Because Google and other search engines compare keywords to determine the relevance of the content on your website, keywords will always be a crucial component of SEO. The challenging part is determining how many keywords to use on your web page. If you use too little, your page won't become part of the top-ranked pages. If you use it excessively, your website might be penalized.
23 On-Page SEO Techniques: The Ultimate List To Optimize Your Website
There are numerous On Page SEO techniques that Google search algorithms prefer. These can range from title optimization tips, keyword optimization, meta descriptions, etc. Search engine rankings do not depend only on on-site SEO but also on off-page SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO elements include everything within the blog post, from the HTML code, URL structure, meta tags, and actual page content.
Today we'll be looking at an on page SEO checklist of techniques you can utilize in digital marketing.
23 On-Page SEO Techniques You Can Apply To Optimize Your Website
Know the correct search intent.
Google has significantly improved over time at determining the user's search intent without using traditional SEO factors. A user's search intent has become a more important factor as opposed to more traditional elements like titles, heading, links, and other SEO fundamentals.
Traditionally, search intent had broad categories.
- Navigational search intent - The goal is to get to a specific place.
- Informational search intent - The goal is to learn more about something mentioned on a particular website or page.
- Transactional search intent - The goal is to purchase or find a good or service to use later.
But over time, search engines understood this classification needed to be more inclusive and overlapped.
You have to comprehend the intent as well as other search engines do to ensure that your website ranks highly for search terms. Search intent is divided into the following groups:
Research Intent - This category contains expressions and keywords that produce Wikipedia pages, knowledge graphs, featured snippets, and carousels as results.
Answer Intent - Given that the user wants a prompt response, they differ slightly from the research query.
Transactional Intent - those who are looking to buy or research products. Such outcomes frequently produce shopping carts and other features that indicate purchase intent.
Local Intent - depending on your IP address, keywords or phrases can offer localized research or trigger information maps. They contain well-known expressions like "near me."
Visual Intent - they include results, which typically contain thumbnails and image packs. Image packs serve as a more reliable indicator of visual search intent. They also bring up results from websites like Pinterest.
Video Intent - refers to using words and phrases in video carousels, thumbnails, and even featured snippets. For some kinds of queries, video is now essential.
Fresh/News Intent - news intent focuses on the most popular stories, recent tweets, and stories covered by date, month, and year. Google typically displays the most recent information about breaking news stories, creating a timeline or chronological order for the news event.
Branded Content - brand home page results typically dominate branded intent queries. A high number of links pointing to a popular website indicates branded intent.
Split Intent is a meta intent type where a user may have several strong intentions, resulting in a "split intent" because Google has trouble determining the user's needs.
As search engines develop to meet user needs, Search Intent will continue gaining prominence as an essential on-page SEO technique.
Do not cannibalize your keywords.
A website becoming its competitor is one of the most frequent errors it can make. Multiple pages on your website that have achieved the same keyword ranking indicate that these pages are vying with one another for higher rankings, which is bad for your SEO. We refer to this as keyword cannibalization.
One of the top items on your on-page SEO to-do list should be to prevent keyword cannibalization. Competing for the same keyword or phrase can make Google's web crawlers uncertain about the goal of your website. The ranking of your website may suffer as a result.
Pick the right keywords thoughtfully and carefully.
For an unpaid search to succeed in Google's SERPs, keyword research is crucial. The Google Keyword Planner can be used to conduct in-depth research on your industry's most common search terms. As long-tail keywords are extremely specific and have lower competition, make sure you also concentrate on ranking for them. Keywords used in LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), i.e., Another thing you must include in your list of search words and phrases to rank for are search terms that are closely related to your main keyword(s).
Simply enter your primary keywords into the Google search bar, scroll to the bottom of the SERP, and click on the "searches related to" link to see a list of useful LSI keyword suggestions. Other than these, you can find more keyword suggestions by looking at the paid advertisements that adorn the top section of the SERP. When creating new, fresh content, remember to look at the existing, top-ranking SERP content already available for a specific keyword and strive to make it even better.
Publish great quality content.
Not just marketers but SEO specialists concur that content is king. Ensure your content quality is impeccable: it must be unique and engaging, originally published on your website, and useful to your readers. Search engines are constantly improving their algorithms, and they will not rank your content highly if it is poorly written, plagiarized, has misleading titles, etc. — everything counts here, even misspellings.
Utilizing Google, which has already done a great job of understanding what users like for various searches, is the simplest way to determine what kind of content to produce.
Your objective is to create better content using this information. Better in this context can refer to various things, including:
- More detailed and instructive.
- It is simpler to read.
- Presenting a potential alternative viewpoint on the subject that still needs to be covered by the existing material.
Rankings will eventually only accept if produced content meets the search intent. Google uses various signals to determine whether or not users are satisfied with the websites shown at the top of the results, so even if you rank highly, this will only be a temporary situation.
Write consistently with fresh and updated content.
Why is posting high-quality content so crucial? Because doing so allows us to meet the enormous demand for pertinent information and establish ourselves as authorities on a particular topic. You must update older posts with any new details, figures, or facts you think are relevant to stay current.
Remember that different types of content necessitate varying degrees of freshness, so you must consider this aspect of on-page SEO carefully. Although posting every day would be fantastic, try to post twice a week if you are busy.
The absence of duplicate content on your website is essential, even though Google favours content that falls under breaking news.
Apply an E-A-T strategy to your content.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: These three criteria are used by Google raters to evaluate websites, individual Web pages, and content. Google rewards websites that produce high-quality content with high rankings. To guarantee that Google always recognizes the content on your website as being of a high calibre, you must develop an EAT SEO guide for your content strategy.
When presenting the subject matter, your content should demonstrate expertise. The readers' trust is strengthened as a result. It should be authoritative in its suggestions to ensure readers get the most out of it. The information on your website should also be Trustworthy and supported by credible sources as backlinks to ensure that there is little chance for readers to mistake it for false information.
Make your content simple and user-friendly.
Start by producing user-friendly content to learn how to perform on-page SEO.
Since content marketing encourages people to visit your pages, it is a crucial component of SEO. Your content helps people find your company in search results, and SEO optimization helps your content rank in searches.
Making your content user-friendly for your audience is key to getting it to rank in search results. To get their content to rank, many businesses make the error of writing it for search engines.
Search engines, on the other hand, have developed sufficiently to know how to rank pages based on how users interact with the content.
Create content for users, not search engines, if you want your pages to rank. This is possible by:
- Using headings to divide up your text will make it easier to skim.
- Finding important information quickly by using bulleted lists.
- Text on your page can be broken up with images.
- Limiting jargon usage.
By adhering to these best practices, you can produce content that gives your audience a satisfying experience and keeps them interested in your work.
Proper headings and content outlining
A page needs to be formatted correctly. Consider it like a report that requires a heading (h1) and subheadings (h2, h3).
There can only be one H1 tag per page. The title of a page is automatically wrapped in H1 tags if you are using WordPress.
There are two options available to you. <title> and <h1> tag the heading or offer a different title.
Remember that title tags, not h1 tags, are what search engines display in the results.
Please consider the following considerations concerning the other headings (h2, h3).
Do not use a single word as a heading, but rather make your titles interesting and helpful for readers who prefer to skim an article.
Organize headings in a hierarchy. E. This heading tag is the first one .<h1> After that, comes .<h2> then comes. <h3> , .<h4> etc.
Use related keywords in your content's subheadings for best results.
Although formatting makes content more readable, it does not ensure it will be read. To encourage readability, it is advised to apply the following on-page SEO strategies:
- Google recommends using fonts and colours at least 16 points high to reduce the need for pinching and zooming to be mobile-friendly. The contrast between the text and background colours should improve readability.
- Use headings to give your content a logical flow. Aside from that, it would be best to employ anchor links so users can skip chapters they deem less significant.
- Users can quickly find the information they want by skimming through bullet points.
- To improve readability, divide your content into brief paragraphs.
- Mix images, videos, and other media embeds to enhance your content.
Optimize page titles and meta descriptions.
Page Titles
Readers can infer from title tags what information may be on a web page. These can be found on every Web page's "header section" and are prominently displayed on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Title tags must always be optimized with pertinent keywords for the search engine crawlers to understand because Google must know exactly what your website is about.
More people will visit your website due to a compelling title tag. To create a title that works, adhere to these straightforward guidelines:
- When using a keyword, ensure it benefits both the user and the search engine. Since users are likelier to read title tags, placing your keyword closer to the front will help your ranking.
- Most search engines typically display the first 50–60 characters. Your title will be truncated if it exceeds the character limit, and the phrase "..." will appear in search results instead.
- It's best practice to end your title tag with your company's name. If people are familiar with your brand, it helps to increase brand awareness and the click-through rate.
Meta descriptions
By providing a summary of the Web page, meta descriptions go one step further. The SERP gives readers an overview of the content on your website.
Google still insists that meta descriptions do not affect rankings. Consequently, how do you create a compelling meta description?
- Your meta description needs to relate to the page's content. It must briefly summarize the information on the page.
- The typical length of a meta description is 150–300 characters. Search engines like Google typically truncate meta descriptions longer than 155 characters.
Improve the on-page user experience.
Please spend some time on your website's design quality, navigation experience (basically, how simple it is to use), reading experience (how easy it is to read your articles), placement of ads, special offers, and pop-ups (so they aren't annoying), etc. In other words, do everything you can to enhance the on-site experience for your users. Both people and search engine algorithms will thank you later.
Mobile Friendliness and Responsiveness
Your online presence must include a responsive website. In many nations, mobile traffic outpaces desktop traffic. You can use Google's mobile-friendly test to determine whether your website is mobile-friendly.
Enhance site speed
Improving site load time is one of the most crucial on-page SEO tasks.
Many factors make a website that loads slowly bad. First of all, data shows that if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, 40% of users will leave the website, and a further 47% of users expect a page to load in less than two seconds.
If that doesn't happen, they'll leave your website and probably never return, leading to a higher bounce rate, less traffic, fewer repeat visitors, less time spent on the site, etc.
Also, site speed directly impacts SEO: if it's slow, fewer pages will be crawled by search engines, negatively impacting your indexation.
By analyzing your site's current load time and making improvements, you can stop this from happening by using a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google will offer recommendations like:
- Reducing the size of the image files.
- Coding reduction.
- Decreasing the number of redirects.
- Taking advantage of browser caching.
- Utilizing a content delivery network.
If you need to learn how to implement optimizations, you can always spend money on page speed services to hire experts to optimize your website.
Conduct scheduled content and site audits
While producing new content is always a priority for websites, it is also crucial to ensure that online content is regularly audited.
A content audit is a list of the content resources on your website. Consider quantitative and qualitative factors when you audit your content.
The audit should assist you in deciding which content assets should be removed from the website, repurposed, and retained. To grade each page, you should consider qualitative and quantitative criteria.
Quantitative evaluations assess the effects of the content, including the overall influence on traffic and rankings. They contain statistics like the page's 30-day average traffic and SERP position.
Qualitative parameters gauge the level of content quality. Did they interact in any way with the content? How many people read it?
Websites must regularly conduct content audits to maintain a smooth SEO strategy implementation, as outdated Websites with subpar content can significantly reduce a website's overall traffic. Regular content audits assist websites in determining the precise ROI their content produces, allowing for the much more focused and accurate planning of future on-page SEO strategies.
If you want to complete the audit more quickly, keep the evaluation criteria straightforward. To ensure you continuously improve your content strategy, you should repeat this exercise every three to six months. Know more content and site audit tips here.
Use of Internal Links
Internal linking, one of the crucial components of on-page SEO, is the main determinant of how accessible your pages are. Effective internal linking makes it simple for users to reach those pages for more information while letting search engines know about your other pages. Utilizing your website for longer will increase the likelihood that users will convert.
Because of the following, linking to internal pages of your website is crucial for SEO:
It's similar to creating your website.
Following links on a page, both internal and external, is the first thing a search engine spider does after finding a carrier.
As a result, if your page doesn't contain any additional links, visitors will read it before leaving.
They will also consider any links you have pointing to internal links on your website.
It's a method of informing search engines about your additional pages.
You can use this technique to inform search engines about pages on your website that they have yet to discover, as it was previously mentioned that when search engines find a page with links, they will go and read those pages as well.
It's a method of letting search engines know which of your pages are the most crucial.
Each website contains some pages that are more significant than others. Sending them more internal links, internal linking is one method of identifying the most crucial pages.
It's a way to lengthen visitors' stays on your website.
A reader of your post is likelier to click on a link to learn more about a particular subject, which will lengthen their visit to your website, result in more pages per visit, and reduce bounce rates.
The best practices for internal linking are:
- Don't limit the use of keywords to add internal links.
- When internal links are helpful to your reader, include them.
- There should be at most 15 internal links on a page.
- Place the links in the page's main body rather than the footer or sidebar.
Use of External Links
External linking is one of the most important aspects of the on-page SEO methods we advise using.
An external link directs users to another website's page, i.e., an alternative domain.
By linking to other websites, you improve the trustworthiness of your content. Adding external links to your website page might sound counterintuitive, but it helps establish your authority when you link it to a relevant website in your niche.
Google is assisted in determining your page's topic by external links to relevant pages. Additionally, it informs Google that your page is a trustworthy source of information.
Although adding external links to your content is not a ranking factor, it can still benefit your SEO efforts.
You can email other websites to inform them about your external links and link them to their pages. Your connection to them will make web admins happy, and this is a great way to strike up a conversation. As more web admins are likely to return the favour, you can gradually strengthen this relationship and obtain backlinks to your website.
The best practices to adhere to when including external links in your content:
- Only use links that benefit the reader.
- Linked to only reliable websites.
- Link only to relevant websites with fresh content.
- For links to external websites you don't entirely trust, use the "no follow" tag.
Use of Anchor Texts to optimize links
Search engines use URLs to assess the relevance of your page. Optimize your URLs to raise the position of your page in more pertinent search results. Users and search engines need help understanding the context of your page when there isn't a clear URL.
Create SEO-friendly URLs to your main and other pages to add points to the Google ranking factor.
You can kill two birds with one stone by using so-called Anchor Texts, hyperlinked text sections that website visitors click on. By doing so, links on your website will be more visible to search engines and your visitors will have an easier time navigating it. One piece of advice is to use varied anchor texts that sound as natural as you can, as this will ensure that they fit into the context and don't get in the way of the content's flow.
Using of Alt Tags on SEO Images and multimedia elements
In particular, when writing long-form content, SEO-optimizing images help to break up the monotony—publications like the New York Times measure the visual-to-story ratio. If you are creating dozens or even hundreds of pieces of content every day, this becomes extremely important.
Search engine bots can better understand your images using alt text (Alternative Text) descriptions.
Image alt tags are essential for helping blind people or those with slower Internet connections. Not only will this group of users benefit from a description of the images on your website, but search engines will also be assisted in understanding the purpose of the image. Additionally, this could raise your website's ranking.
In addition to providing context, the alt text should sound natural to readers.
When making your website load slowly, images are also the main offender. To make sure that images load quickly, you must compress them. For image compression, using the programs Imagify or Short Pixel may help.
You can use lazy loading to speed up website image loading. Lazy loading is now the default setting in WordPress as of the most recent update.
We advise creating an image sitemap through your Google Search Console account if your website contains many images.
Use of Schema When Necessary
Schema Markup is essential for assisting search engines in comprehending the content of your website. For instance, a search engine result page (SERP) with images, reviews, or ratings is much more appealing than a standard search result. It improves the website's clickability.
The schema should only be used on some Web pages, though. Use it only for Web pages that you want to drive more traffic to, or that have enough relevant content to appear in the search results.
Sitemaps and Crawlability
Webmasters can inform visitors about the crawlable pages on your website, thanks to sitemaps. A sitemap is an XML file containing a list of URLs and additional site metadata.
Sitemaps make it easier for web crawlers to find and browse every page on your website. They also give search engines details on how frequently and when a page was most recently updated.
If search engines cannot find, crawl, and index your website, neither you nor potential users will benefit. Furthermore, you must check your robots to make sure there are no crawl errors—txt file to see if the Google bot has accidentally blocked any significant pages from being crawled.
You can monitor the health of your website and prevent such issues by using the Google Webmasters tool. The use of structured data markup will also aid web crawlers in understanding your content and may even result in rich search results.
A 301 redirect to a related, relevant page should be performed if you are getting a lot of backlinks to a 404 page to keep visitors' attention and avoid losing any goodwill.
HTTP vs. HTTPS - Make sure your website is in HTTPS
An HTTP or HTTPS protocol that comes before your domain name. Google advises that all websites use a secure protocol (the "s" in "https" stands for secure). An SSL certificate from your hosting company is required to guarantee the security of your website.
SSL encrypts your data and guarantees that the information transferred between your web server and the browser used by the searcher is kept private. Additionally, HTTP/2 enhances loading times and efficiency.
URL structure optimization
Regarding best practices for on-page SEO, short URLs are your best bet. It makes sense to place the main keyword close to the beginning of a URL because Google prioritizes the first three to five words of a URL the most.
Lowercase letters and hyphens rather than underscore between words must be used in the URLs' carefully planned structure. Although codes and ID numbers are frequently found in URLs, avoiding them for an SEO-friendly URL is best. A better option is to use descriptive words to tell search engines and users what the page is about.
In addition, effective internal linking is another frequently overlooked method of increasing website traffic while informing Google about the creativity and intent of your page content. All you need to do is remember to use keyword-rich links and add two to five of them to each post.
Study Google's Core Web Vitals
Despite Google's best efforts, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has yet to be a successful project. According to a W3Techs study, only 0.01% of websites use AMP, even though over 2 billion of them exist. Your website will appear in the Top Stories carousel on Google Search if ranked for AMP.
Google is attempting to gauge web users' experiences with Core Web Vitals, and it will also optimize websites for popular stories that don't use AMP.
To achieve this, they created a brand-new metric called Core Web Vitals. It evaluates the following factors:
Loading - Consider how quickly your website can load. Google's benchmark is 2.5 seconds. Search engines use page load speed as a ranking factor when determining how to rank your website for a given query. To speed up your website, we suggest using a CDN or VPS. WP Rocket and Autoptimize are plugins that can help you speed up your website using shared hosting.
Interactability - Measures how responsive your website is when a user clicks a link, taps a button, or makes use of a unique JavaScript-powered control. According to Google, a website should accomplish this in 100 milliseconds.
Visual Stability - Examines the behaviour of your website in production and measures user experience. It examines the stability of the content as it loads to prevent accidental button-tapping (how annoying!) when it shifts under your finger.
Sharing content on social media platforms
Nowadays, social media has an increasing impact on search results, so it's important to build robust social media channels to share content and links.
Simply put, a high click-through rate for your web pages indicates that many visitors find your content worthwhile. This and dwell time—visitors' time on your page—are blatant signs of how relevant and helpful Google sees your website. If you regularly publish trending, shareable content that receives lots of traffic on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. So do the chances of someone linking to you from their highly regarded website. Once more, this might result in a rise in organic search results. Thus, prominently display social sharing buttons next to each important article you post on your website.
Conducting keyword research and having relevant keywords in your blog post are also important. Remember to avoid keyword stuffing in your page content and page titles as much as possible.
After discovering the techniques for optimizing individual web pages, it's time to check out how digital marketing companies, especially this SEO agency in Singapore, can help your particular page rise to the top of search engine results pages. Their services in digital marketing include:
- Helping you find and use target keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing.
- Making your site mobile-friendly.
- General help with SEO on-page techniques.
You can also check out their posts about on-page SEO factors to learn more about on-page SEO basics, URL optimization, and what makes on-page SEO important.