Introduction
What Is On-Page SEO: You may have heard the term “on-page SEO” and wondered what it means or how it can help your website. In short, on-page SEO refers to optimizing your page’s content to rank better in search results. Several factors include your title tag, meta description, content length, internal linking structure and more.
The good news is that these are all things that can be easily managed with a few tweaks here and there. If you’re ready to dive into this topic on a deeper level than ever before and learn how to optimize every page of your site for search engines (and human readers), read on!
You can identify major and minor on-page issues repressing your ranking in search results.
- Is your page title too long or too short?
- Does the page have too many images, videos, and other resources?
- Are there any grammatical errors on your site (or a lack of spelling/grammar check)?
- Is the content of your pages engaging, useful and unique to what others have written about the same topic? If not, you need to modify something!
Title tags are a large part of on-page SEO.
The title tag appears in search results, and it’s important to get it right. A good title should be unique, descriptive, short and readable on mobile devices.
For instance, if you’re looking for an apartment in New York City and you search “apartments New York City,” you’ll get a result that looks something like this:
Notice how they initially put the “apartments New York City”? That’s because Google has found that putting keywords at the beginning of your title will help with clickthrough rates; people tend to click more when they see those words first! It’s also helpful if you add other relevant keywords so that people who need to know what kind of apartment they’re looking for will still find your page useful. In addition, try adding short phrases such as “new construction apartments” or even just “apts” (for example) so that users searching specifically for these terms can find your site easily too!
Use a plugin that takes care of your SEO to make things easier.
The first step to improving your website’s SEO is ensuring that each page’s content is well-optimized. But a plugin can do it for you if you’re not a professional copywriter and need more time to learn all of the ins and outs of on-page SEO.
Consider looking for a plugin that offers automatic page analysis and optimization as part of its features. Plugins like Yoast SEO (free) will allow you to check what keywords people use when they search for your business online and how many times those terms appear in each web page’s content. It also gives you tips on how best to optimize each page based on its findings so that search engines can better understand what pages are about—and rank them higher in searches for those topics or searches containing those words/phrases specifically, which leads us into our next section:
Sometimes on-page factors can seem more important than they are.
For example, a website’s backlinks and domain authority are sometimes more important than you think. Social media shares and comments may be less influential too. If a page or post has a lot of these things going for it, that’s great—but if your website doesn’t have any of this kind of activity yet (or isn’t getting any), don’t worry about it too much, focus on other parts of your site instead.
Check your site’s speed to help it rank better.
The number one factor that Google looks at when determining how high to rank a website is its speed, and for a good reason: users are impatient! If your site takes too long to load, you lose potential customers and miss out on opportunities to make sales.
Fortunately, there are ways you can improve your page speed without having to do much in the way of technical work; in fact, many of these tactics will save you development time down the line because they’ll produce faster results than if you’d gone with a more complex solution from scratch.
Make sure the length of your content is appropriate.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is creating content that’s too long or too short. Don’t worry, though! You can check this with the aid of some tools.
Word count is important because most visitors have a limited attention span, so if your page takes forever to load or if it just seems like there is no end in sight, then you could be losing readership before they even get through half of the page. The average internet user will typically stay on a landing page for about 8 seconds before deciding whether or not they want to continue reading further, so make sure your content isn’t too long before sending users away from your site in frustration!
Similarly with a word count: If something is too short and doesn’t provide enough substance or detail for readers to take action on/learn more about whatever information has been provided (e.g., buying product X), then once again people will be less likely read all the way through—or at all!
Make sure you have several internal links.
Internal links are one of the simplest ways to get people to explore your site and find their way around it. For example, if someone is looking for information about how to buy a car, they could start their search on the homepage. You could link them directly to a page explaining what makes up a good price when shopping for cars.
This would also be beneficial in terms of SEO: Google uses internal linking as one of its ranking factors in determining which sites have more authoritative content related to certain keywords. That’s why it’s important that you have internal links and that they’re done well (i.e., they lead users somewhere useful).
Provide shareable images and videos when possible.
Although the potential for sharing isn’t a reason to use images on your site, it is good. If you can find relevant images and videos that are visually appealing and fun to watch, you’ll increase your chances of being shared.
However, simply including any old picture won’t do. Images should be relevant to the content, adding value when readers share them with others. Suppose there needs to be a better connection between an image and its surrounding text. In that case, readers may see it as gratuitous or distracting and quickly scroll past it without even noticing it’s there—and if they don’t notice it while they’re reading through an article on their phone screen in a hurry before getting back up again at work or school (or wherever else), then chances are no one else will either!
On-page SEO balances how you want to be seen by Google against what makes sense for your visitors.
While it’s true that if you write content that’s good for Search Engines, it will also likely be good for people, the two are sometimes different.
Google wants to see that you have a good website—this means it should load quickly, look nice and be easy to use. But more than this, they also want to see that you are a good business with information about who runs it and where we come from (the “about us” page). To achieve both of these goals, there are some simple steps we can take:
- Think about who will be reading your pages before deciding on their contents; this may mean making some changes right away
- Make sure each page has links back into its relevant section on other pages on your site, so they don’t get lost in cyberspace
Conclusion
It’s important to remember that on-page SEO is just one piece of the puzzle. Even if you get everything right on your site, it won’t matter if nobody sees it or finds their way there in the first place. For example, if Google has stopped sending traffic because they don’t like what they see when they crawl your site, then all of these things won’t mean anything! That’s why it’s important to keep track of what’s happening with tools like Ahrefs’ Index Health Report.