What is on-page SEO? and how to do on-page SEO
As a business owner, you must have a website and implement the most effective SEO techniques in order to rank high on the SERPs. But do you know the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing website components such as keyword density and page speed. It refers to actions on your website, such as content optimization and simplified navigation, to improve search engine rankings.
In contrast, off-page SEO focuses on elements outside of your website that affect your search engine rankings. It refers to actions outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other leading websites to improve search engine rankings.
Experienced and skilled SEO professionals clearly understand their differences and implement the most effective techniques.
Since this article is all about on-page SEO, you'll learn what it is, why, and how to optimize it, evaluate optimization, and monitor competitor brand performance.
Let's dive into the water.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the optimization your website includes that you control. If you work on SEO, it will drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. If you work on SEO, it will drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. On-page optimization can make your website user-friendly and increase online visibility and search engine rankings.
When it comes to on-page SEO, you need to optimize certain factors to improve search results and enhance your website. Here are the factors you should optimize for:
Key words
URL
title tag
title tag
meta description
content
mobile friendliness
picture
ALT tags
Internal link
speed
For the best on-page SEO results, you need to write high-quality and informative content, optimize meta descriptions and title tags, clean up site code, simplify navigation, and speed up your site.
Why Prioritize On-Page SEO?
Google crawls your site's content to see if it's a relevant result for a user's search query. The crawling process involves searching for relevant trending keywords.
On-page SEO is more than just adding keywords to your content. Google looks for the most relevant search results for a query, so their algorithms look for other relevant content on the site. If your website is about cosmetics, you don't need to specify various varieties. Google knows there may be more relevant search results online.
Since relevance is an important part of on-page SEO, you should strive for the highest search engine rankings. You should always create rich on-page SEO content to manage the SERPs.
Now, let's discuss how to do this.
How to draft SEO content?
Before doing technical optimizations, such as placing keywords throughout your content, you need to draft what Google likes to rank for. To rank well on the SERPS, you need to keep your main keywords in mind and focus on the following:
Association
Relevance, i.e. content alignment with search intent, is an important element of on-page SEO. Since Google understands search intent in the best possible way, you should start analyzing your current top search results to understand the 3 Cs of search intent - Content Type, Content Format, and Content Angle.
The most common content types are blogs, landing pages, categories, products, and videos. Remember that there is about a 50/50 split between ecommerce pages and blog posts in search results. Many searchers are looking to shop but not learn, so you tend to rank higher for keywords with e-commerce sites, as shown in the screenshot below.
Content formats are mostly suitable for blogs, as they are usually lists, how-tos, articles, news, reviews, and opinion articles.
The content angle is not clear, which is the key "selling point" of the content. The perfect content angle is the user's guess. So choose the angle that you think will most appeal to and benefit searchers.
When it comes to aligning your content with searchers' expectations, you shouldn't go with the flow. To capture the attention of searchers with unique types, formats, and angles, you should keep trying.
Refinement
To appear on the first page of the SERPs, your content should contain all the elements your target customers want to see in search results. Once you've identified the 3Cs of search intent, you'll have an idea of what a searcher might want to see.
If you evaluate the 3Cs, you get a clear picture of intent. To understand your content elements, you need to research further by evaluating relevant top-level pages. Many web pages divide a topic into subtopics with subheadings, which helps you understand what searchers are looking for, mainly if you see the same subheadings across multiple pages.
When writing your listing, look for subheadings for information related to certain products or services you might want to include. Find keyword intersections and common subheadings between multiple pages to analyze them more efficiently. You can then build content for searchers, adding the elements they care about most.
In addition to analytics pages, you can check SERP features such as the "People Also Ask" box and featured snippets.
Unique
Your searchers should always get what they want, but you should offer them something unique. If your content is the same as that of many other sites, no one will want to link to your content. When writing website content, you need to be as creative as possible.
Embed videos in your posts to drive traffic from Google. When a user visits your page, likes the tip you shared and wants to share it with others, they have no choice but to share or link to your page.
You may find it difficult to build a unique product/category page, but you can use high-quality filters, product photography, unique descriptions and reviews.
Clear
Your content may align with search intent, but if it's vague, no one will read it. To write clear content, add the following elements to it:子弹
Descriptive subheadings for the hierarchy (H2 to H6)
image of visual rest
Simple words and short sentences/paragraphs
large font
spoken language
You need to know what searchers need to find the information they are looking for. When your site contains everything people want to know but can't find, they tend to hit the "back" button to find pages with clear information.
How to Optimize On-Page SEO
It's not enough to know the factors that affect your on-page SEO. You need to know how to optimize it. It takes time to optimize your website components and get the results you want.
However, depending on different factors, you can build a well-optimized website if you follow these tips:
Keywords are words used for SEO purposes to target trending search queries. Add relevant keywords to every page on your website to describe the topic. If you add a keyword to your entire website content, Google can read it and rank it high on the SERPs. Pages that aren't well optimized, like a "contact us" page, can even help your brand gain a massive online presence.
You can research and collect keywords for every page on your website. Use keyword research tools to understand the keywords people search for your products and services. Check valuable metrics such as competition and monthly search volume to find keywords that add high value to your website content.
The content in the screenshot above shows how the author adds the keyword "SEO services" to return search engines for that keyword and reach the target audience. Many companies use long-tail keywords (3 to 4 words) with low monthly search volume and competition. You can easily find the search intent behind long keywords because they are more specific.
When people search for short-term keywords, they can't understand exactly what they want. Depending on your business goals, you can add short-term and long-term keywords to your SEO campaign.
URL
A URL is like the address of a web page on the Internet. It requires a short description of your web page topic.
Instead of a string of numbers, you should add relevant keywords ("SEO Services" in the screenshot above) to your URL, as this makes your site easier to navigate and helps people understand the topic of the page easily. Always use the correct URL to improve your website framing and search engine rankings.
Title tag
Heading tags are tags that separate content from H1, H2, H3, and H4 to improve content readability (see image below).
You need title tags for readers and search engines. Lets you use them throughout your content in a way that improves readability. The image above shows "How to do SEO for your blog" as an H1 and "Create content your readers will love" H2.
Including main or related keywords in order to provide more context for your page's search engines can be a wise step. When writing your title tag, make sure to target your main keyword in your H1.
Title tag
The title tag is the title of the web page that only appears in the SERPs. To show your site in the SERPs, Google needs to know the full content of your page. Search engine crawlers can easily read your website when you use specific keywords in the title (<title>, </title>) of each page.
The screenshot above shows a meta description ("Get more customers with affordable SEO services" for the keywords "SEO services" and "affordable SEO services". To rank high on the SERPs and prevent Remove title tags from Google search results, keep it within 55 characters.
Meta description
A meta description is a summary of the content of a web page displayed in the SERPs. It doesn't directly boost on-page SEO, but it helps users understand your page. Since Google will display user search terms in bold in your meta description, you should optimize your meta description for on-page SEO.
The meta description you can see in the screenshot above has the keyword "SEO agency" in bold.
You should add main and relevant keywords to your meta description to get the desired search engine results. Make sure your meta description is 160 characters or less.
content
Your content provides responses to users and context to search engines. If you have great web content, users will visit your site repeatedly to view product pages or read blogs. Content optimization helps search engines interpret and rank your website on the SERPs.
Here's what you should do to optimize your on-page SEO content:
Add relevant keywords to headings, subheadings, and paragraphs.
Divide content into headings (H1.H2.H3 and H4).
Include images to add value to the content.
Make sure the spelling and grammar in your content are correct.
Build trust with your content.
Frequently add new content to your website (blog posts and landing pages) so that search engines know that you are active online.
Identify and remove duplicate content, as search engines tend to get confused about which pages to rank for. Also, website visitors get confused when taking action. Since duplicate content can adversely affect your on-page SEO, you should frequently check your site to identify and remove similar content.
Mobile friendliness
Mobile friendliness reflects the accessibility of your website on mobile devices. You should have a mobile-friendly website that accounts for more than 50% of your online traffic from such devices. If tablet and smartphone users are inaccessible, your website ranking will automatically drop. Search engines consider mobile friendliness as a search engine ranking factor. Therefore, if your website is not optimized for mobile devices, you will miss out on high-quality leads and revenue.
Make sure you build a responsive website as it will help you add new content and upgrade your website.
Take the "mobile friendliness test" mentioned above to check your website's responsiveness.
Picture
Images are multimedia that help Internet users understand your website content, break down your content, and improve on-page SEO. Images make your website more user-friendly and improve search engine rankings.
Using images, you can easily describe complex concepts or characteristics. Make sure to compress images before using them, as oversized multimedia can slow down your website. Images make your website more user-friendly and improve search engine rankings.
Don't forget to add alt text for the image in Image Settings (check the photo above) and add a transcript for the video. Adding target keywords to alt text can make your site ADA compliant.
ALT tags
Use ALT tags as they provide more information about images and videos. Search engines don't see multimedia, so they read ALT tags to understand them.
The part highlighted in yellow in the image above is the ALT tag for the "Doritos Nacho Cheese" image. In addition to ALT tags, you can give image files a descriptive name so Google can understand your multimedia. ALT tags can also help people who cannot view or access your web content and make your site accessible to all users.
Internal link
Internal links are links to and from your website pages. As your site grows, you should prioritize internal linking as this helps search engine crawlers crawl your site. Crawlers can find new content and interpret the context of various web pages.
If you have few links to your website, users tend to miss out on valuable content on your website, reducing your conversion rate. Add links to/from related and old content in new web pages.
You can implement various internal linking strategies. Just make sure every new page has 2 to 3 links and never force links. If you can't find relevant content on other pages, create pillar content.
page speed
Page speed estimates how fast content on a web page loads. Users have the shortest attention span, with 53% of them leaving the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Remember, people always want instant information online. Search engines consider page speed as a ranking determinant.
To optimize your web page speed, you should control its speed. If your website loads faster, it can rank high in search engine results. PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for speeding up your website. Follow specific page speed optimization strategies, such as compressing image size and removing extra encoding.
Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques
Once you've completed basic on-page SEO techniques, you'll need to upgrade to implement the following advanced strategies:
Featured Snippet
Featured Snippets appear above other organic search results and are therefore very valuable. They come in many forms - definitions, tables, lists and videos.
Since Featured Snippets appear in "position 0," they help increase CTR. You need to find out if you have featured snippets for the keywords you are tracking and if there are additional opportunities. You can see which site has snippets you like and build content on their site to increase click-through rates.
Consider competitor research and check that your feature snippets contain feature snippets that don't. See if it has a user-friendly and concise query definition, answers the question directly with enough detail, and has a helpful list that matches search intent.
You can restructure your content based on relevant featured snippets and target keywords to provide a better user experience.
page speed
Google has said that page speed is a ranking signal for desktop and mobile. You can use the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool to get performance scores for desktop and mobile devices. The tool also provides actionable suggestions to improve rankings.
Senrush helps you learn more about your website's performance with site audit tools. The Core Web Vitals report shows if any particular pages are slowing down your site and how to improve it.
pattern tag
Schema Markup may be a technical component of advanced on-page SEO and a kind of digital roadmap for Google bots. Google uses automated robots to help them crawl, index, and deliver your web content.
Google relies on a simple technical language called schema markup to understand what your site is about and how pages relate to each other. Coding vocabulary is also known as structured data.
Pattern markers signal when content involves events, products, people, recipes, reviews, medical conditions, organizations, and local businesses. The pattern markup used by website promotions helps Google understand that they can show this type of activity more prominently in search results.
Schema Markup looks like a lot of code. If you're willing to experiment with creating structured data, check out the Google Schema Markup Testing tool to make sure you've created your code correctly. After implementing the coding, focus on Sutw Audit to identify any issues with structured data.
How to monitor your and your competitors' on-page optimization
After optimizing your website for on-page SEO, you should monitor its performance using a tool or manually. Check that each page has relevant keywords to pass users on, do you link pages to each other in your website and post content frequently. Remember that your website should always load quickly as a slow website will irritate your visitors. Therefore, you should immediately find and fix those issues that are slowing down your website.
When monitoring your competitors' SEO, visit their website to find out what they are currently doing. Competitor website analysis can help you understand which areas of your website need improvement. After dealing with on-page SEO, you can see that your website ranks highly on the SERPs.
bottom line
So, here's everything you need to know about on-page SEO, how to optimize your website, and monitor your and your competitors' on-page SEO performance. Competition is fierce in today's business world, and you shouldn't be left behind by poor on-page SEO.
Make sure you implement the most effective on-page optimization techniques above to get the desired ranking on the SERPs. As mentioned earlier, you can hire a professional for on-page SEO and grow your business significantly.
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