On-page SEO helps your page’s position by placing it in a higher ranking in the search engine results page; thereby, your website has more visibility to targeted visitors. They will eventually convert visitors into paying customers. 

What is On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the method of optimising your web page content to show up better on search engines and thereby to the users. It is also called “on-site SEO”. The common on-page SEO tricks used are optimising your content, title tag, internal links and URLs. In this article, I am going to share some awesome On-Page SEO techniques that really work.

Why On-Page SEO is Important?

1 Helps you rank better on SERP

On-page SEO is important, particularly for new websites. This particular technique of SEO convert content on your page to a language understandable to the search engine. It, therefore, convinces search engines as to why you deserve a good ranking. Search engines can understand codes and HTML language so our content must also have elements to make it clear for the search engine to read.

2 It is not about keyword stuffing anymore

Search engines are becoming smarter by the day, it crawls your page for keywords to know the quality and relevance of your page.
In fact, if you search for a competitive keyword, you’ll find that all top-ranking pages use almost the exact primary keywords in the title tag. But cramming keywords into your page in the name of SEO alone won’t do the trick. You also need to optimise your content for factors like user experience, page loading speed etc.

3 Helps search algorithm make sense of a page

By performing on-page SEO, you translate your content to help search engines understand them. This forms the basis of content marketing. These can be done using elements like the structure of a page, URL, headlines and content optimisation as discussed earlier. The more elements you include, the higher are your chances of getting better page ranking and feature at the top of the list.

4 User friendly

On-Page SEO gives user satisfaction. Every user who comes to your page must have a great experience to come back again. Off-Page SEO does the job of bringing them to your page but it is up to on-page SEO to make it user-friendly.
You are missing out on a great opportunity to publicise your good content if you do not do your SEO well. On-page SEO has a lot of possibilities to enhance usability and hiking traffic to your website.

Difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO

To understand the difference, you need to know what is on-page and off-page SEO.

• On-page SEO: It deals with what your site is about and is mainly focused on the content.
• Off-page SEO, on the other hand, looks at the popularity and how authoritative your site’s presence is.

In simple words, on-page SEO account for what you rank for, while off-page SEO decide how high you rank. SEO encompasses a combination of both on-page/off-page SEO to rank your website higher in search results 

On-page SEO Techniques

For your webpage to get its maximum performance on search engines, you need to optimise on-page SEO. Let us see what are the on-page SEO factors that you must pay attention to:

On-Page SEO checklist

Now, what are the ways in which we can effectively do on-page SEO? Let’s find out.

1 Use the target keyword at the beginning

Google puts more emphasis on words that appear earlier in the content. Therefore topping the on-page SEO techniques is to mention your target keyword in the first 100 words of your blog. Also including long-tail keywords that are relevant to your product or service can boost the chance of ranking your page higher in your nice search category. Therefore, your product will show up to the right audience that you have targeted.

2 Publish high-quality content

Originality scores in terms of content. Be it text, images, videos or infographics, authentic and exclusive content perform well. Include text elements to accompany your non-text content like descriptions for videos that you post on your website. Long-form articles that are well-researched rank better than shorter ones.

3 Optimise page content

How to do on-page SEO on the content that goes on your page? Let us elaborate.

• Before you write your blog, do your keyword research.
• Decide on your target keywords, create a list of related keywords and even long-tail keywords. These have to be used in your titles, descriptions, headings and page content.

• Take your cues from Google suggest. These are the suggestions that pop up when you start typing your query in Google search. Another place to look is the “People also ask” section that appears as prompts when you search. These make for great your sub-headings. Don’t forget the Related Searches section at the bottom of the search results on Google. Try to include them in your content.
• Schema.org (often called Schema) is an exclusive vocabulary of tags or rather microdata which can be added to your webpage it creates an enhanced description also called rich snippet. Schema markups improve the way your page is represented in search results. Schema gives the search engines a context for your data. For example, if you mentioned ‘Intel’ “in your blog, Google won’t know if it is the company Intel or the generic term. Schema lets you mark up this data and tells Google that you are referring to the company. Thus Google can show your page for the correct search terms related to the company. It also helps you get into the revered “featured snippet” box.

4 Headings and content formatting

• Follow the hierarchy with headings and don’t jumble headings and subheadings. The first heading tag should be <h1> followed by <h2> and then <h3>, <h4> etc.
• Each page should have only a single H1 tag. Do not use single word headings. You can make your headings exciting and informational for users who like to skim through rather than read the whole article.
• You can place related keywords in your subheadings. For the content, make sure it has the right font size, and don’t shy away from employing underline, bold, or italics to highlight important points.

5 Optimise page titles and meta descriptions

This is very important for SEO. Each of your pages must have a unique title that will be picked up by search engines. Remember to add keywords at the beginning of your page title. Keep titles short(Just below 60 characters is optimal) and descriptive.

Meta descriptions and meta tags provide a brief of what your page is about. These are often displayed underneath the title of the page in the search engine result page(SERPs). Although Google claims that meta descriptions don’t help boost rankings, optimizing your meta description well can improve your Click-through rate (CTR)and the perceived quality of the result.

6 SEO Images and other multimedia elements

Images make the blog look more attractive. Optimise your images by using original pictures whenever possible. The ALT tag can be used to describe the image. Alt text strengthens the context of your articles for search engines and thereby improves user accessibility of your page. Alt texts are used for any image on your site to describe what’s on it. This will help search engines understand what the image is about and thereby can display it in the image results too.

7 Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible characters that are displayed on hyperlinks when linked to another document or web page. These are commonly marked in the blue underlined text but can be easily changed to your wish on the back-end. Anchor text functions as contextual information to both search engines and users about the content in your page. Readers may want to explore on a certain topic in your blog and can click on the anchor text to be redirected to more details.

8 Internal links And External links

Linking your page within your website and from outside is essential for SEO. What are its advantages?

8.1 Internal Links

Imagine reading a long blog post, and you wanted to navigate to the conclusion part of it. Would you enjoy scrolling all the way to the bottom? No. That is why link building through internal links are essential. You can also link pages within your website. It lets search engines know your other pages. It also pinpoints which your most important pages.

All websites have pages of varying importance. Internal links will tell search engines what the most important pages are because they have more internal links and it also reduces bounce rate as users spend more time on site.

When it discovers a page, the search engines crawl your website and then follows the links on that page. With no links, it just browses and goes. When there are links, however, it will go through them as well and take them into account when considering your content.

If a user is reading your post and it has links in it, there is a higher chance of him clicking it and go on to read more about another topic on your other page. This increases the time spend on your website, decrease the bounce rate and boosts the number of pages per visit.

How to employ internal linking:

• Don’t stick to keywords alone for your internal links
• Do not overdo it, only add internal links when they are useful.
• Try to add links in the content of your webpage which has a higher chance of being liked.
• Limit them to a maximum of 12 per page

8.2 External Links

Linking your webpage to other high-quality websites will you increase the trustworthiness of your content which reflects in SEO.
Google will also use external links to understand the context of your text and know more about your content.

9 URL Optimisation

Once your content is optimised, we need to move towards optimising the URLs for maximising SEO. The first step is the URL optimisation and then URL structure. An SEO friendly URL has to be short yet descriptive and should positively include your target keyword. Good URLs have below 255 characters and use hyphens to separate the elements of the title. A slug or a permanent link will be the unique URL of each page.

Some great URLs look like this:
• https://www.brandloom.com/category/business-strategy
• https://www.brandloom.com/10-best-payment-gateways-in-india
Here are some bad URLs to stray away from:
• https://www.brandloom.com/category/aph?dsj
• https://www.brandloom.com/1opaymentgateways2019

10 URL Structure

The URL structure should be similar to the actual structure of the website.
How do you optimise your URL structure?

• Categorise – Divide your pages into categories so that users and search engines are able to find what they search for faster. Uncategorized items make it difficult to track and make for lousy user experience too.

• Including sub-categories can also help with SEO. At the end your URL structure should look something like Homepage > insights > Social media > Article

• To enhance it further, you can add breadcrumbs that help in allowing users to navigate your website in an organised manner by providing information about where they are keeping the home page as a guide.

11 Page loading speed and Mobile-friendliness

It is said that when page loading time increases from one to five seconds, the bounce rate probability peaks to 90%. You definitely don’t want that. Since 60% of searches on Google now come from mobile devices, its common sense to optimise your webpages for mobile to get good traffic coming in.

A lot of effort is put to make the web faster. You must have seen the search speed displayed in seconds at every word you search. In this effort, Search engines now want web sites to take speeding up their accounts seriously. It has also now officially become a known page ranking factor. Having faster websites work best not only for SEO but for customers too. They don’t want to wait around for the webpage to load and therefore faster pages can lead to better conversions.

12 Mobile Friendliness

Almost 60% of the searches in Google are now coming from mobile devices. This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are already losing half of the potential traffic.

Checking for mobile-friendliness is easy. You can check your website for shortcomings with Google’s mobile-friendly test tool and correct it accordingly.

Go ahead and try out your website on your mobile, and make corrections so that everything is displaying exactly to the comfort to of the user.

13 Watch your Results

Setup Google Search Console to monitor your SEO. It is a live dashboard from where you can get data on how your site is performing in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Backlinko explains on-page SEO is crucial in ranking sites better on search engine platforms. By using the search console you can gauge how each of the steps of SEO are paying off for your website.

There are 3 major reports to look out for regularly.

• Performance: This report shows you how many people click on your page in search results. It shows the exact keywords used by people to find your page along with your rank. It is recommended to monitor impressions and clicks over a period of time to watch the trend.
• Coverage: By watching the coverage report, you know which of your pages are indexed. You can troubleshoot them if you see “errors”.
• Enhancements: This report lets you gauge your pages “Mobile Usability” as Google is keen on the mobile user experience. Thus, it’s important to make sure that your site is mobile friendly.

14 On page Comments Optimisation

In the end, its what users enjoy that matter. Precisely why comments are still an important factor that shows that people benefit and relate to your content. Many people browse comments on your page posting a new comment. This is also more time to spend on your website.

Remember the following for comments:

• Moderate comments before it go on your page
• Avoid generic comments and don’t keep them for the sake of the number of comments displayed. It looks spammy.
• Censor comments that are irrelevant to the page.
• Monitor the user name and prefer ones with real names.
• Make it a point to reply to comments as this will keep your community growing.

On-Page SEO for Small businesses

How to do on-page optimization in SEO for small businesses? It turns out that on-page SEO might be the only optimisation required for smaller or niche businesses, or if you are looking for a local audience. These are the things that you can never forgo for your website.

• Optimise your homepage so that Google understands your location clearly along with the details of your business. Have an eye out for your page title tag, header tag and meta description.
• Write good meta descriptions and pay attention to your metadata. Although it doesn’t directly affect ranking, metadata makes a huge difference to potential visitors to your page. Thus it ha more to do with user-friendliness than ranking, bot of which are important for you.
• Another tip when organizing your website is to create a page for each of your products, services and locations that you are active in. This is required to ensure schema mark up for your product which requires separate webpages for each. Then you can apply the local business schema or even a structured data markup on your pages for local SEO.
• On the content side, don’t forgo reviews as the last bit of the page. Especially when you are a product or service, people trust good and honest reviews rather than airbrushed product shoots and a glossy webpage. Make sure to keep the review section active and you can even pull out a review from Google and Facebook or wherever your community is.

Winding up, you should note that once you complete the on-page SEO steps, then you can start to think of how to promote your website by going to off-site optimisation.

Conclusion

It is obvious that if your website isn’t giving you the results you seek, you need to tweak its content and on-page SEO. So, in essence, what is on-page SEO? On-page SEO is the first step to optimising your website for visibility and higher ranking on search engine result pages(SERPs). Along with it, constantly updating your blogs with relevant information and acquiring backlinks from trusted and high ranking sites is crucial to maintain your score on search engine ranking.

If you are looking for on-page SEO services or information, you may want to check out our website at Brandloom.com. Find out more about SEO  on our blog at Brandloom and our on-page SEO tutorial on YouTube. Curious about the world of digital? Watch our website for exciting articles that give you a good idea of how digital marketing works and also business in general. 

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