On-page SEO is the implementation of optimizing websites page content to enhance search engine rankings and earn organic traffic.
Not only is producing high-quality content relevant to SEO, but on-page SEO also incorporates optimizing your website’s page headers, tags (title tags, meta tags, alt tags, description tags) and images. It also means making sure your website has a high level of competency, domain authority and that your users have trust in your brand.
All of these aspects are what search engines take into account and will help improve your website’s search ranking.
Why is On-page SEO important
On-page SEO is significant because it aids search engines in determining if the website that they are serving the user is relevant and its content matches the search terms used.
As search engines become more developed, they have a substantial basis for relevance in search engine results pages.
Google, which has an abundance of complex algorithms, has improved on itself and is now much better at:
Knowing what users actually want when they submit a query.
Supplying the user with results that meet the intent they wanted.
Giving the user local search results that meet their needs.
Adapting to these changes is essential to being able to rank and to do it by guaranteeing that your site and its content that is observable to users on your site(text, images, video, or audio) and HTML elements that only search engines see are optimized.
Putting in the effort to create strategies for boosting your on-page SEO will help give you a boost in traffic and see your website rise in the search engines.
Our guide will help walk you through the most important elements for on-page SEO optimization. These 10 tips will improve your content and authority that search engines see which in turn will increase your ranking and presence.
1. Keywords in your title
Having keywords in your title helps search engines recognize the pages. Not only is it the name of your page but sometimes (depending on the platform) it also puts it as the slug (URL) of the page.
Example: www.mycompany.com/awesome-seo
Awesome SEO would be the title and the slug for the page.
Look at the below example notice how Awesome SEO is in the title of the page which google brings back as a hit.
2. Keywords in your
Header tags
Having keywords in your title helps search engines recognize the pages. Not only is it the name of your page but sometimes (depending on the platform) it also puts it as the slug (URL) of the page.
Example: www.mycompany.com/awesome-seo
Awesome SEO would be the title and the slug for the page.
Look at the example notice how Awesome SEO is in the title of the page which google brings back as a hit.
3. Length of the content
The length of your content is important. It shows that you have an understanding of the subject that the user searches for. This is exactly what search engines are looking for to be able to serve the user correctly. We recommend on the low end at least 500 words. When we do off-page SEO for backlinks though we do 1,000 – 1,500 words minimum.
4. A no-brainer, using the keyword in the content
5. Image Optimization & Image Tags
Image optimization is a huge part of on-site SEO. Making your images smaller helps with load times which search engines looks for and who likes sitting there waiting on a website to load? I sure don’t, we live in a world where everything is instant and it is at our fingertips.
Adding alt=”” tags to your images as well will let search engines know what type of images are and help accessibility of your website.
6. Outbound links
Linking to domain authoritative pages tells search engines that your page is more trustworthy. Look at it this way, the only reason your site would be sending out an outbound link would be to teach your user about the subject matter. This is a huge trust factor for search engines but too many outbound links can diminish your page’s rank, hurting its visibility so use in moderation.
7. Content updates
Updating and adding new content helps keep your site relevant to search engines. Once a month is a good spot to be with new content if you can.
8. Meta description
9. DO NOT duplicate content
Whatever you do, do not duplicate content this can actually hurt your visibility with search engines because they see it as keyword stuffing and using the same content. If you want to focus on the same subject theirs a couple of options, see if you can split it up or do a year-on-year comparison of the subject with updates. If you stick to 1 new content piece a month that should be easy enough to do.
10. Your server & domain
Your server (web hosting) and domain play a big part in SEO as well.
Google for example sees domains 1 year or older as more trustworthy than new domains.
Your domain also has a domain authority score attached to it. You can check out your domain authority here.
Keeping your domain name short as well helps with the search results, a study revealed that the top 50 most popular sites only have 6 characters in their names.
Webhosting plays a part in it as well, the server is what processes your user’s query to deliver the content. This can affect your website’s speed as well as your SEO.
Conclusion
On-page SEO will help your site rank but it’s not the only way that search engines look at your site they also look at off-page SEO. Doing both of these things in tandem will help boost you to the top with the keywords you choose to target.
