Article Table of Contents
- 1 1. Keyword Research
- 2 2. SEO Friendly URL’
- 3 3. Title Tag Optimization
- 4 4. Meta Description Optimization
- 5 5. H1 Tag – The Mother of All Headings!
- 6 6. Image Optimization & Responsive Images – What You Need to Know!
- 7 7. General Content Optimization
- 8 8. The Importance Of Internal Linking
- 9 Conclusion: The importance Of On-Page SEO
Many of the so-called “essential on-page SEO factors” are more or less technical, which means they may not be readily apparent to a beginner. That being said, there are many elements that are essential for on-page optimization to achieve higher rankings in the Google search result.
To help you get started on your journey to SEO mastery, we have compiled a list of the top 7 essential on-page SEO factors that all beginners should know about.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding out which words or phrases people either search for or are likely to search for on a specific topic.
There are many SEO tools that you can use to do keyword research, including Google’s Keyword Search Tool and Moz Keyword Tool.
It’s essential to optimize your website for a keyword phrase that is not too competitive but has a good search volume, is relevant to your content with goof commercial intent.
2. SEO Friendly URL’
Adding your main target keyword to your page URL is a strong on page SEO factor.
The objective behind URL structure is to make it as search engine friendly as possible. The main reason for this is that the URL is one of the first things a user sees and factors into how they view the site.
The keywords in the URL and should be included strategically so that they don’t become a part of something unrelated to your website’s content, such as a person’s name or another piece of information.
Find out if users can find what they are looking for from your URL by checking if people can find your company from just your domain name because this will help with SEO rankings.
3. Title Tag Optimization
A title tag (also called a “meta tag”) is part of the HTML code used in the web page to specify what the page is about and is an important ranking factor.
The title tag is a crucial part of the webpage since it is what will show up in search engines, and it is what users will see in their browser tab. The title tag should be between 60-70 characters, contain keywords relevant to the webpage, and be easy to read for a user.
A good title tag will have a strong call-to-action with a keyword in it. It should also have a descriptive phrase or sentence that explains what you can find on the page so that if a user searches for something, they might find it through your webpage. It should not be repetitive or include words like ‘click here’ because this will cause you to rank lower in search engines.
4. Meta Description Optimization
A meta description is a concise summary of what the page is about. It’s displayed as a snippet under the URL on search engine results pages.
A meta description should be unique for every page and contain words that will help search engines understand the content on your page and rank it higher in SERPs.
The meta description is an extremely important element of SEO because it can be used to rank in Google’s search results, encourage more clicks, and create a compelling call-to-action.
An optimized meta description can result in increased traffic and engagement rates, so it’s worth spending time on this aspect of your blog post-production process.
Keep it short: Meta descriptions should not exceed 160 characters. It’s good to use all 160 characters, but you can also split your content into two or more sentences to reach the character limit.
5. H1 Tag – The Mother of All Headings!
Heading tags are containers for large chunks of text. Generally, the H1 header tag is used to introduce the page with an overview of its contents.
The H1 tag is often seen as more of a stylistic decision than a semantic one because it doesn’t change how search engines rank pages.
6. Image Optimization & Responsive Images – What You Need to Know!
Images are either the first thing a visitor sees on your website, or they are what they scroll past quickly. Carrying out search engine optimization on your images can help get your website to the top of the search engines.
There are a few different types of responsive images. The first step is to optimize the original image as much as possible before creating a responsive image from it. You can do that by following these three steps:
1) Optimize the file size – If your website has images with high resolution (2000px and above), reducing their resolution can make them smaller and reduce loading time for users with slower internet connections.
2) Compress the file – Compressing an already compressed image won’t make it any smaller. But, if your original file was not already compressed, compressing it will reduce its size without losing quality.
Some best practices for optimizing images include:
- Keep them at their original size, but make sure that their dimensions are relative to each other.
- Keep them at no more than 240 dpi.
- Make sure that all of the colors are in RGB mode.
- Create an image map so that visitors can click on the image to see it in full size without opening another page or window.
Adding An Alt Tag To Your Images
An alt tag is an HTML attribute that lets you provide alternative text for your image within your web page or blog post.
Image alt text will appear in place of the image if it cannot be displayed on the screen, such as if somebody has turned off images in their browser.
7. General Content Optimization
Producing quality content with good search engine optimization is a process that you undertake to rank higher in search engine results pages.
You need to use the appropriate elements to do this, including using the most prominent keywords, focusing on long-tail key phrases, and ensuring that your text contains relevant links.
There are four main ways to optimize your content:
- SEO-Friendly Content: Utilize keywords and phrases that people will be searching for on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo so that when they search for these keywords and phrases, your page will come up on top of the list.
- Engaging Content: Create content that readers want to read and share with others, keeping them coming back for more.
- Relevant Content: Creating content (blog posts, reviews, videos) about products or services related to what you sell or offer can help drive traffic to your website through links from other websites.
- Use a header tag to separate each paragraph for ease of reading. The H2 header tag is used for the main paragraph heading with an H3 header tag for a sub heading of that paragraph.
Ensure you do not have any duplicate content through your website. Duplicate content is copied from either other websites across the internet or other pages on your website.
Avoid keyword stuffing throughout your content. Keyword stuffing is trying to add a keyword into your content that is not relevant and does not make sense. This makes the content hard to read and can cause over-optimization. Instead, use different synonyms and ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’ LSI keywords.
8. The Importance Of Internal Linking
Internal links use relevant anchor text that links from one web page to another web page on the same website. An Internal link is considered a cornerstone of a website since people can easily navigate a website.
Internal linking can be an efficient way to increase your site’s crawlability and ranking on search engines. It also helps in building cohesion for related topics and groups of pages.
Additionally, Google has said that “a site’s internal linking structure may have a stronger influence on its search rankings than any other one factor. So every business owner needs to understand the importance of internal linking.
Conclusion: The importance Of On-Page SEO
Optimizing a web page to be search engine friendly is an essential part of online marketing. However, there are a lot of areas to optimize. Therefore we recommend creating an SEO checklist to ensure you do not miss out on any areas.
A website could appear in the top 10 search results for a given keyword and still not get any clicks if it isn’t well optimized in the above on-page factors.
Ensure your website is optimized for the search engines with good On-Page SEO. However, be aware that on-page SEO is only part of the SEO strategy. You will also need to master good Off-Page SEO to get to the top of Google SERP’s.