Also known as on-site SEO, on-page SEO is a process where you optimize the content and structure of a web page. Therefore, the main goal of on-page SEO is to speak the language of search engines by helping the search engine crawler comprehend the context and meaning of your web pages.
Therefore, on-page SEO enables search engines to better understand what your content means. During the ranking and indexing process, search engines try to match keywords and search terms with web pages. By using certain techniques, you too can guide what keywords will rank for specific pages.
The following on-page SEO methods will give you an edge when it comes to being found on the Internet. To better understand on-page SEO, you need to define SEO, as on-page SEO is a subset of SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that relates to activities that improve your site’s ranking position the search engine page results, known as the SERPs. On-page SEO allows you to establish settings that can be optimized and applied to your website’s pages and content.
Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO – Making the Distinctions
While technical SEO, which covers the crawling and indexing of websites, off-page SEO is used outside the boundaries of a site’s design. Therefore, when contrasted with on-page SEO, off-page SEO involves link-building and how search engines rank the usefulness of a website.
Publish Content of a High Quality
While there are a large number of on-page SEO techniques you can follow, you only need to focus on the most important ones first. The first of these techniques is publishing high-quality content – content that is well-written and valuable to the reader. While a website with great content can do well with or without SEO, content with good content will become better with SEO.
What Is Good Content?
Good content is considered to be original content – content that has not been rewritten from a current article. It may include text, images, videos, articles, infographics, comments, or presentations. The content should also be unique to your website and not have been printed on another site. Unless you use a canonical tag to direct the search engines, you do not want to use similar content.
Good content also includes some type of text. For example, you should always include text to support non-text content. That means, if you post videos on your site, you need to add text to describe each video. If you add a picture, use text to describe the image.
Have Your Thought about What You Are Writing?
In addition, good content needs to be purposeful and useful. You should never publish content just to publish it. It should convey some type of meaning to your readers. When you publish useful and good content, it also is well-researched content. A reader does not want to scan a quickly written post and the search engines do not want to crawl this type of material.
Make Sure Your Content Is Objective
Remember, when adding quality content, the longer articles rank better than shorter articles. Also, the content should not be biased, but objective. Be sure you cover both sides of the story.
Optimize Your Meta Descriptions and Page Titles
When you are practicing on-page SEO, you also need to optimize your meta descriptions and page titles. When search engines read your copy, they also review your titles and descriptions. They never do anything halfway. They look to see what your page is all about before ranking your pages to keywords and indexing the material. If you really do not understand this concept, you need to take some time out and review how the search engines work.
Page Titles
Each page on your site should have a unique title. After all, your pages are unique, so the titles should also be different. In fact, the page title is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to practicing on-page SEO.
Optimizing the Title – Some of the Tips
To optimize your page title, you need to follow the tips below.
- Include keywords at the beginning of page titles. Doing so will help the search engines understand immediately what keywords your page targets. However, do not go overboard and keyword stuff. If you cannot place a keyword at the start, just make sure it is somewhere in the title.
- Make sure the title is short and descriptive. Your title does not have to be lengthy. Keep it under 60 characters, or the average character length in most Google search results.
- Always include power words and numbers. Numbers and power words, such as amazing, actionable, ultimate, and checklist always work well for SEO. Both these additions also increase the click-through-rate or CTR.
- You do not have to include your website name, or domain name, in the title. This name is automatically added by Google. Instead, you can use the extra space to provide a more precise description for the page. However, if you have a strong and recognizable brand, you may want to make an exception and add the domain name in the title.
Meta Description Optimization
The page description is what is shown in the search engine results page or SERPs. Therefore, the meta description must be up to 200 characters long and unique and descriptive. The meta description allows you to advertise your web page and convince the users to click the link and visit your site.
Google does not always use the meta description you use yourself. In some instances, it may feature an automated description if that description has been deemed better for searching. When writing a meta description, remember to add a keyword or keywords in the description. Google finds and highlights the search terms or keywords in both the title and meta description, so you need to add keywords in both these places.
Optimize the Content on Each Page
Content SEO is part of on-page SEO as well and involves optimizing the keywords for a specific page. Before publishing any content, make sure you conduct a keyword search first. You need to do this to find out what your audience wants to read or locate and how to direct your content.
Once you find your target keywords, you will need to create a list of related keywords, called LSI keywords, and include them in your content, titles, headings and descriptions. Google search algorithms not only rank sites for keyword relevancy, they also rate sites for topic relevancy. To make sure you add the right keywords and terms, check first by typing a query into Google search and checking the possible phrases. You can use these phrases as keywords in your content.
While the above information only covers a small part of on-page SEO, it gives you enough of an introduction to begin. If your goal is to increase website traffic, focus first on adding great contact, including keywords in the title and meta description, and finding keywords through “Google Suggest,” when searching for topical info.
