linking
Internal linking is also called a hyperlinking use to link other helpful resources on your website. It is very important On Page SEO because through links users can go to other pages on your blog and it indicates to Google that your website is more helpful and valuable.
The term internal linking refers to a process of creating links within the website pages. This helps the search engines ascertain the primary web pages and other pages. Internal linking facilitates easy navigation within the website and stalls the visitors for a while.
External Links to Authority Sites
Google loves to see natural content, and natural content usually links to other content – especially authority sites.
By Authority sites, I mean sites like WordPress, Yahoo, CNN, and even Google itself – popular, very highly ranked pages. Try to place at least one hyperlink to an authority site.
9: Mobile Responsiveness
Google favours responsive websites to rank higher. If your website is designed for desktops and doesn’t fit on the mobile screens, then you are going to face a ranking issue due to this.
It’s 2020 so mobile responsiveness is not a problem. But you can still check if your website is responsive or not, Using this link.
10: Site Speed
Page affects your ranking indirectly. Google knows that slower websites can convert in conversions and users do not want to stick with your website for long.
So it’s a ranking factor. You can check your page speed using: Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
11- Get a Sitemap
This one doesn’t really apply to optimizing the page you’re working on, but will boost SEO for all your pages, so I wanted to include this in checklist.
The good news is, if you’re running a WordPress Blog, it is a snap to do! Like all things WordPress, there’s a plugin for that – Google XML Sitemaps, Yoast SEO and Jetpack.
This automatically builds and keeps up to date a logical “map” of your website. It allows the search engines more efficiency in figuring out where all your pages are and leads to more of them being indexed (included) in the search engine results.
Furthermore, it creates backlinks into to each of your pages (with hyperlinks that match your page title – which should contain your keywords) – Google loves to see a site with intertwined pages.
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Conclusion
On-Page SEO carries far less weight than off-Page SEO in terms of getting your content ranked high in the search engines. In fact, there are many webmasters that don’t consider it at all, which is why you should.
It can give you the edge over competing pages that neglect on-page SEO and is relatively easy to do. Additionally, once it’s done, it’s done and costs nothing but a little time and planning.
The best way for us to explain on-page SEO is with an SEO checklist that explains each step in getting your pages optimized. This checklist will refer to implementing optimizations in a WordPress Blog – although the concepts are the same for any website.
On Page SEO can be referred to as all the activities conducted within a website like description, title, keywords, content, linking, etc. On Page SEO technique means designing and building a website so that it is search engine friendly.
Once you crafted a good content. Make sure to check all these settings are optimised on your web page. The page is simple and fully under your control.
Boost On-page SEO With Social Media
Some say social media is or has replaced SEO. But that’s not true. Social media plays a different role – that of distribution.
Namely, social media facilitates the sharing of your content with others. So social media complements SEO by distributing your content to interested parties or groups.
On-Page SEO – No Technical Background Required
Clearly, website optimization is a broad and complex topic. However, prudent marketers do not shy away from SEO. They make SEO work for them, without worrying about having a technical background.
Focus on these five non-technical, on-page elements, and you’ll realize tangible results. It simply requires consistent application.
By focusing on these five, you quickly master them because they’re manageable. This sets you up to delve into other SEO techniques, such as off-page SEO.