In today's digital world, having an online presence is crucial for any business to grow. However, just having an online presence is not enough. Search engine optimization includes on-page, off-page, and technical SEO that marketers need to focus on to enhance the website's performance. With so much competition in online marketing, it's essential to focus on crucial on-page SEO tips such as conducting keyword research, optimizing content, and more, to drive organic traffic to your website. In this blog post, we will discuss the most important on-page search factors to consider in a marketing strategy. In this blog, let us discuss how performing these essential on-page SEO tips helps in achieving the desired marketing ROI and effectively optimizing your website to rank it on SERPs.
What is on-page SEO?
Performing on-page SEO is the most crucial factor in enhancing website ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). By optimizing the elements on our website such as keyword placements, headlines, HTML tags, alt text images, meta descriptions, etc., we provide search engines with information about what our website is all about. Since most of the on-page SEO elements are under our control, it is vital to use them effectively to increase our website's authority and trustworthiness. Therefore, we must pay great attention to how we perform on-page SEO on our web pages.
Importance of on-page SEO
The importance of on-page SEO lies in the fact that it helps search engines determine whether to display your website on search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for relevant content. On-page SEO provides search engines with information about your website's content and relevance to user search queries. For instance, popular search engines like Google and Bing rely heavily on SEO signals to rank websites, and they prioritize user experience when doing so. Therefore, when optimizing your website for search engines, ensure that your content is user-friendly and easy for both users and search engines to understand. Remember that your website's ranking depends on how well you balance user experience and search engine optimization.
On-page SEO vs off-page SEO
Though we use both tactics to improve our site ranking on SERPs, the difference is that in on-page SEO, we do all the optimization on our web pages internally while on our site. Creating quality content, targeting the right keywords, right keyword placement, adding both internal and external links, Alt text the visuals, and optimizing the title tag are some examples of on-page SEO. The best thing about on-page SEO is that all those things are in your hands, and it all depends on your skills and how you optimize them. The off-page SEO is what we do outside our sites to optimize the rank of our site on SERPs. By doing the off-page SEO, we try to convey to the search engines that our sites have more expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Unlike on-page SEO in off-page, we have very limited control over it. link building, content marketing, GMB listing, guest posting, and local SEO are some examples of off-page SEO.
On-page SEO vs technical SEO
As discussed above, on-page SEO is all about doing all the optimization processes on our site, like choosing the right keywords, keyword placement, adding links to your content, and so on while being on your site. In technical SEO, we optimize all the back-end of a site so that search engines like Google and Bing can crawl it even better and our website can rank higher on search engine results. content management system(CMS), page speed, mobile friendliness, robot.txt, XML sitemaps, and structured data markup(“schema”) are some of the techniques to do technical SEO.
Core essentials for on-page SEO
We know that on-page SEO is optimizing our web pages to make them user and search-engine-friendly, so there are some essential tips and points you need to cover while doing on-page SEO.
1. Keyword research - Keyword research is the most important part of on-page SEO as all your work for website ranking depends on how relevant your SEO keywords are to drive website traffic. To conduct keyword research there are many free as well as paid tools available online where you can get the search volume and competitor analysis and many more options to choose the best keywords you are looking for. You can also filter those results with whatever location you want as well. Google Keyword Planner, Semrush tool, Uber Suggest, and Ahrefs tool are some of the tools you can use for SEO keyword research.
2. Quality content - The first and foremost thing to understand before writing quality content is user search intent, yes if you want to rank higher you should know what people are looking for and that you are solving their issues with your content. Now, you can move to content ideas for this there are tools available like Semrush topic research tool and Ahrefs, etc. You also need to focus on the format and readability of the content. Writing short sentences, adding images, using bullets and number lists, and writing in the right tone give the content uniqueness and needed quality.
3. Keyword density and placement - While writing the content, you must be a little attentive to the keyword density and placement. As per search engine algorithms, you need to target your keywords in the right density and at the right place, as this will lead your site to the top of SERPs. Google and other top search engines respond best when the keyword density is around 0.5%. So, to make your website rank on SERPs, it is advisable that you put approximately 10 keywords per 1000 words on your page, i.e., your keyword density does not exceed more than that; otherwise, it would be counted as keyword stuffing and search engines hate these artificial optimizations of content so, make sure to put keywords naturally.
4. Title tags - Title tags also known as Page titles are the most important part of on-page SEO as they tell the visitor and search engine what is the page all about. To make title tags more effective you can use the focus keyword in each page of the website. For example, if we write outsource email marketing then it would be written like this.
5. Header tags - Just like printing pages, the Header tags are used for introducing the content below them. The header tags are useful for the readers as well as search engines to give the outline of the content. H1 Tags are used for the most important keyword or content title. H2 and H3 are used for the subheadings and lastly, H4, H5, and H6 are used for the other upcoming subsections.
6. Images alt-text - There are reasons why we do optimize all those images on our site pages the first reason is when users visit the site and any image fails to upload, then those texts will help the viewer to know what the image is all about, and the second and most important reason behind images alt text makes those images to visually impaired people as the reader on search engine read those texts for them. The images alt-text also helps the crawler to index your site smoothly, also this increases the traffic on your site as they rank on the Google images section.
7. Meta description - While doing on-page SEO writing the meta description is equally important; they are the short descriptions of your page content. While it is not important in terms of page ranking on SERPs, they play a pivotal role in getting traffic to your site. Meta descriptions are visible to the user on search engine result pages below the website's name and help the users to know what the content is all about and help increase the clicking rate.
8. Page URLs -Page URLs are the texts that are made to replace the IP address, it consists of a protocol, domain name, and a path. A good URL makes the user and search engine understand the landing page. The URLs also play an important role in ranking the website on SERPs when placing the keywords in the URLs as well.
9. Site speed - Site speed is one of the measuring factors search engines use to rank the website on SERPs. The Site Speed depends the what web hosting you are using as well as the page sizes on your site. The size of images, catchy infographics, and videos directly impact on speed of the site. Google Search Console and Semrush site audit are some of the tools that can be used to analyze the site speed.
10. Sitemaps - By adding sitemaps we tell the search engines which pages, files, and data are important on our site. E.g. when the page was last updated or any alternate language versions of the site pages, image location, video running time, article title, and publication dates are some of the methods of doing the site mapping. If your site is large you should go for adding the sitemaps for it as it will help search engines know even the smallest data on your site.
11. Internal Links - Internal links on your site help the search engine crawl and index it better. Doing the internal linking on your site helps us to pass the authority to the other pages on our site. Internal linking also helps the user on your site to navigate better and find relevant content on the site.
12. Mobile optimization - Mobile optimization is important while doing on-page SEO on the site, by optimizing the site for mobile we make our site and pages accessible for the users who visit our sites through their mobile devices. Writing meta descriptions, creating titles, and using schema.org structured data are some of the ways of doing mobile optimization.
13. Schema markup - Schema markup does not just give our site a different appearance from others but also impacts the ranking on SERPs as it helps the crawler to understand the content and pages on the site easily. There are different types of schema markup but search engines like Google only support 35 of them. Local business markup, product markup, and article markup are some examples of it. There are some ways to do schema markup efficiently like:
a. Choosing the right schema type that should match the content type on the site page.
b. It is better to change or update the schema from time to time according to your content.
c. Do not use any irrelevant schema that does not match the content on your site page, to rank on SERPs unfairly.
d. Keep yourself updated with the information about schema markup guidelines which change from time to time.
On-page SEO tools
There are various online search engine optimization tools available to help you do on-page SEO for your site easily without getting into too many technical issues. You just need to know their basic functionality and you are good to go. If you want to hire SEO professionals, you can also Outsource SEO services and get the work done by experts.
I. Google Keyword Planner - Google Keyword Planner is a PPC tool but you can also use it to find the keywords with the search volume and the average keyword bidding costs. You can also filter your results with options like a specific location, excluding and including any keyword. It also provides a forecast of how well your keyword will perform in the future.
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II. Google Trends - Google Trends as its name itself suggests, is a tool by Google that provides data according to search trends over time. There are options available to filter the results by geographic location, topic categories, and time.
III. Google Search Console - Google Search Console is a tool by Google that tells your overall site health and provides you the option to monitor how your site is performing on search engines. Identifying and fixing errors, overviewing search performance, and reviewing the internal and external links on your site are some of the features of Google Search Console.
IV. Google Analytics - If you have your site and you are not using a tool like Google Analytics then for sure you are not going to catch your competitors forever. Google Analytics provides your website data by connecting through it. Here you can track the website traffic, bounce rates, visitor information, and sessions and can also track the goal campaign and activities of your site. The best thing is you can also integrate this tool with other tools like Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google AdSense, etc.
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V. Semrush -Semrush is one of the easiest tools when it comes to doing on-page SEO. Semrush provides a lot of features that will help improve your site performance on SERPs. Features like SEO, SMM, PPC, keyword research, content marketing, competitive research, and campaign management are available on Semrush which will help the marketer to hone the marketplace.
VI. Google Data Studio - Google Data Studio or Google Looker Studio is a visualization tool that helps to create customizable dashboards and prepare understandable reports, it also helps us to track KPIs, visualize trends, and compare the performances over time. One of the best features of Google Data Studio is, that it allows the user to connect above 150 data sources and also makes the sharing and collaboration of reports easy.
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On-page SEO checklist
By following this checklist you can compare whether your on-page SEO task is on the right track or not. Here are some of the points:
a. Ensure you are using your targeted keyword in the URL as this will help search engines know your page better and can lead to ranking your website on top of SERPs.
b. Unique and plagiarism free content is most important in an on-page SEO checklist. Writing unique content gives a good impression to your site and search engines also promote unique and user-friendly content.
c. While writing the content you should always include your keyword in the content body as it gives relevancy to the content.
d. Using headers in the content not only helps the search engine to crawl and index your page better but it is also a user-friendly thing to do that decreases the bounce rates from your site and pages.
e. Optimizing images and visuals with alt-text is another important thing to do while doing on-page SEO as it helps provide a better ranking on Google.
f. Adding meta description provides another strength to your site that directly impacts the clicks and traffic on your site.
g. SEO audit is a method to analyze the website performance on search engines as it provides the problems with your website and gives the options to fix them.
h. SEO report is another essential process to focus on while going through the on-page SEO as it informs which search engine optimization practices are giving the best results for your site.
i. Adding internal links and external links to your site provides credibility and authority to your site and search engines like it too so, make sure to link your site with internal and external links.
Conclusion
In conclusion, knowing that on-page SEO is very crucial when it comes to ranking our website on SERPs doing it the right way, and following the important tactics make us stand different and provide an edge over our competitors. As on-page SEO is done on the pages and almost everything is in our control in comparison to off-page SEO so, it's up to us how we do it in the right way. keyword research, unique content, image optimization, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions are some examples of doing on-page SEO. tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Semrush are some of the tools that help us to do SEO better. After doing search engine optimization outsource SEO audits and outsource SEO reports are the better and easiest ways to determine whether all your SEO tactics are working or not.
References:
. On-page SEO: what it is and how to do it
. The complete guide to on-page SEO