On-page SEO is optimising your website such that search engines easily find it when an Internet user searches for information based on certain keywords. These search engines will actually assess your web content to determine if it matches what the user is looking for. Although you might think having a good web design and good content is enough, it’s barely everything you need to reach your market. Of course, these things matter to your site visitors, but before these visitors get to you, you first have to be visible to them. This you can do with on-page SEO.
There are many things you can put on your website – images, videos, illustrations and the like – which can add value to your visitors’ experience. However, search engines do not necessarily see this value unless these things come with text. This is because it is through text that the engines recognize what you put on your website. Keywords are, thus, the cornerstone of any successful on-page SEO campaign. With the right keywords. your website can easily attract the attention of search engines because they indicate how relevant your site is to a user’s search. Then again, just using keywords is not enough. You also have to put them in the right places, and these are places on your website where search engines look.
The following are basic on-page SEO rules you must observe:
Choosing the right domain name is one of the key ingredients of a perfectly optimised web page. For a domain name to be effective in driving traffic to your page, it has to include your main keyword.
While putting the main keywords in your domain name isn’t the sole determining factor when it comes to ranking, it can still make a noticeable effect on your SEO. Using relevant keywords makes it easier for your target audience to find you and can help increase your click-through-rate.
If you want to increase your web page’s shareability and improve user experience, don’t forget to optimise your URL. This is done by inserting the target keyword in the URL without any special characters or stop words. Keep in mind that shorter URLs are more likely to be copied, shared, and embedded, so make sure you don’t overstuff your URL with keywords.
Headers on your webpage are hugely important for SEO as they provide essential information to the visitors and make your page more readable. Using a unique <h1> HTML tag for each page makes the page for usable and accessible and can indirectly improve your ranking.
The percentage of keywords compared to the total number of words on a web page is known as keyword density and is one of the most important on-page SEO factors.
There is no precise formula for the keyword density, but the general rule states that for keywords to be effective, they shouldn’t compose less than 2% and more than 4% of the text on your page. Keywords should also be used in a natural way for better user experience, more relevant traffic, and higher conversion rates.
If you want the search engine crawlers to properly identify the content of your web page, you need to make sure all the image alt-tags and title tags are optimised. Alt-tags and title tags not only help visitors understand the images on your web page, but they also give you an opportunity to insert keywords and improve your SEO.
To make the keywords stand out from the rest of the text, it’s a good idea to bold or italicize them. This prevents your readers from simply skimming over the important keywords and can improve your search engine ranking.
Avoid underlining keywords and using all caps as this can come across as people are conditioned to recognize underline words and phrases as links, and capitalization has no effect on on-page SEO since keywords aren’t case-sensitive.
When it comes to blogging, there are no rules. The length of an average blog post can vary greatly depending on the content, but the general rule of the thumb is that posts should be at least 500 words in length. Go below that and you run the risk of damaging your site’s authority and getting penalized by Google for thin content.
Writing optimised content is not just about choosing the right keywords, it’s also about putting them in the right places for maximum SEO effect. Not only does starting and ending each post with relevant keywords help readers scan the text and decide whether it provided relevant content, but it also increases Google crawl rate and helps your website rank higher.
While internal links help visitors understand your web page better, increase page views and reduce bounce rate, external links help you drive more traffic to your website and improve its authority.
It is no secret that good search engine rankings are the best way to get found online, gain customers and expand your subscriber list. Of course, off-page optimisation also has its merits. But if you want to direct a significant amount of traffic to your website, dominating the search engine rankings is key. After all, 85% of Internet users make purchases online, and most buyers find the products and services they want through the search engines. It should be remembered that on-page SEO is the foundation of the success of any online marketing campaign. External promotions may actually lead people to a website, but it is still what happens within the website that matters in the end.
However, everything still depends on the SEO company behind your on-page promotions. Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines change their algorithms from time to time, and an SEO campaign implemented by a team of non-experts may not be able to keep up with these changes. Thus, it is important that you hire an SEO company that has a proven track record in terms of effective SEO in general. This is to ensure that your online promotions go beyond the basics and are able to adjust to new trends and requirements to ensure positive results.
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