What’s On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO, at its basic level, is when you optimise your website for maximum visibility and impressions on search engine results (this includes content and code). On page optimisation is extremely important in this regard! So, before you think of off-page SEO such as local listings or building high-quality links, your main priority should be optimising your website with the on-page optimisation best practices.
In order to get a proper idea where you can improve your on-page SEO, begin by asking yourself the following questions:
- Have you ever done any keyword research relating to your industry?
- Is your website mobile responsive?
- How long it takes for your website to load completely?
- Are your website’s images optimised?
Whenever Googles bots crawl your web page, they consider how well your website delivers the content the user may be looking for. Along with off-page indicators and social media indicators, of course. However, let us take a closer look at how Google does it, and thus how you can improve your Google’s understanding of your site content.
Now you understand on-page search engine optimization basics, let us dive into a checklist of sorts. Follow these top 10 on-page optimisations whenever you publish new content to your website.
Meta Descriptions
Lots of people do not include meta descriptions in their web pages. The descriptions are an important area to include some important keywords for the content since these are used in your search results whenever your page gets listed. For example, take ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’, a good meta description will include the main keywords and the related ones. Thus, “This simple chocolate cake recipe is one of the most mouth-watering, delicious, and chocolatey cakes you can make for under £5.” This is a good example of meta description you can use, since it is very short, and contains specific keywords connected to your niche.
Page Titles
Page titles are an important search engine optimisation factor for your website. All of your pages and posts must have a unique title and should include the main keywords for this page. For instance, you can write the blog post on a new milkshake recipe, which you have recently tried. Therefore, it is very important you include ‘Milk Shake Recipe’ in your post title, maybe “Easy Vanilla Milk Shake Recipe” or “Vanilla Milk Shake Recipe for Children”, etc. So, when somebody searches for ‘Milk Shake Recipe’ in the search engine, then your website page has an increased chance to show up because you’ve included all the relevant keywords.
URL Structure
Include your keywords in the URLs for all of your web pages as per your page titles. Shorter URLs appear to perform better in the search engine results, but that isn’t an only factor. URLs that include some targeted keywords, perform better. Location of the keywords also can be the major influence so try to place your keywords at the beginning of your URL.
Meta Tags
For all your pages, you should include a certain set of keywords that are in the meta tags. These must be all relevant keywords of the content that you should have previously researched. You can use WordPress plug-in as it allows you to enter your meta tag keywords, description and your page title at a bottom of all of your posts before you start publishing. This just inserts all information in your web page HTML format and making your life easier.
Keyword Density
It is very important that you include all the relevant keywords all over your content since it helps the search engines to work on what your article and content are all about. But, do not repeat or overuse any of the keywords only for the search engine robots. It will lead to your website getting banned from the search engines. In order, to avoid that, try and keep the keyword density between 2 to 5%. In case you find it hard, then get out the thesaurus and related keywords and widen your writing dictionary. You are still writing about the same thing, without the risk of getting banned or flagged by Google.
Body Tags
When writing articles, you should break up the content in smaller sections and paragraphs in order to make it easier for the user to read. The sections are given heading that is where Header one, two, three, four, etc. tags are used. Normally, Header one tags are reserved only for the main page title, and with subsequent headings being issued as H2 and H3 and so on. Search engines also make use of H1-H6 tags to determine what’s very important in your content, so it’s great for on-page SEO. For this reason, keyword-rich headlines are very useful and should be used whenever possible.
Internal Linking
Often people think that only external links are important for SEO. Indeed, these links are very important, but aren’t the only important links! Placing links on your other pages that are relevant is a great way to help your on-page SEO efforts and if used rightly, internal links are the most useful weapon in the SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it easy for the visitors to navigate over your website and find your content, but it also helps your on-page SEO by ensuring your website gets crawled correctly. This helps to build the relevancy of the page by linking phrases and keywords on other pages throughout your website.
Image SEO
Using images in your content is a great way to make your website visually appealing as well as break up any text-heavy content. You should try to use images as this helps to improve your on-page SEO too. Your uploaded pictures should have meta information in order for search engines to know what they are, however. Information such as image titles and alt-text help search engines determine what your images are as they’re unable to ‘see’ pictures. Relevant keywords will help users find your website while searching on Google Images, for example.
Improve page speed
A fast website cannot be underestimated if you are looking for a good conversion rate. Google also measures the bounce rate and dwell time and a slow website impacts your users’ experience, thus the number of times a user hits the ‘back’ button. A high bounce rate will hit you in the SEO department, so you should test your website load speeds from as many different devices and connections as possible. The speed of the server is just one important factor for page speeds and on-page SEO so don’t forget to put in place best practices when designing your website.
Make your content consumable
Peoples reading habits are different on the internet. We all tend to scan web pages rather than digesting every sentence. Actually, very few people will read each word of the post. The reason behind is a high volume of content published on the internet. Other half is a fact that the new digital lives give too many distractions. So make sure that your user can find what they are looking for quickly in order to keep the bounce rate down!
