On-page SEO. On-page SEO is optimizing one’s page content in such a way that the page ranks higher in SERP and there is an upsurge in the on-site traffic. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external resources.
The ultimate goal of any type of SEO is to improve ranking of the site. Although one must keep in mind the simple fact that the main focus should be – how consumer friendly the content is.
The key to on-page SEO is content creation and content optimization. Here are some points to follow while creating content.
Content Creation
Content Creation revolves around keywords. It’s all about how many relevant words does your content contain for the crawler to catch, so as to increase the page relevance. In order to use more keywords, proper and extensive key word research must be done.
Keywords
There is a term popular among content creators known as LSI keywords. These are the words and phrases that google sees as “semantically related to the topic”. If you are writing content about digital marketing, then the LSI keywords might be SEO, content writing, digital marketing strategies, types of digital marketing, digital marketing jobs etc.
Keyword research –
Simple keyword research can be done by searching the required topic on google. There will be two sections- top section and bottom section. The topmost section will have a column named people also search for. The bottom section will have a searches relted to the topic you searched for. If we take the previously taken example of digital marketing, the search results for it are :
Keyword density –
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.
If you want to find out the keyword density for a piece of content, you will need to:
- Identify the keyword
- Count the total number of words on the page
- Divide the number of times the keyword appears with the page’s total word count
- Multiply the results with 100
For example, if a blog post has 1,000 words and a keyword appears 10 times, that means the article has a keyword density of 1%. Loading your content with a high volume of keywords is not as important as inserting them into the right places. As a general rule, keywords should appear in:
Most important:
- Title tag (ideally at the beginning of the title)
- Body content (the higher in the page or article, the better)
Less important:
- Headings (H1, H2, and so on)
- URL (slug)
- Meta description
- Image alt tags
Other than content creation a website can be optimized in several other ways.
Page Titles
Page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. As these are the first thing that the user sees. If the page title does not seem relevant to the user, then the sit traffic would decrease. Page title is by a HTML element known as title tag. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. Page title must contain keywords related to your content and brand.
Code for writing a page title is –
<head> <title> Write your page title here </title> </head>
Meta Descriptions
Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. It is a snippet of up to about 155-160 characters which summarizes a page’s content. It is really important to give proper meta descriptions of your content. When we search for something we look at the title and then read the meta description. Sometimes we get the answer just by reading the description. It should be written in such a way that it doesn’t give away too much information and at the same time drives the user to open the website. While writing meta description one must not forget to use keywords.
<meta name=”description” content=”The page’s description”/>
Meta Tags
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about. The <meta> tag defines metadata about an HTML document.
For example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”digital marketing, content writing, SEO, on-page SEO”>
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe”>
Internal linking
An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another webpage or resource. It connects your content and gives Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages.
Links can be written using the below given HTML code
<a href=”write link here” title=”link title”> Keyword text </a>
The ‘Keyword text’ will become a hypertext i.e. when we click on the text, the link in href attribute will open.
Image Optimization
Image optimization refers to reducing the size of the image (not in length or width but file size) without sacrificing the image quality. Doing this decreases the page load time. Another way to optimize an image is by giving alternative text. Sometimes when the image fails to load – due to reasons like slow internet speed, alternative text is displayed instead of the image. This text should describe the image and also contain keywords for the crawler to scan through.
All the practices and optimization techniques of SEO are ways to make the content user friendly. In the end, if your page provides someone with a comprehensive answer to what that person is looking for, google will rank you higher up on the first page.
