Do you need to improve your on-page SEO and rank top in major search engines?
You might have been running you site for a long time now and still wondering why your site does not rank in major search engines, or maybe you just started blogging and are wondering what next! How do you rank on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and many others?
Well! Here is a guide on where to start optimizing your site to make it easy for your reader to find you on the major search engines.Now you might be thinking SEO stands for “Something Extremely Obscure” and you just might be right. As a marketer you are responsible for staying on top of what can feel like endless Google algorithm updates because if you fail you risk not showing up in search engines most targeted keywords.
Search engine optimization can be categorized in two different parts:
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
Today’s article will focus on on-page optimization, and I will be sharing lots of good on-page SEO techniques you should implement while working on optimizing your blog posts.
But first…
What is On-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO (sometimes referred to as On-Site SEO) the practice of optimizing web content for search engines. Proper On-Page Optimization of a page will ensure that it ranks higher on search engines for relevant keywords and drive targeted traffic.
Why is on-page SEO important?
In the world of online marketing SEO is a necessary evil. SEO makes content available to search engines and also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.
Good SEO practices can help increase site visibility, site visits thus increasing customers to help grow your business. Wrong approaches to SEO can bury your site, thus derailing your business leading to loss of customers.
On-Page SEO Techniques to Improve Higher Rankings
On-page SEO techniques, as you may be already aware, are one of the biggest SEO ranking factors and it has the ability to make or break your website.
Here are a few basic On-page SEO factors that can impact the search engine rankings of a page on search engines.
1. Page Titles Optimization
Page titles play a major role in SEO as they help readers and the search engine to understand at a glance what you post is about. Make sure to include your target keyword in the title for the page. The closer the keyword is to the beginning of the title tag, the more weight it has with search engines. Use modifiers like “2017”, “best”, “guide”, and “review” can help you rank for long tail versions of your target keyword.
2. Meta Descriptions Optimization
Meta descriptions appear below the page title in the SERP. They can help increase CTR, but nowadays, they actually don’t have a direct impact on rankings. They’re there for humans, not search engine crawlers, and you should use them to tell searchers why they should click on your result. Use one of your target keywords or phrases in your meta description so they know your content is relevant to their query, but make it attractive to the viewer, too.
3. Proper URL Structure
Have your target audience in mind when creating urls, that is descriptive of your page contents and easy to read. Consider using keywords and separate them with hyphens removing extra words like “a”, “the” and “and”. NOTE: Avoid keyword stuffing because you will be penalized, remember the golden rule of SEO, “You can never trick the search engine!”
One way to create good SEO friendly urls is directory structuring. It helps you create urls like:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/seo/tips-to-improve-your-on-page-seo
Rather than:
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?route=information/information&information_id=5
Such is not memorable, gets your audience lost as compared to the first url. Again in the first url if a user removes the last part they land on a page with all posts falling in the category SEO and so on.
Practice good url structuring and google will notice you and most importantly your audience will remember the url easily.
4. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)
Headings are not the primary factor that Google uses to rank your website in 2018. Google is rating the quality of your website. Headings are signposts that guide readers through an article. Because people tend to read them carefully, they should indicate what a paragraph is about, or people won’t know what to expect. Also, headings may help them get back on track if they get lost in (poor) writing.
The h1 tag should contain your targeted keywords, ones that closely relate to the page title and are relevant to your content. The h2 tag is a subheading and should contain similar keywords to your h1 tag. Your h3 is then a subheading for your h2 and so on. Think of them as a hierarchy based on importance, the above being more important than the below.
Keep in mind that it’s also very import that your header tags are readable and grammatically correct. Stuffing your h1, h2 and h3 with keywords is not going to help your cause. If anything, Google will recognize this and assume you are trying to manipulate them.
5. Keyword Density
Keyword density is the percentage of the number of times a keyword appears on a page divided by the total number of words in that page. The higher the search volume for a given keyword, the more correlated it is with being featured on a ranking page. That means high-volume keywords were more likely to appear in titles, descriptions, and the body of pages that ranked high for those queries.
6. Image SEO
Adding images is a good way to make your webpages more appealing. But not all images are created equal – some can even slow down your website.
Optimizing images properly will help you make the most of a valuable SEO asset.
Image optimization has many advantages, such as:
- Additional ranking opportunities (show up on Google Image Search).
- Better user experience.
- Faster page load times.
Images shouldn’t be an afterthought. Make sure to incorporate images that support your content and use descriptive titles and alt text.
7. Proper Internal Linking
Linking to other pages within your website is also key as it helps search engines to understand the hierarchy of your pages. This makes it easy for search engines to easily find your pages and how they relate thus making it easy to index.
Closing Remarks
Now, I may not have been pre-emptive on this topic, for instance I will just mention some other On-Page SEO factors/ SEO techniques that are just as important to making sure you are upto date with your On-Page SEO. Some of these include Keyword , E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), Keyword Cannibalization, User Engagement, Page loading speed among others.
Search engine optimization is evolving and will keep evolving for as long as it keeps making user experience to the best state it can be. This is to encourage you as a content developer to deliver the best content to your readers. If you exercise these techniques you can improve your on-page SEO thus improve your site traffic.
They will help to get your pages working better, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases. So, it pays to spend some time implementing these to improve your site!
If this post was helpful remember to share with your friends to make the web a better place. Stay tuned for the next post on Off-Page SEO.
