Best On-Page SEO Techniques

On-Page – It’s a technique where you do all the changes inside the website/app to increase ranking on the search engines. For example, you do your home interiors and decoration to improve your home look and feel and it impacts your overall home look and feels, this is on-page SEO. 

Here is the complete list of on-page SEO techniques – 

1. Publish High-Quality Content

A website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO. A website with bad content will not survive with or without SEO. A website with good content can become even better with SEO!

So, what is considered good content?

• Original content 
• Content exclusive for your website 
• Content that includes text elements
• Content that is useful 
• Content that is well researched
• Unbiased content

Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.

2. Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

This is SEO 101 but very important for on-page SEO. When search engines ‘read’ your pages, among other things, they check the page title and the description of a page.

They do so because they need to understand what the page is all about and then based on other factors (off-page SEO, domain authority, competition, etc.), they will rank your page (for various keywords) in a position in their index.

3. Optimize Page Content

Content SEO is part of on-page SEO and has to do with optimizing the actual content for your target keywords.

Before publishing a piece of content (whether this is text, images, audio or video), the first step is to do your keyword research.

This is necessary to find out what search terms users are typing in the search box and create content that can satisfy their intent.

Once you decide on your target keywords, you should create a list of related keywords (also called LSI keywords), longtail keywords, and use them in your titles, descriptions, headings and page content.

4. Headings and Content Formatting

A page needs to be properly formatted. Think of it as a report which needs to have a heading (h1) and subheadings (h2, h3).

The H1 Tag

Each page needs to have only one H1 tag. If you are using WordPress then by default the title of a page is wrapped into H1 tags.

You can either choose to have the same <title> and <h1> tag or provide an alternative title for the heading.

Content Formatting

Do not just throw text on a page but make sure that it is readable.

Use bold, underline or italics to highlight the important parts of a page.

Use a good size font (at least 14px).

Split the text into small paragraphs (max 3-4 lines).

Use enough spacing between the paragraphs to make the text easier to read.

Make use of CSS to create sections that stand out and break the text into smaller more manageable parts.

5. Images and Other Multimedia Elements

Images are important for presentation purposes. They make a page more interesting and easier to understand.

The biggest problems with images are that search engines don’t understand them and that they add to the loading speed of a page.

Best practices for SEO optimizing images

Use original images. If you need to use an existing image from the web you need to reference the source.

Optimize the size of the images – the smaller the size (in bytes) of the image the better.

Use an ALT tag to describe the image – This helps search engines understand what the image is about.

Use descriptive filenames – Don’t just name your image ‘image1.jpg’ but try to use descriptive filenames, for example, ‘man-doing-push-ups.jpg’.

Use a Content Delivery Network – If you have a lot of images on a single page you can use a CDN service that will make your page load faster. In simple terms, your images will be hosted and served by a number of servers and this speeds up the loading process.

6. URL Optimization

Optimizing your URLs is important for maximum SEO. It has two parts. The first part is URL optimization and the second is the URL structure.

URL Optimization

Example of SEO Friendly URL in SERPS

A permanent link (also known as a slug) is the unique URL of each page.

Good URLs should be less than 255 characters and use hyphens to ‘-‘ separate the different parts.

Just like the page title, an SEO friendly URL is short, descriptive, and includes your target keyword.

Best practices for optimizing your URL structure

Make use of categories – Group your pages into categories to help users and search engines find what they want faster.

It’s like having a warehouse with lots of uncategorized items versus a warehouse with all the items assigned to a dedicated category.

You can have sub-categories as well but my advice is not to go over two levels. For example, a good category structure is:

Homepage > Social Media > Facebook > Article

7. Internal Links

Linking to pages within your website is very important for SEO because:

It’s like building your own web

The first step a search engine spider will do once they discover a page, is to follow the links they find on that page (both internal and external links).

So, when they arrive at your page, if you don’t have any other links within the text they will read your page and go.

If you have links pointing to other pages within your website they will take those into account as well.

8. External Links

After the release of Panda and Penguin, a lot of webmasters are afraid to link to other websites. They believe that this will trigger a Google penalty but this is wrong.

By linking to other high-quality related websites, you increase the trustworthiness of your content and this is good for SEO.

Also, Google can use external links as a way to understand more about the topics you are covering in your content.

9. Page Loading Speed

Last but not least, 2 SEO techniques that are becoming more and more important are: speed and mobile-friendliness.

Page Loading Speed

Google is investing a huge amount of money to make the web faster. In every Google, I/O someone will talk about the importance of speed and their desire to include the fastest websites in their index.

In order to ‘force’ web site owners to take speed into account, they have officially added speed as one of the known ranking factors.

So, we know for sure that website speed does matter when it comes to SEO and ranking.

10. Mobile Friendliness

Almost 60% of the searches in Google are now coming from mobile devices. This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are already losing half of the potential traffic.

What should you do?

As a first step, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Check your website with the Google mobile-friendly tool and fix any potential problems.

Then go one step further and test your website on mobile, like a real user would do, and make sure that everything is displayed correctly including your CTA buttons.

In general websites with a responsive design, have nothing to worry about mobile-friendliness.