Digital Marketing Consultant
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of a websites’ traffic for a higher SERP ranking. (Google Search)
In today’s digital world whether you have a big or small business, it is important to optimize a website’s on page SEO to improve the websites’ organic search result.
On page SEO also known as on-site SEO is the practice of optimizing a websites’ content to rank higher on SERP. It includes various tactics that help the web pages’ content rank higher for a target keyword and deliver search results that meet user intent.
In order to understand your websites’ content and determine whether the content is a relevant result for a particular search term, Google checks some of the following:
Google prefers if your content is always up to date.
The number of times it has been used in a piece of content
While writing any blog or for that matter any piece of content for a website it is important to main quality.
Thus, On-page SEO becomes important.
Without this, your website could be missing out on opportunities to rank higher for relevant search queries related to your business.
Without a search engine optimization strategy your website would get pushed down in search results by your competitors.
Therefore, developing an effective on page SEO strategy to improve your rankings in search results becomes necessary.
On page SEO starts with finding the right keyword for a particular blog or article. The target keyword should be relevant to the main topic or theme of the content and should have a high monthly search volume & relevant to your target audience so that it improves your websites’ search ranking.
You should select one primary keyword for your content. You also need to make sure your primary keyword isn’t assigned to any other piece of content.
Once, you have selected your primary keyword you should develop a content plan for your keyword. This would help you in knowing how and where you will use your keyword. You can also decide whether the keyword would be a timely blog post, evergreen content, or a landing page.
After all this, you need to perform keyword optimization to improve keyword rankings. Here’s a quick checklist for that:
The title of your page should be wrapped in an H1 title tag. An H1 title tag is an important ranking factor and is used by search engine bots to figure out what a page is about.
Wrapping the subheadings in an H2 tag helps search engines identify the subheadings in your content and the main points of your content. Break the content into sections and use descriptive subheadings (H2-H6) for hierarchy.
A meta title is the first thing that users look at and it is also the blue colour title that appears on Search Engine Results Pages.
Here are a few good practices for creating a good meta title
A meta description is a piece of information that summarizes and describes the content of your web page to help users and search engines understand the content better.
Google often shows a web page’s meta description as a descriptive snippet in the SERP.
You can use these tips to write a compelling description:
Link building is an important component of SEO. Linking to relevant internal and external sources can help you direct visitors to sources of information. Example: Facts, Statistics etc.
Adding relevant internal links from blogs or pages to other potential pages helps drive traffic to new content, additionally, it is recommended the anchor tag is set to a target keyword to build relevancy.
Links leading to other websites (external links) also helps search engine robots understand your content. Therefore include relevant, valuable, and high-quality backlinks can help direct relevant visitors to your site.
The most important element of SEO is content. Even when you are creating SEO content for ranking, you should always remember that your primary focus should be your readers.
Both readers and search engines like content that is easy to understand. You should aim at creating high-quality page content that is useful, valuable, and well-written.
Having low-quality content or irrelevant content with good quality backlinks on a mobile-friendly site won’t help you to rank on SERP as effectively as reputable sites.
To gain a higher search ranking in 2021 you should focus on the following factors:
Here are some of the ways in which you can create user-friendly content:
Details: Adding details such as images, screenshots & videos help improve visual content on a website, this also improves readability
Updates: Regular updates of new strategies, and steps make content valuable.
Experts: When content is written by an expert who has expertise in a particular field, that content holds more value to users.
A Uniform resource locator is mostly known as a “web address” that specifies the location of a web page on the internet. A SEO-friendly URL helps in enhancing user experience and thereby improves the websites’ search engine ranking.
Some of the best practices for URLs for SEO are:
CTR refers to the Click-through rate that is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. Organic click-through rate is important as it is one of the Google ranking factors and increasing CTR helps in increasing more organic traffic to your website.
Organic CTR can be improved in the following ways:
Keyword cannibalization means all your blog posts and articles on your website rank for the same or similar keyword. For example, if you have two posts on the same topic, Google won’t be able to distinguish which article should rank higher for a particular query.
As a result, both the posts will rank lower. You can identify and fix keyword cannibalization by using keyword cannibalization tools by SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Schema Markup is a structured data vocab that helps search engines understand the content on your website. The user can easily check the details of your websites’ page at a glance which would help them decide whether to click on or move on to a more relevant one.
Good schema markups can even lower your bounce rate and help you get more relevant clicks to your website.
Featured snippet is the search result that is featured on top of Googles’ organic search results, below the ads in a box. It aims at answering a users’ query. Featured snippets can offer higher visibility to searchers and can drastically improve organic CTR.
UX means User Experience. UX signals are the behavioural patterns considered by Google to determine the user‘s experience on your website. When your UX is good, more users visit your website and this will increase the chances of your website rank higher on SERP.
Click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate are two of the most crucial of these behavioural metrics.
A higher CTR helps you to rank better on the search engine results page (SERP)
Thus it becomes important to monitor each page’s CTR. This would help in identifying the loopholes and improving them to have a higher CTR.
You can improve your websites’ bounce rate by
1. Optimizing page loading time
2. Structuring content for mobile users
3. Using Internal links
4. Image optimization
An effective On page SEO strategy will help you optimize your content well so that Google improves your visibility on SERPs.
But to get your website to rank better you would also need a complete SEO checklist that means adding off-page SEO and technical SEO checklist to your strategy.
We have upcoming guides on off-page SEO and technical SEO which are coming soon.
What are your thoughts on On page SEO?
If you have questions let me know in the comments below and I will be sure to answer them.
Some of the best SEO tools are:
a. Keyword Planner (keyword research tool)
b. Google Analytics
c. Google Search Console
Here is a guide on free SEO Tools to help you get started
Some of the most important on-page SEO ranking factors are:
a. Keyword Research
b.URL optimization
c. Meta tags
d. Header tags
e. Content optimization
Here's how it works head over to google page speed insights:
Step #1: Enter Your URL and Click “Search”
Step #2: Click “Analyze” in the Left Sidebar
Step #3: Scroll down to “Site Speed”
You're shown the loading time for both desktop & mobile devices and ways to improve it.
SEO boils down to 3 crucial factors:
a. Crawlability: The search engine begins to scan all types of content on the internet
b. Indexing: This where the search engine analyzes, categorizes, stores and presents the data on SERPs
c. Ranking: The search engine presents the results on different pages SEPP by looking into the index.
Here is a detailed blog on how SEO works.
Anuradha is a passionate content intern at itzfizz digital. An avid learner with a dynamic portfolio of managing content for clients across multiple domains and nationalities. Set out to make a career in digital marketing, because hey, pizza costs real money.