The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO
Google has established a mechanism that decides if your on-page SEO is on an acceptable level. By knowing how Google determines it, you can use it to your benefit and rank highly on it.
Keep following further to understand what you can do improve your on-page SEO.
Content SEO
Most of the necessary components for ranking higher on on-page SEO come from the high quality content. Little details, if given attention, can drastically improve your performance on Google. It is just like an exam; you get higher grades if you answer more questions correctly.
Your content should interesting and unique. It should not be repetitive of other people’s content. It should include your personal touch, some anecdotes from personal experience that people can connect to. You should hire expert writers who have experience in such topics to write with personal touch.
Your content should also emotionally appeal to your customers, so they are better convinced to buy your product. Use questions or phrases that relate with everyday experiences of ordinary people and you will the difference.
It also helps to update your content in case of things that keep on upgrading like iPhone, Microsoft Windows etc. Your website can provide a review of different iPhone or a guide to using Windows Vista. The title tag of your article can include the year when you update your guide like 2020 so that your customers know it’s up to date.
You should also make sure that you do not have thin content. Thin content is low quality content that has no value and little content.
Search Intent
Search intent is the reason behind someone making a search on Google. You can tell a lot about the intention by the words people use to make a search. Search intent can help you understand what the need is in the market for the product you are selling.
Based on these search queries, you can see what results come up as top-ranking article on Google. You try to reproduce that intention by using this data and produce unique content that will help you rank high on Google.
There are four types of search intents:
Informational
These search queries require information about a topic. The query can use words like what, who, how to ask the search engine information about a topic.
However, it does not necessarily use a questioning word. It can just be the name of the topic someone is seeking information for like Oprah Winfrey, Christmas party, etc.
Navigational
Such search queries know about the subject of their query but need more information like their website address. If you search LinkedIn, the search will direct you to its website.
This kind of search intent is mostly used for getting to websites like Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Yahoo mail etc. You regularly us such websites but you don’t always remember their URL. Google help you point it out and you follow it from there.
Transactional
Transactional transactions show when you are looking to buy something online. Most likely you are looking for the website to do the final transaction. The search queries may include words like buy, price, USD etc.
Commercial Investigation
This kind of search query is in market to compare products and find out what’s best. The search words can include compare, review, top, vs. etc.
When you find out the most searched, top ranking pages, you can look at the kind of pages that come up and make sense of how you should produce your content that can rank high. For your content to be SEO optimized, you should follow these tricks to produce unique content.
Let’s look at following factors that directly influence SEO optimization and see how well you can do in on-page SEO optimization by following these steps.
Keywords
The first thing you look for when you decide a topic is to search for keywords (or target keyword as they are called) that are most searched. Different software like Semrush and Ahref can be used to find out appropriate keywords that are most searched for. You can also find out more clues about keywords from Google searches by doing a keyword research.
What is important that these keywords should used throughout your text. Some important places where they absolutely should be are:
Title Tag
At least one of the headlines
In first 100-150 words
Repeating 6 to 10 times in the text
Some important considerations regarding occurrence of Keywords:
There is a need to apply caution here as well. You should not repeat keywords excessively and unnecessarily. It can negatively impact your performance.
You should place our keyword towards the start of your title tag. This speaks of relevance more than if it was placed later in your title. Most of the high-ranking entries on Google all have keyword at the start of their title tags.
Why is it important?
If your topic is about a certain keyword but it doesn’t appear in your text, it means that your text is not much relevant to the topic. Google understands relevance of a topic through repeating words especially if the keyword has been used in first 100 words of the text. In addition, the page title should be well explain the content on the page. All this greatly influences the ranking factor of your page.
Having used keywords appropriately in your text is a great thing but it cannot make up for other shortcomings. The text must follow all requirements.
Technical SEO – On-Page SEO Guide
Outbound Links
Adding outbound links to other pages that are related to your topic and its content increases authority and ranking of your page. In simple terms link building (with the relevant anchor text) is an important part of SEO or page optimization. These related outbound links let Google know that your content is consistent with your topic as it is continuously referring to similar, authority pages.
Internal Links
Adding internal links helps you increase traffic in between different web pages of your own websites. For example, in a blog post about dental scaling, you can talk about dental whitening as well and link it to the blog post or service page of dental whitening.
This will be a chance for your customer to learn more about it if interested and potentially book an appointment with your service center. This not only increases dwell time but also increases traffic on multiple webpages of your website; not to mention your sales as a result.
Alt Text in Images
Images play an important role in any content. They attract readers and help maintain their interest during the process of reading. The text should include a few images corresponding the text.
The images have alternate text (alt text) that should feature keyword of your topic. It does not have to be included in all images. It should at least be in one image especially the first image.
H1 and H2 Tags
H1 and H2 tags are quite necessary as they highlight important things to Google. WordPress platforms automatically wrap your title tag in H1. If not, you should manually add these tags.
You also need to be careful to add H2 tags for sub-headings in the texts. These tags are not automatic; hence they have to be added manually.
There are H3 and H4 tags as well which represent sub-headings to your sub-headings. Appropriate heading tags should be added at all time while writing the text.
These are important because they help Google understand the structured data on your page.
URLs
URLs are very important in improving your SEO ranking. For higher ranking, your URL structure should be short and should include the keyword for your topic. This also increases relevance and Google is able to fetch your text increasingly easily.
Meta Description Tags
Another method to boost your pages’ ranking is to add meta description to your page. This is a small description of your page that should include use of your keyword.
These descriptions let Google and your readers know about your page as this is the text that appears under the entry when you search it on Google. This is your potential customer’s entry into your website. Therefore, it should appeal to your customer’s emotions.
UX
User Experience or UX design is quite important for on-page SEO. This means that the design and experience of the website should easily flow. Any kind of glitches will discourage the user to keep searching or from coming back to your website. Following points are important to take care of while designing.
Design of the website
Page Layout
Fast Page Loading Speed
Image Optimization
The design should also be designed in a way to easily work on different browsers and screen sizes. It should also be shared easily on multiple social media platforms and way to encourage active community on your website.
Benefits of SEO – On-Page SEO Guide
Higher Ranking
The most direct benefit of on-page SEO is that if you follow all recommendations, you keep improving your ranking on Google. The direct result of high ranking is that more people open your website and spend time there i.e. dwell time.
Increase in CTR
If you have high ranking on Google, a large majority clicks and finds itself on your page This is click-through-rate (CTR). If you get to be on the first page on Google, it is the best place to be. As majority of people do not go beyond first two pages of search entries on Google.
Increase in Dwell Time
Having a high ranking means people come to your website. If they find quality material, they spend some time there and visit other pages. It increases dwell time of potential customers on your webpages.
Improved UX
If you follow all requirements of on-page SEO, you would see improvement in user experience which keeps people on your sites and impress the with its quality.
More Organic Traffic
With a higher rank, more people organically come to your website and look at your products. This increases organic traffic.
Better Conversion
With better user experience, creative content, design etc., your website attracts increasing number of people and an increasing number buy your products as well.
Optimizing is the Key
On-page SEO optimization has a long list of recommendations for you to follow but the result is worth it. The key is optimization. You must make the most effective use of your resources for which you do quite a bit of tweaking to get yourself to the top of Google search results. Literally. And that’s the place to be.
Hope this On-Page SEO Guide or this piece of content was useful. And provided all the relevant information and tips to make you On-Page SEO activities simpler.