What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual webpages to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and to get more traffic to the website. On-page SEO work includes optimizing the content elements, HTML source code, and site architecture elements.
Content Elements
First, we will discuss the content elements. A web page would need high-quality content for the readers. Contents are the heart of on-page SEO. Contents tell the readers and search engines what your website is all about. Keywordresearch is the first step to create high-quality content. With the help of a keyword-tool planner find the most used keywords on search engines by the audience related to your product or service. It will give you an idea about what the audience is talking about online or what they need to know more about the topic. Based on the keyword, start creating content for the website. Whenever you create new content for your website you will have to create the content with specific keywords. Every individual page of the website is recommended to have a primary keyword and a secondary keyword. On-page SEO will help to turn your research into content your audience will love.
Best practices for creating high-quality content.
- Use long-tail keywords and short term keywords naturally
- Include relevant and engaging visual content
- Create the content for the target audience
- Find solutions for your audience issues actively.
- Produce content that people will share and link to
- Optimize for conversions with CTA’s (Call To Action) to offers and product pages.
There is no shortcut for your page to rank higher on the search engine result page. Search engines rank pages because they know which will be the apt answers for searcher’s questions. To get a higher rank in the SERP, it is not enough that your page is not spamming, duplicate or broken, but you should have quality information that is better than any other website’s pages which is relevant for the user’s query.
Certain factors one should keep in mind to get a higher rank on the SERP
- Do keyword research
- Identify the pages which is currently rank higher for the particular keyword
- Determine the quality those pages possess
- Create content better than that page
HTML Elements
An HTML (HyperText Transfer Protocol) element is an individual component in the HTML document or webpage, these are the elements in the source code. Anyone who is not using the HTML tag is missing out on a significant part of SEO. The HTML elements you need to pay attention to do SEO are the title tag, meta description, header tags. Image alt-text, and no-follow link tags.
Titles
Titles are the HTML element used to describe the topic of the webpage. Titles have a direct impact on both the searcher’s clickthrough rate and search engine rankings. To make your title both user-friendly and click friendly, try to keep it below sixty-five characters. So it does not cut off on the search engine result page. Include the primary keyword on the title naturally, So that readers can identify that your content is relevant to the search query. To avoid the chance of cutting off the words place the keyword at the front of the title. Do not use all caps for the title.
Header tags
Header tags are HTML elements used to designate your heading on the webpage. The main header tag is an H1 tag reserved for the main heading of the page. These tags help organize the content of your page for the readers and the search engines what part of your content is more relevant. The h1 and h2 tag should contain keywords but choose different ones. Incorporate the most important keywords in h1 and h2 tags. You should avoid using the header tags to mark up non-headings and other factors like contact details, navigational buttons, etc. There are other tags for subheadings varies from H2 to H6, the hierarchy of the tags goes in the descending order.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are short description, what we see under the titles in SERP. It influences the user, whether the link should be visited or not can be decided by reading the meta description. There are certain criteria for creating meta descriptions
- Keep it below 160 characters. Although Google allows up to 220 characters, mobile devices cut off meta descriptions to 120 characters.
- Try to incorporate keyword or keyword phrase
- Use a complete influencing sentence
- Alphanumeric characters should be avoided
Image alt-text
Images also have to be optimized for search engines. Image alt-text is SEO for images. It helps search engines to identify the image description. It is important to give a description to the image because google is giving image results for every search as they give text results.
There are certain factors you should keep in mind while giving image alt-text
- Make it descriptive and specific
- Keep it shorter than 125 characters
- The image should be contextually relevant to the broader page content
- Use keywords but don’t stuff keywords
No-follow link tag
A no-follow link is a link which does not boost a page’s rank and so it does not give the page a place in SERPs. It is like a sign given to the search engine not to consider this page. There are a few reasons why no-follow links have to be considered. When you are working on the backlink SEO strategy for a website you will need to know whether the backlinks you receive are do-follow or no-follow. Do-follow links will help to get more traffic to your website than no-follow links. Still, there are some arguments going on that no-follow links help rankings, even if it is not to the same level as do-follow, so we cant say that they are totally useless. And you might be considering a no-follow link when you are using your own website to link with a poor domain authority website. This will ensure that the link will not put your domain authority down.
Site Architecture Elements
Site architecture elements are elements that frame your website and web pages. Google and other search engines crawl your website and web pages easily if it is having a proper structure. The reason behind why website architecture is important is, an optimized site architecture helps spiders to crawl and index all of the webpages on your website. If you have pages that are several clicks away from the home page or pages that are not linked with any other pages at all, google robots or bots will be having a tough time to find and index those pages. But if your site architecture is interlinked, spiders can easily follow your internal links. A well-structured site architecture will improve the page rankings. It also helps the visitors to easily find what they need on your website which indirectly helps SEO.
Page URLs
Page urls should be simple and easy to understand by both users and search engines. URL structure should logically follow your categories. To make URLs SEO friendlyfollow certain rules
- Remove extra unnecessary words
- Use only one keyword
- Use HTTPS because google considers it as a positive ranking factor
Internal links
Internal links are links that go from one page of a domain to the other page of the same domain. Internal linking structure improves the crawlability of the website. Internal links ensure that search engine crawlers can find all pages on your website, thereby providing ranking power to other pages on your site and you help your visitors navigate your site. So internal link building on your web pages aids to increase the web traffic.
Anchor text
Anchor text will send signals to the search engines about the content on the destination page. For example, if I link to a page on my site using the anchor text “learn java” that is a good indicator to search engine that the targeted page with which users can learn about java.
Just like keyword stuffing overusing of the anchor text is not a good practice. Too many internal links with the same keyword-stuffed anchor text can appear to search engines that you are trying to manipulate a page’s ranking.
Mobile Responsiveness
In recent years google started favoring websites that optimized for faster mobile speed. Nowadays it is essential to choose a website host, design and theme which provides better readability and navigability on mobile devices because most of the users are searching from mobile devices.
Site Speed
Search engines are always concerned about user experience. Whether using a mobile device or a desktop the website must be able to load quickly. It is said that an average user waiting time to load the page is 2 to 5 seconds. If your site loads slowly your visitors are not going to stick around and search engines will know about it.
Sitemap
Using a sitemap is a great way to increase the crawlability of the website. It also helps to visualize the categories, subcategories, and pages on the website. A well-structured website will use a sitemap to increase the crawlability of the site and to make the website user-friendly.
Conclusion
The on-page SEO will give a huge impact on the search engine result page rankings of the website. Well performed SEO will reduce the bounce rate of the webpage and also improves the website domain authority.