on page seo

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is the practice of optimizing the content of web pages for search engines and users.

It means:

The optimization techniques apply within the website, such as optimizing title tags, content, internal links, and URLs of each and every web page in order to rank them higher in SERPs.

The final goal of on-page SEO is to guide the search engine’s web crawlers to understand the context of the web page easily and rank them accordingly.

In this guide, I will exactly show you how to do it.

Key Aspects Of On-Page SEO

1. Keyword Optimization: Incorporating relevant keywords naturally into the content, headings, meta tags, and URLs to signal to search engines what the page is about.
2. High-Quality Content: Creating valuable, informative, and engaging content that addresses the user’s intent and provides answers to their queries.
3. Meta Tags: Crafting compelling meta titles and meta descriptions that accurately represent the content and encourage users to click through to the page.
4. Headings and Subheadings: Using proper HTML headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure content and help search engines understand the hierarchy of information.
5. URL Structure: Creating clean, descriptive, and user-friendly URLs that contain relevant keywords and reflect the content of the page.
6. Image Optimization: Optimizing images by using descriptive alt text and reducing file sizes to improve page load speed.
7. Internal Linking: Connecting relevant pages within the website through internal links to improve navigation and distribute authority throughout the site.
8. User Experience (UX): Ensuring that the page is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and provides a positive user experience across different devices.
9. Mobile-Friendliness: Designing and optimizing pages to be responsive and mobile-friendly, as mobile-friendliness is a crucial ranking factor.
10. Page Load Speed: Improving page load times by optimizing images, using caching techniques, and minimizing unnecessary code.
11. Schema Markup: Implementing structured data markup to provide search engines with additional context about the content, improving rich snippets and appearance in search results.
12. Content Formatting: Using proper formatting techniques like bullet points, lists, and bold text to make content more scannable and user-friendly.
13. Outbound Links: Linking to credible external sources when relevant, can add authority and context to the content.
14. Social Sharing: Integrating social sharing buttons to encourage users to share the content on their social media profiles.

Why Is On-Page SEO Important?

On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines understand your website and its content, as well as identify whether it is relevant to a searcher’s query.

Previously we have already discussed how search engines work and how it’s getting more sophisticated.

So you’ll need to work on all of the on-page SEO methods that we’ll go through in this article if you want search engines to list your website more effectively.

Search engine especially Google has an amazingly complex algorithm and it’s getting better day by day to:

1. Understand what users are actually searching on the internet
2. Provide results to their searchers according to their search behaviour, location, intention, urgency, etc.

On-page SEO requires you to adapt to this search behaviour, which you can do by ensuring that your site content, such as text, images, video, or audio, is well-optimized for users and that HTML tags, structured data, and metadata are properly optimized for search engines.

If you put effort into on-page strategies, you’ll see a boost in traffic and a rise in your search presence.

To rank your content in 2023, you also need to optimize your content for:

• User experience
• Bounce Rate and Dwell Time
• Search Intent
• Page loading speed
• Click-through-rate
• Mobile Friendly

Optimization Of Url For SEO

SEO-Friendly URL is highly recommended.

Optimized URL helps search engines in crawling and indexing your web page efficiently.

For example, have a look at the three URL structures below.

• https://www.elegantespace.com/p=2749/
• https://www.elegantespace.com/12-02-19/on-page-seo-guide
• https://www.elegantespace.com/on-page-seo/

Now, which one is the best?

Obviously the third URL

Even Google has stated that the URL is actually more important now than before.

So make your URLs short and meaningful and avoid using special characters, symbols, brackets etc in the URL.

Optimize Your Page Title

A page title is one of the most important factors of On-Page SEO strategies.

Each of your pages and posts should have its own unique title and should be sprinkled with your main keyword.

The optimized and attractive title attracts more people… more people means more clicks and more clicks will help you to boost up your page rank in SERPs.

You should try to put the target keyword at the beginning of the title, if not possible, make sure to keep it somewhere in the title.

However, embedding keywords at the beginning of the title tag puts more weight.

Here is a live example of my post on the Best hosting company.

Always Use The H1 Tag In The Post Title

There are six heading tags H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (most important) level and H6 the least.

Generally, the H1 tag is reserved for the page title and make sure you only have one H1 tag that contains your target keyword.

Most CMS platforms (like WordPress) automatically add the H1 tag to the blog post title. If that’s the case, you’re all set.

However, this isn’t always the case. Make sure your title is encased in an H1 tag in your website’s code. And your keyword is contained within the H1 tag.

In some cases, the WordPress theme overrides the settings.

So consider checking your site’s code to make sure you only have one H1 tag per post.

Add Power Words In Your Title

Now, what does it mean by power words?

Words like “Ultimate”, “Premium”, “Proven”, “Powerful”, “Best”, “2024”, “Latest”, “Guide”, “Review” etc. are power words that grab attention and attract click on your page.

But wait a minute!

Power word should be used only if it is relevant to the post.

Unnecessarily use of these words can make your visitors angry and rather than improving page rank, your site will get penalized.

So don’t try to fool your visitors and search engines by embedding those keywords unnecessarily.

Use Your Target Keyword In The First 100 Words

It’s true, a keyword-rich article has a good chance of ranking in the search results but only if it is used in the correct ways.

Dropping your target keyword in the first 100 words of your article helps Google to understand what is your page all about.

Here is an example:

Why is this important?

Google puts more weight on terms that show up early on your page.

However, overuse of keywords can lead to your website being banned from the search engine.

Hence you should keep the keyword density to around 1.5%.

Optimize The Subheading Of Your Web Page

From the SEO point of view and for your visitors, make your article reader-friendly by breaking up your content into smaller sections.

To do so, use heading tags to highlight various headings and sub-headings.

For subsequent headings stick to H2 and H3 tags. However, if you want to add more subheadings then you can use H4, H5, and H6 tags to highlight the topic.

Sensible headlines are more useful than generic ones.

So include your target keyword in at least one subheading and wrap that subheading in an H2 tag.

If necessary then use the LSI keyword in other subheadings or else don’t use it, Google doesn’t like too much keyword stuffing.

Meta Tags And Descriptions

A meta description is a concise summary of a webpage that appears underneath the blue clickable link in SERPs (search engine result pages).

Having a unique and compelling description can improve the click-through rate (CTR) for a given webpage.

Again, you should include the target keyword in your meta descriptions but don’t spam it with keywords. It should look meaningful and reliable.

To maximize CTR, Google and other search engines automatically make the keyword bold in SERPs which draws the eyes of searchers.

So you should write your descriptions accordingly.

And Google Starter Guide recently recommended that you write your own meta descriptions.

To make things easier and simpler I recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin.

This plugin helps me in writing customized meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and much more in one go.

Add And Optimize Images And Videos To Engage Your Visitors

Putting images or videos in your blog post is a great way to make your site visually appealing.

Optimized images not only help in driving more traffic but also keep your visitors staying to your post.

It reduces bounce rate and increases time on site.

Also, having a focused keyword in the “image title” and “alt text” plays a significant role in on-page SEO strategies.

If your site is on WordPress then you can easily add alt text to your images as shown below.

So make sure to use keywords in alt text and in the title of an image.

But be careful

Having too many images and multimedia on your post may slow down your site and hamper your overall page rank.

To overcome this problem, consider:

• Compressing all the images
• Use webp version of images
• Use caching plugin
• Use CDN

Add LSI Keywords

Along with the target keyword, start using LSI keywords in your article for better SEO results.

LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is a keyword or phrase that contains words that are similar to your main keywords.

For example:

If your target keyword is “SEO”, then your LSI keywords could be “search engine optimization services”, “top SEO company”, or “website optimization”.

You can find relevant LSI keywords for your website from LSI Graph or you can use the Google search engine itself.

To do so, search for your keyword in Google and scroll down to the bottom of SERPs and choose some of the suggested topics from the “Search related area” as simple as that.

This way you will not only cover almost every important part of the topic but also you can write without the risk of being banned.

Internal And External Links

Both internal and external link plays a crucial role in the ranking factor of your webpage in SERPs.

Internal linking helps your visitors to navigate around your site and find all your content.

It won’t only provide a better user experience but also ensure that your site gets properly crawled.

Relevant internal linking tells the search engine that you are providing deep information regarding the article and you will get a golden chance to boost your page rank.

Apart from linking to your own blog post, you should also link your post to the relevant external website.

Websites with external links outranked the sites without them.

But make sure the website you are linking is trustworthy and relevant to your post.

However, if you are not sure about the authority of the external website you should use a nofollow tag to avoid passing the link juice to that site.

For example

This is a special tag attribute you can add to a link that tells the search engine not to count this particular link.

Actually, internal and external links are a good sign of writing a content-rich article and Wikipedia is a great example of this.

Adopt Responsive Design

Yes, websites which are not mobile-friendly are getting penalized by Google.

In the coming year, it will be a nightmare for all web owner whose website is not responsive in design because Google has rolled out MFI.

To check if your site is responsive, here is the recommended tool from Google.

This tool even detects the problem (if any) of your site. So you can work on that and make your site mobile-friendly.

Responsive design is not only a part of on-page SEO but also one of the most important SEO strategies of 2024.

If your website is not responsive/ mobile-friendly, I insist you make it now.

Write In-Depth Content: Pillar Of On-Page SEO

Make it a thumb rule “In-depth content = Complete On-Page SEO of a website”.

How?

Because if you post In-depth content then:

• You will cover almost every topic
• You will break up your content by using header tags
• You will use keywords in more place
• You will Automatically add LSI keywords
• You will get more chances to embed an internal and external link

In other words, the post that has less word count will not perform up to the mark.

Because they are usually less informative and Google give less importance to those post.

However, there are exceptions, but in general, try to make a post with at least 1900 words.

After analyzing thousands of Google search results. I found that the average word count of a first-page Google result was roughly around 1900 words.

To do so, collect all of the related queries that people are searching for on a specific topic, conduct some research, and begin writing an in-depth informative post.

Boost Site Speed

Google has indicated site speed as an SEO signal used by its algorithm to rank web pages (and recently they have given even more importance to Page Speed).

So make sure your website loads in under 2 seconds because a slow site completely hampers user experience which results in a high bounce rate.

If you want to know how fast your site is, then here is a website called pingdom.com where you can check your site performance too.

Like this (a result of my site):

The hosting I use helped me a lot in improving my site speed from 4.3 seconds to nearly 1 second.

Along with the best hosting, you should also consider using CDN, Compressed images, Minify CSS, JavaScript, HTML and the fastest theme like Astra.

Use Social Sharing Buttons

Social sharing comes under both On-Page SEO strategies and Off-Page SEO strategies and may not play a direct role in ranking your site.

But social share generates more eyeballs on your content and more eyeballs mean more clicks.

Having prominent social sharing buttons can increase social sharing by 700% and will automatically boost your page rank.

User-Friendly Navigation

The navigation of your website is a key component that directly impacts your business. Especially if you are running an e-commerce website.

If your visitors don’t find the product or service they are looking for, chances are they will hit the back button immediately and never return to your site.

So make sure your site has user-friendly navigation.

Encourage Blog Comment

A blog with lots of positive comments gives a slight dent in Google’s search results.

It shows people loving your content and interacting with you more and more. So it’s a good idea to ask your visitors to leave a comment on your blog post.

And believe me, genuine visitors always leave positive comments.

But again… Rich Content is the king of on-page SEO.

Let’s have a quick review of the entire topic:

Things to do:

• Write In-Depth content
• Put the keyword in the post title
• Insert optimized Images
• Use LSI keywords
• Make SEO-friendly URLs
• Switch to responsive design
• Work on site speed
• Ask visitors to take action

Things not to do:

• Keyword stuffing
• Don’t put more than one H1 tag
• Don’t try to fool search engines and visitors

Things that need to be careful of:

• Keywords in title and URLs
• Maximum 1.5% of keyword density
• Minimum 1900 words
• Drop your keyword in the first 100 words
• Customized meta descriptions
• Proper internal and external links

This is how on-page SEO works effectively.

And I am pretty sure if you follow all the above strategies, your web page will definitely get a significant hike in the SERPs.

Faqs And Most Asked Basic Questions On On-Page SEO