In this day and age, if you have a business, you have a website. And if you have a website, you have a fair idea of what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is. But have you wondered what will make your website more attractive to a user and enhance its visibility on search engines? That’s where on-page SEO comes into the picture. Its purpose is to provide value for users, thus ensuring a website ranks high on search engines. Let us look at on-page SEO in detail.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO can be defined as a practice that improves a website’s ranking in search engine results pages or SERPs. This helps the website gain more visibility and in the process more traffic.
Let’s imagine a fictional website, Such a Bookworm. This online bookstore started in 2022, offers a wide range of self-help books. The owner wants the store’s online presence more prominent so other bookworms visit. On search engines, people search for “most read self-help book” or “suggestions on improving financial habits”. Such a Bookworm should appear in the search results based on its wide collection of self-help books. To achieve this, the site managers ensure the website loads quickly, relevant blogs are published regularly, and different pages are linked to each other.
This SEO practice is also known as on-site SEO. In literal terms, it means anything and everything on the website. When someone enhances a website’s elements, it helps improve the website’s ranking in the search results. And, if a website ranks higher in the search results, users have better visibility.
A website’s elements include relevant keywords, structured content with titles and headings, quality content, etc. These elements are key areas of improvement if you want your website to rank high using on-page SEO. We will explore each element later in this blog. For now, let’s understand why this concept of optimizing your website plays a big role in attracting an audience.
Importance of On-Page SEO
If someone searches for “books to expand your mind”, Such a Bookworm should rank higher in the search results. And why? Because that is the dream plan of the owner. Now, how can this dream come true? By optimizing each element of the website and making it more visible to the search engines.
On-Page SEO makes your website’s communication with search engines easier. To give a hassle-free experience to a user, you should follow the best practices to make your website rank higher in the results. If the owner optimizes the content, uses focus keywords related to the content, and ensures a mobile-friendly version of the website, Such a Bookworm is deemed to provide a seamless experience.
Let’s find out the best practices for on-page SEO if you are ready to use it as a weapon and make your users go “Yes, that’s what I am looking for.”
Best Practices for On-Page SEO
To make on-page SEO your website’s friend, we will discuss the best practices for your website to be more engaging and increase traffic organically.
Keyword Research and Optimization
Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO, especially on-page. They help the users view your website as one of the higher-ranking search results. If user search queries match your website result, they will click on it to know more. The practice of keyword research involves analyzing what people are searching for related to the brand, product, or service you offer. Content on this is then created.
Selecting relevant keywords for your web content is a crucial step. For example, our online bookstore wants people to check out newly added self-learning books on “Preparing Impactful Speeches”. If someone Googles “How to prepare an impactful speech”, the search results should share our website’s newly added collection if the keyword matches the search intent of preparing speeches.
The best way to implement keywords is to add them in the title, headings, and occasionally in the content. They should be used in an organic manner. Keyword stuffing or overusing keywords seems unnatural and can lower the content quality. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, if a website has unnecessarily stuffed its content with keywords, Google demotes or lowers the ranking of the web page or site.
Title and Heading Tags
A user clicks on a search result based on a relevant title. It should be unique and must contain the target keyword, matching the user’s intent. There is no limit on the characters in a title. However, Google typically cuts off titles longer than 60-65 characters. So, the ideal way to make it visible is to use 50 to 60 characters in your title tag (H1), and also use the target keyword.
Such a Bookworm website has a new blog “10 Best Reads for the Perfect Monsoon Season.” It starts with an attractive introduction that makes the readers want to explore which are these best ten finds. As soon as the time comes to go to the first book on the list, the title of the book name is neither numbered nor bold. The reader doesn’t see it easily. Here is where heading tags would have enhanced the reader experience.
Using heading tags (H2, H3, H4…) makes the user’s experience hassle-free and provides a concise structure to the content. Heading tags provide easier accessibility and smoother navigation for relevant information.
Meta Description
When a user searches for a particular keyword and is presented with search results, a description appears below the title. That is known as meta description or meta tags. It provides a brief introduction about the content and makes the user decide if the search result matches what they searched for.
If the meta description is vague or too long or does not recognize voice search, it affects the traffic on the website. In certain instances, Google will perform actions such as shortening the overly long description or randomly picking up on description from your content.
The best way to write meta descriptions is to keep it mobile-friendly, adding your keyword mindfully and in an active voice. After the title tag, the next deciding factor for a user is meta descriptions.
Creating Quality Content
Creating content that is of high quality and appealing to users, is one of the essentials of SEO. A content piece is considered to be of quality when it accurately answers a user’s questions. It should be relevant as well as engaging.
High-quality content has several elements. These include understanding your audience, structuring content with title, heading, and subheading tags, organically positioning targeted keywords, and proper usage of images and videos.
For example, the content on Such a Bookworm website includes attractive book covers. There are short book review videos and each blog or article is curated seamlessly.
Optimize URL
Optimizing URLs helps the engine crawlers understand the subject of your website’s content. It works better if the URL is readable and less complicated.
URLs should be descriptive, include keywords, and should not contain any special characters. Would you rather click on: “Such-a-Bookworm.com/best-reads-for-perfect-monsoon-season” or “Such-a-Bookworm.com/F6LaxJufdQ0pVy-reads-MoNsooN?Season-books”?
We all know the answer, right?
The structure of a URL should be clean and easy to understand, rather than random jumbled alpha-numeric characters which hardly make any sense. It should also be short and crisp, and follow a similar URL structure pattern across the website.
Internal Links
An often overlooked aspect of on-page SEO is internal links. It is beneficial to engage the users from one web page to another on your website, making them explore more content and understand it better. It also makes it easier for Google to crawl the site.
For instance, a fellow bookworm is reading about “Upcoming Self-Help Authors of 2024” and wants to skim through each author’s book review. Our Bookworm website has created another blog that talks about self-help book reviews. By linking the review blog to the “Upcoming Self-Help…” article, the reader can be kept engaged on the website for a longer duration and explore more content.
Mobile-Friendly Optimization
In current times, a mobile is a necessity rather than a luxury. Providing an optimal mobile-friendly experience to a user is a necessity rather than a choice.
To optimize the experience on a mobile device, designs should be adjustable according to different screens. The text should be readable. All links and tabs on a website should be easy to tap on mobile devices. Images should be compressed. Minimal use of JavaScript should be considered to increase the speed of webpage loading on any mobile device.
Page Speed
If you grew up in the 90s, you may remember how long a page would load in the early internet days. Such a speed today on our devices is unimaginable. Fast-loading pages are therefore essential to on-page SEO.
If Such a Bookworm website is as slow as a dial-up internet connection, the readers will hit backspace and select another website called “So Bookish”. This is not desirable for Such a Bookworm.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix are widely used for detailed insights to measure page speed. These tools provide suggestions to improve content while also increasing the speed.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals play a crucial role in the ranking of a page. These are significant metrics that determine the user-friendliness of a website. They are as follows:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This refers to the time the biggest element on a page takes to load. A video on a page would be the biggest element. If it loads quickly, the viewer is happy. The page thus has a good LCP score, under 2.5 seconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It is how much the page’s content moves upon loading. A paragraph at the top of your screen lingering for a few seconds and suddenly moving down is disorienting, leading to poorer CLS. The ideal score is 0.1 and under.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – This refers to how promptly a page responds to user interactions. Clicking on a button and seeing a form immediately, means there is a good INP. The best score is 200 milliseconds and below.
These often make or break your SEO. You may have better content than your competitor, with appropriate keywords and good internal linking. However, they may outrank you simply because they have ensured their core web vital scores are good while yours are subpar.
Image Optimization
Any content feels incomplete and dull without an image or two. Images play an important role in on-page SEO but only if they are properly optimized. Provide quality images but in a compressed size, for better user experience.
You need to ensure you use the right formats for your images. The recommended ones are JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, BMP, and GIF. The file name of the uploaded image should be crisp, yet descriptive with targeted keywords.
The images that you upload should have an Alt Text. This is a description added to an image to help the search engines understand what the image stands for. It also assists visually impaired users in understanding the image through their device’s accessibility features.
Monitor & Analyze Performance
Monitoring the growth and performance of on-page SEO helps understand what works best and highlights the improvement areas. When the Bookworm website owner used tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, it gave a better understanding of the website’s performance. These tools are used to gain better insight by tracking website traffic, bounce rates, and the presence of the website in search results.
Analyzing the performance includes understanding user behavior and updated trends along with making it easier to adapt changes for improvement. If you are aware of your keyword ranking, or immediately fix broken links and resolve page speed issues, you are analyzing your website’s performance well.
Orphan pages
Like a little island separate from the mainland, an orphan page is a web page that is not linked anywhere on your website. This negatively affects your website’s performance in three ways:
- Your orphan page will confuse the search engine crawlers resulting in your page not being visible as a search result.
- Even if the engine crawlers can find your orphan page, it will still cause poor ranking of the page.
- A user will only be able to view this orphan page when they enter the URL manually.
To fix this issue, you should add relevant page links to your website or create a navigation menu.
On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO
If on-page SEO is about optimizing anything that is on a website (or internally), off-page SEO is about optimizing anything outside of a website (or externally). Both forms of SEO are useful and have their ways of engaging users.
If you are using on-page SEO, one of the many focus areas is to generate quality content and optimize the presence of individual web pages. For example, Such a Bookworm website publishes its own collection of articles, blogs, and book reviews on self-help and self-learning topics.
When the focus shifts to social media marketing, third-party backlinks, and public relations strategies, you engage with off-page SEO. For better understanding, let’s say Such a Bookworm is reviewed by a famous blogger. They interlink Such a Bookworm’s website in their blog, giving them a backlink. Activations like this help in off-page SEO.
Summing Up
In today’s digital-driven world, on-page SEO plays a fundamental role in significantly increasing a website’s visibility and providing optimal user experience. The objective of a page is to provide value to a person. This is what Google also keeps in mind when selecting pages to rank. Tactics such as keyword research, title tags and high-quality content are all means toward an end. Keeping yourself constantly updated on user behavior and Google algorithms will ensure your on-page SEO efforts pay off.
FAQs
What are the key elements of On-Page SEO?
A few key elements of on-page SEO are keyword optimization, title tags, heading tags, Meta descriptions, internal links, optimized URLs, images, and alt text. All the elements collectively help improve the website’s performance and increase organic traffic.
What are the other types of SEO other than On-Page and Off-Page?
Technical SEO is also a type of SEO apart from on-page (on-site) and off-page (off-site) SEO. It covers improving and enhancing the technical aspects of a website. It also helps in increasing the speed of a page. There are several other small types of SEOs however, on-page, off-page, and technical SEOs are the main three types.
What are the different types of SEO Tools?
There are several types of SEO tools available, the most popular or commonly used tools are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Schema Markup Generator, Link Building Tool, and XML Sitemap Generator.
