On-Page SEO is one of the most underrated and overlooked factors when it comes to ranking websites. To me, that is crazy as it’s clear that smart SEO practitioners know that on-page seo should constantly be prioritised if you want to see ongoing results online with your website.
On-Page SEO plays a vital role in today’s marketing landscape if you want to succeed online.
The best part is that its super easy to do and its totally under YOUR control.
In this article I will cover what On-Page SEO is, why it’s so important and 10 key crucial on-page SEO considerations you need to be across.
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What is On-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO relates to the optimisation of your website in order to improve your rankings and earn more organic traffic to your site.
When you really boil it down, it’s the design, layout and construction of the page to make it as search engine friendly as possible.
It’s really cool because we have control over all of it, unlike Off-Page SEO which are the links where other sites are linking to us but in the end we don’t control over who links back to us and how they do it.
What Is Google Looking for:
- Quality, “real” websites
Google is looking for good and real websites that have a real person behind it. The algorithm is looking for websites that have a ‘real’ person behinds it. It wants to ensure that it’s a real business in the real world.
- Relevancy
When someone types a query ‘web design south yarra’ , google is looking which site is more relevant for that query.
- Good user experience
Google analyses how people interact with your site. If they see people spending time on your site, interacting, then it’s more likely to rank it higher.
- Sites that will reflect well on their brand
Google is a big corporate entity and as such it has a brand value. Their whole value on their brand is around the searches they provide. Hence they want to ensure they are showing the best possible results.
Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience
Top 10 Crucial On-Page SEO Factors
#1 Choose Relevant Keywords!
- Your web-pages will come up in higher the search results if Google thinks they are RELEVANT to the search question.
- You need to use the keywords on your website that your potential customers are typing into Google.
#2 Prioritise Your Keywords
SEO is not about stuffing one keyword and including it everywhere possible. Although this is a common practice and typically it is utilised in the main on-page elements (such as the headings, body, title tag, anchor text, URL, etc), it doesn´t mean that you can´t prioritise different keywords in order to grow your organic traffic.
The focus should be to prioritise your keywords, therefore having some top-level keywords (ideally your 3 core purposes/services you offer), then including some long-tail keywords in your articles that relate to your core services.
These will typically be easier to rank for and will enable you to create some authority for your site in Google´s eyes.
Top-level keywords should be utilised more frequently, and in the most important places. Organise them like you would with a book about a certain topic.
That´s why we would typically include our top level keywords in our home page and most important places so they clearly stand out.
Then we have the category levels keywords which can be sub-categories of the top level ones. Remember, utilising the analogy of the chapters of a book is always useful to keep in mind.
#3 Keywords in Meta-Data
Once we organise the keywords we need to include them in our Meta-Data. These will consist of the following :
- URL: in the website address (web-design-south-yarra);
- Title of the Page: South Yarra´s Best Web Designers;
- Description: The meta description is a key opportunity to include some relevant keywords you are currently targeting for; and
- Keywords: Include specific keywords targetted keywords in your article.
#4 Relevant and Engaging Headings
This is always a quick on-page SEO win. It´s super easy to do and produces massive results in SEO.
The goal is to include keywords or synonyms and to utilise relevant subheadings (H1,H2,H3, etc) to keep readers engaged, using secondary keywords and synonyms.
Another key factor is that actually having the keyword at the start of the title allows the search engine to clearly know what the page is about. Don´t forget that Google bots typically scan your site first from H1 and then your H2 and so own.
Hence, you want to ensure that your title is relevant to the keyword you want to rank for.
If you are struggling to come up with catchy, punchy and engaging headlines you can download the Yoast Plugin or Rank Math. They will enable you to create great SEO titles.
#5 Content
Your content has to be engaging, readable or scannable and of good quality.
No matter how well optimised your site is, if you skip this part you will never rank if you don´t meet this criteria.
You may have heard before that the longer your content is, the better it will rank. And we got to say that its quite an accurate premise.
The average 1# ranking post in Google is around 2000 words. A good rule of thumb is too look at your competition and emulate them. Check the number of words they have and ensure you create more relevant and engaging content.
Always remember that although the word count plays a big role its even more important to focus on serving the best possible answer.
Readability
Most internet users like to scan the text so ensure to include short paragraphs. Make it easier for them
Avoid blocks of text
Try to avoid long and boring paragraphs. Ensure to include the following:
Try to avoid long and boring paragraphs. Ensure to include the following:
- Bullet points
- Bold and italics
- images/graphics/infographics
- Quotes
- Videos
All of these factors improve your bounce rate as the visitor will be more inclined to stay longer in your site rather than immediately bouncing off.
Key items to consider when writing content for your website:
- Use keyword in title, sub-heading, first sentence and last sentence or paragraph
- Use keyword density of approximate 1%
- Label all images with keyword variations (image alternate text)
#6 Essential Pages
Google is expecting to see the following pages:
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy
- Terms of Use
You can also include an FAQ and have a social media connection.
#7 Site Structure and Navigation
This is one of the main things you should always keep in mind, even before launching your website.
A lot of web designers out there either forget about this part or don’t bother to care too much about it.
It´s very important to get it right at the beginning as it can be quite difficult to edit it afterward.
There two main reasons why this is important:
- It helps to ensure the site is crawler-friendly
- Improves your overall user experience (UX)
Below are some key tips to consider:
- Organise your content and its importance
- Include core purpose pages
- Use categories like the chapters of a book
- Use tags to drive related content or make your content searchable
- Global navigation bar with links to the most important pages
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#8 Internal Links
This is another huge factor that it’s typically underlooked and it plays an essential SEO role.
Internal links encourage people to stay longer on your website as well as providing extra value to your visitors.
Ideally when you create the blog page of your website you link back to the core purpose pages of your site so they can take some action (e.g, I want to book in with this person, call them, etc),
Internal links also allow search engines to better understand what your site is about and how they can get there.
How many internal links should you actually utilise?
Well, that depends largely on the size of your text. You want to gently include links that are relevant and add value to your visitor. Always ensure to make it look natural.
#9 Mobile Responsiveness
Nowadays it’s estimated that approximately 75% of the internet searches are done via mobiles, tablets and laptops.
That is why as of 2015 Google started to penalise websites that weren´t optimised for mobile phones. Therefore, you better tick this one off as it will directly affect your rankings in your SERP results.
If you want to find out if your site is mobile friendly, check tool from Google, or check the issues in Search Console, section Mobile Usability
#10 Technical SEO
We want to make sure to keep the Google bots happe and show them what they need to look at and what they need to ignore.
Technical SEO enables the search engine to crawl your site and index it properly.
Check robot accessibility and page indexation
This is typically automatically created on the wordpress sites, so you don´t really need to worry about this one.
Robots.txt is a standard tool that shows the search engine what to crawl (pages, categories, tags, etc) and what to avoid crawling.
If you want to find if your pages have been indexed you can check that by utilising Google Search Console.
Sitemaps
Utilising XML sitemaps enable you to give your search engines a structure of your site commencing from the most important pages to the least.
The sitemap is a file containing all the URLs of your pages. You can automatically generate some with Plugins such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, or Rank Math.
Page Speed
Page speed matters and it is a ranking factor. This doesn´t come as a surprise considering that we live in a society where it is all about the “instant gratification”, hence we want to be able to access our information fast.
Every second counts, and the longer it takes for your site to load the higher chances your visitor will bounce off your site immediately. Recent studies have shown that 55% of the mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer that 3 seconds to load.
This is ultimately a factor that you can control and key items to consider:
- Choose a proper web hosting provider
- Optimise your images
- Enable browser caching
- Consider a CDN
If you want to check the speed of your site, and areas to improve, I always utilise GTmetrix which is an incredible tool to measure all these items.
Final Thoughts,
We covered some of the 10 key essentials for effective On-Page SEO. All of the practical steps that we covered above will ensure you set up some good on-page seo and include your keywords on your site.
If done correctly, these factors can quickly boost your page through the SERP results.
Remember, all of this factors are in your control as opposed to the Off-Page SEO therefore I strongly recommend you that you start implementing them in your website to see some incredible results in your rankings.
