For new blogs and websites, building regular audience is the higher priority. SEO optimizations can be whole a lot of useful in such process. SEO factors are present both on the viewable part of the website and in architecture too. Those present on the web page are called on page and rests are known as off page SEO factors. In today’s discussion, we will be describing various on page SEO practices that can help to achieve a good search engine result/ rank for any niche. It ultimately helps to attract audience. However, maintaining that audience will be completely depended on the overall quality of your website and the service you provide.
What is On-page SEO?
Before jumping into various on page SEO techniques and on page SEO checklist, it is important to understand proper meaning of on page SEO optimization and how it is actually important for building good search engine ranking for your commercial or marketing website. Thus, we will discuss on page SEO definition first of all.
On page SEO is combination of various SEO factors that can be found on the user interface of any web page. Since they are present on the web page, web designers have direct influence upon them. These factors are too analyzed by search engine as it is done with off-page SEO factors in order to determine search engine or search result ranking of that particular page. Content of the web page, structure of HTML codes used to build that page and overall website architecture are some of the important factors related to on page SEO.
After understanding the on page SEO definition, here are the reasons why it is of great concern to online marketers and website holders / bloggers.
Importance of on page SEO
Improved on page SEO content will reflect as improved website rankings, which makes them even important for website marketers and bloggers. Since these factors are embedded on webpage, web designers possess the complete ability to control and manipulate there SEO factors and their influences over the search engine ranking of that page. Keyword research and quality leaves a great impact over content optimization. HTML titles and meta-tags are useful too, however, only web experts can manipulate these tags. Proper use of such HTML elements optimizes the architecture of the page making it comparatively easy for search engines to locate. However, over manipulating the content should never be a choice. Nowadays, search engines are updated enough to detect over manipulating activities and take steps to restrict them. There are possibilities for your website getting penalized for such activities. Thus, do not even think of trying them unless you want to ruin your website ranking.
Moving ahead in the discussion; now that you have under the proper on page SEO definition, one many definitely want their own blog to be completely optimized with various SEO techniques to achieve best possible rank in search engine results. Next in this discussion, we will be describing some effective on page SEO techniques that would help you to increase search engine rankings of your page in search engine results.
On page SEO techniques
Online business, commerce and the field of online marketing are growing with the speed of bits and bytes. A number of new websites, blogs and online stores are launched on daily basis, with intentions of establishing a well developed online business. However, most of the people, launching their first website are totally new to the online and blogging community. They lack enough knowledge or various off page and on page SEO techniques that may help them a lot. Here are some most useful and verified techniques among them. Consider it an on page SEO tutorial since we will be providing unique examples for each of these techniques so you can figure out their practical implementation easily.
- Appropriate Page Titles:
Title given to each page is an important SEO factor while ranking the webpage in search result. One should make sure that each page has its own unique title that is relevant too content and contains all main keywords related to content of the page. These keywords can also be the targeted search keywords. Consider that you have a blog that contains different recipes. You are now planning to add one more recipe for chocolate cake. Targeted search keywords for this post would be “chocolate cake recipe”. Make it sure that title of you webpage containing this recipe / post contains these keywords. So your title would be something like “easy chocolate cake recipe” or “creamy chocolate cake recipe” and so on.
Now whenever someone will Google “chocolate cake recipe”, your page will possess a better change of showing up in the results since these keywords are embedded in your web page title.
- Meta keywords / descriptions:
Meta description is important factor in SEO optimization however, ignored by most of the people. Meta description can be used to insert relevant keywords related to your content. It will boost your search engine ranking since Meta description is used to prepare search engine results.
Let us demonstrate this on page SEO technique with the same example as above. For the page describing a chocolate cake recipe, the description can be like, “This chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most easy and delicious that will make you a tasty chocolate cake”. This Meta description includes a number of relevant keywords such as following:
- Chocolate
- Chocolate cake
- Chocolate cake recipe
- Easy
- Delicious
- Tasty chocolate cake
One may wonder that why chocolate cake and chocolate is written as separate keyword. Always remember that Meta description of a webpage is treated by search engines as a superset of words which means each single word and every possible combination of those words are treated as keywords (both which make sense and which do not). Whenever such a combination is inputted as search keywords, your chances increase to be at the top.
- Using Meta Tags:
A Meta tag allows us to insert multiple keywords that are related to our content so search engine finds it easy to reach our page. Meta tags and descriptions need to be embedded with HTML codes and tags properly in order to provide proper functionality. A non-IT person may find it difficult to code on very own. For such persons, there are various plug-in of automated website developers that make the work easy. By using this plug-ins you can insert Meta tag keywords, description and page title manually after you create each new page / post on your website. Such plug-ins can be easily found on wordpress, wix, etc. Despite of you are able to insert any number of keywords, keep them limited to 5 to 10 since a search keyword is rarely that long and use most relevant keywords only.
- Embedding keywords in URL:
SEO friendly URLs are great way of increasing performance of your website in search engine results. Shorter URLs easily dominate longer one when it comes to search engine result rankings. However, the length of the URL is not the only factor that matters. Embedding targeted search keywords in the URLs is another great technique. When doing so position of these keywords matters a lot. Just remember to keep your URL as short as possible and embed the keywords effectively.
For a simplest example, URL for this website can be www.defaulturl.com/on-page-SEO-techniques. This kind of URL will perform much better in SEO rankings compared to www.defalturl.com/article-461113.
- Proper use of HTML body tags:
To make content easier to read, break it into various sections and paragraphs much smaller to the main content body. Each of these section or paragraph should be given a heading. Don’t just bold and underline the heading. Instead, use a proper body tag such as H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 should contain the main title of your content. Use H2, H3, and H4 for upcoming subheading according to their priority. Use rich content headlines and avoid using generic one. This method helps the search engine identify what is important in your page. Consider the following example.
<H1> Main heading
<H2>Point 1
<H3> point 1.1, 1.2, etc.
<H2>Point 2
<H3> point 2.1, 2.2, etc.
<H4> point 2.1.1, etc.
I hope I have not confused you with this. You may now understand how these heading tags are supposed to be used.
- Keyword Density:
Remember that search engines are just another computer programs operating on human instructions on the basis of programming codes. They will never understand what your content is all about unless you provide enough amounts of relevant keywords in your content. For example,
Search query: tasty chocolate cake recipe
Your content: This recipe will teach you how to prepare delicious chocolate cake.
What search engine sees: This recipe will teach you how to prepare delicious chocolate cake.
However, never try to spam your content with a lot of keywords just for the sake of search engine robots. Doing so can get your website banned on search engines since they are now developed enough to detect such spam keywords. Keep the ratio of keywords between 2 to 5 percent of the total content and you will never run into any trouble. Broaden your vocabulary and use words with similar meaning in the content. This way you can use more relevant content without getting your website banned.
- Images:
Use of images is common on the website and blogs since it helps to maintain the attachments with the content, avoids boredom and represents the information more attractively. Besides being used for SEO optimization, these images can also be optimizing in order to increase search engine result ranking of the page and ultimately the website. Images used on the websites have titles. These titles should be treated the same way as other titles. Using relevant keywords in image titles will make it easy to find them when searching on Google images. Alternative text and description of the image can be treated in this same way to improve the performance.
- Internal Linking:
Internal links are those links on your webpage that redirect the user to other page of the very same website. Such links can be used as a good on page SEO technique to achieve the some good ranking in search results. There are two important advantages of these links. First one is that users or visitors of your site will find it much easier to navigate on various pages of the website. Second one is for search engine robots. Thanks to these links, search engines will be able to scan the whole website rather than just a single page. Google page ranks can be highly increased with this technique.
This technique can be applied in various possible ways, such as providing links for contact information, other titles, home page, content list, etc.
This on page SEO tutorial and techniques might definitely have made your understandings clear about on page SEO optimization. Here is a checklist based on all the on page SEO techniques described above that every new / established website must follow for brilliant search engine ranking. Let’s call it on page SEO checklist, since it is based on on-page optimization methods:
On-page SEO checklist
- Is your content high-quality, original and relevant?
- Is length of your webpage is appropriate to suite readers perspective? (Keep it between 500-1000 words)
- Is targeted search keyword included in page heading?
- Does at least one of your subheadings contain targeted search keywords or phrase?
- Make sure that the targeted search keywords are not repeated on a same page more than 10 times, it will get your website banned on search engine.
- Are targeted keywords embedded in the content in a meaningful way?
- Do images and symbols on your webpage reflect your subject?
- Make sure to use relevant captions for images and symbols that reflect the targeted keywords.
- Make sure that tools for sharing your webpage on various online platforms are accessible for your visitors.
- In page footers, make sure to include your locality so specific audience from that location would be targeted.
- Avoid grammar mistakes or your rank would be downgraded.
- Give interaction options for visitors through comments or messages. Such active pages attract more audience easily.