On-Page Search Engine Optimization (On-Page SEO)

So far you have learnt the fundamentals of SEO. From this point, you will know about different SEO techniques, strategies, tools and tips.

If you want to succeed in organic search, you need to strategize the right combination of on-page, off-page and technical factors.

There is an increased focus on off-page SEO techniques for years. However, smart SEO experts constantly prioritize on-page SEO techniques due to the ever-changing landscape of organic search.

If optimized properly, on-page SEO has a great impact on your website’s ability to rank on SERPs.

On-Page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website to improve visibility on search engine ranking and earn tons of organic traffic.

There are several things to be taken care of such as – content, HTML tags, images, site speed, etc. This factor ensures that your website has a high level of expertise and authoritativeness in any particular industry.

With a Plethora of Algorithms, search engines became more sophisticated with a greater focus on semantics on SERPs.

Let’s get started with the On-Page SEO factors that help you maximize your efforts on driving organic traffic.

Optimizing these features will help you improve the rank of your webpage in search results and will also make sure your website is on par with the competition.

URL

URL is nothing but the address of the website. It should always reflect the key service or description of the page’s topic.

For example – if you have a website on content writing services, a good URL will be www.website.com/content-writing-services.

Including the keyword in the URL makes your website easier to navigate. Also, it gives your audience a better understanding of your page topics.

It is advised to use well-organized URLs to improve the site’s architecture as well as help in search results.

Title Tag

It is the name of your webpage that appears on the search results. Google need to know what your page is about, to show up in relevant search results.

Using relevant & appropriate keyword in the title tags will help the search bots to know what your webpage is about.

For example – If your webpage is about content writing services, you can create the below title tag -

“Content Writing Services in India | Company Name”

For optimum results, the title tag should be around 55 characters. Make sure to insert the target keyword in the beginning.

Meta Description

The Meta Description helps users to know more about your page. It is an important element of on-page SEO that provides a concise summary of the webpages. It is a snippet of around 155 characters.

For example – The content highlighted in red is the Meta description

Search engines use this snippet to sketch out the quality of the webpage and the content on it. It is usually displayed when a page for a specific query in SERPs.

The SERPs can be enhanced through rich snippets i.e Meta description – as the first glimpse for potential users. So, the content on the Meta description should be created carefully.

It can have a decisive influence on the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).

Make sure to include the keyword in the Meta Description with appropriate Call-To-Action (CTA).

Heading Tags

Heading Tags are H1, H2, H3 and H4 headings that help you organize the content for better readability.

Additionally, they should be distributed evenly across the content. Make sure to break up the content into sections and make it more readable.

You can add the primary keywords in the heading tags to help search engines know more about the context of your webpage.

For example – if your page is about content writing services, you may use headings like –

• Benefits of Our Content Writing Services
• Why should you choose our Content Writing Services?
• Tips to Choose Best Content Writing Services

Make sure to use the target keyword in the H1 tags.

Keywords

Keywords are an important part of SEO, as everything revolves around the keywords. Each webpage on your site must have relevant keywords to help search engines know about the topic of the webpage.

Using keywords across the body of the page help search engines read and rank the page appropriately. Before you start working on the keywords, you should research and prepare a list of relevant keywords for each page on your website.

There are several tools for keyword research. Google Keyword Planner is one of the best tools that help you find relevant keywords to rank your webpage.

For detailed information on keyword research, refer to Chapter 7 – How to Do Keyword Research?.

High performing campaigns contain different types of keywords. Choose them wisely depending on your goals.

Content

Content is a crucial element of on-page SEO and is a primary reason for users to visit your website. Whether it is to check an update or read a blog post – your content plays an important role.

Optimizing your content for search engines can help it rank on SERPs. There are several best practices to optimize content, some of which are –

• Breaking content into sections
• Complementing content with images
• Using appropriate keywords in headings
• Avoid duplicate and low-quality content
• Providing valuable and informative content

Also, you need to keep adding content new pages (in the form of blogs) to your website regularly.  Go through Chapter 8- SEO Content Strategy to rank #1 on Search Engine Results.

Page Speed

Website or Page Speed is the measure of how fast the content on your website/page loads. It is one of the important factors that determine if the visitor found relevant information to his/her search query or not.

Search engines like websites that load faster, as it plays an important role in enhancing the user experience. Check the speed of your website on PageSpeed Insights.

You need to follow some basic practices like – compressing images, eliminating unnecessary code etc to improve the speed of the website.

Fast loading pages improve the user experience and increase your page views. For more tips on Page Speed Optimization, skip ahead to Chapter 9 – Quick ways to improve page loading speed.

Image Optimization

Image optimization is one of the important on-page SEO factors.

Images make an important part of SEO. They are crucial to know that the content is more attractive, accessible and engaging to the users.

Image optimization is the process of adding high-quality images in terms of format, size and resolution for better user engagement.

Search engines can’t understand the images. They understand the images with the “Alt Tag”. You can add descriptive names to the images to help search engines a better understanding of the images on the webpage.

Check out Chapter 10 – Tips to Optimize Images for SEO for more details on Image optimization. I am sure these actionable tips will help you drive more organic traffic to your website.

Internal Links

Well, I am a big fan of Internal Links!! These are some advanced techniques without which SEO is completely boring.

Internal Links are often overlooked by many SEO experts. However, they are easy to make and manage – and the best thing is that they are crucial for improving the page rank.

An Internal Link is any link from one page of the website to another page on the same website. It is a known fact that search engines and users check links to find the content they want to find.

There are several types of links that can be added to the content. They allow the search engines to determine the value of your content. Besides, they guide visitors to relevant and high-value content.

To know about detailed strategy on Internal Linking, jump to chapter 11 - Proven Internal Linking Strategies for more Conversions.

External links

Well, external links are the hyperlinks that point to other relevant sites.  Though they are an undervalued tactic in on-page SEO, they are important for SEO and user experience.

Also known as Outbound Links, they can improve the search visibility and rank of your website. The quantity and quality of external links matter a lot in SEO.

An external link is more valuable if it links to relevant and high domain authority sites. Whenever you link to another relevant and high PR site, they are likely to add a link to your site in their content.

No doubt, this kind of external linking is a great source of FREE traffic.

Go through chapter 12 – Best External Linking Practices for SEO to know more about managing and optimizing your website with the best external linking practices.