On-page SEO is the technique of optimizing your webpage so that it ranks higher on search engines’
result pages. Higher ranking results in greater surge of organic traffic, more conversions and
booming sales. Ranking higher also enhances brand visibility and builds brand awareness. In the long
run and with consistent results, SEO creates trust and credibility around your brand. However, as
competition rises, search engines evolve to be smarter and the digital world matures, ranking on
SERPs becomes a tough task to achieve, yet not so impossible.
SEO is commonly categorised between off-page SEO and On-page SEO. On-page includes optimizing
both the content and the web HTML source code as opposed to off-page that is deals with
optimizing signals beyond your webpage such as backlinks. Gone are the days when on-site SEO was
commonly regarded as stuffing your content with keywords. Google in 2020 is smarter than its
younger days, smarter enough to understand synonyms and semantically‐related keywords. This
means on-page SEO grows to be larger than keywords.
Read below to discover new and innovative ways for Important Factors that impact your On-page SEO
Content matters
Google’s entire business model is built upon providing its viewers with satisfaction by displaying the most relevant answers to their search query. Since content composition is of such importance to search engines, quality content is the most important factor that wins you a position on the search page results.
But how would you define quality content?
From SEO perspective, good content has three main attributes:
- Answers a demand: Like anywhere else in the world, information too follows the dynamics of supply and demand. Your supply of information is only useful if it fulfills the demand of a viewer. The larger the demand that you fulfill, the better position search engines grant you on their result pages.
- Is linkable: Good content is also that which can serve as an evergreen reference so that viewers link it in their content. It is highly unlikely for an unlinkable piece of content to rank amongst the search engine results.
- Purposeful and comprehensive: The ideal piece of content not only answers a unique search query but has its purpose reflected on all its domains:
- title tag
- URL
- Content of page
- Image alt text
Title tags and URL:
The title tag is the HTML element that denotes the heading of your webpage as it would be displayed on SERPs. These serve as linked gateways to your site from search engine result pages and hence the first view of your offerings granted to the viewers. This makes titles incredibly useful for the purpose of SEO.
For best SEO, titles are advised to be concise, interesting, and short, ideally between 50/60 characters so that your heading isn’t split into half by the search engine with the addition of an ellipsis (“…”) or omission of important words. Titles are also ideal places to push in a keyword and known to give rise to your rankings. However, be careful not to spam your title with keywords that make little sense when combined. This not only fails to fool the search engine but also makes the users wear for spam. It is a better approach to strategically place keywords in misdescriptions and headings on your site.
For Moz’s recommendations on how to best write your titles, visit
For SEO, URL is recommended to reflect their categories in a precise order; for example:
www.example.org/games/video-game-history
These allow search engines to better understand and read the content being provided and consequently link it to relevant search queries. On the other side, a URL structure such as http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569 fails to provide the search engine with any useful information. It is also helpful from an anchor text perspective because people are more likely to link with the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL.
Keywords:
Cramping content with keywords is the most widely known and an age-old way of SEO. Modern times however demand its responsible use. Search engines and particularly Google have grown weary of keywords stuffed pages that offer little information. Moreover so, search engines have grown wiser to understand and read synonyms of the keyword. This allows them to span beyond the limited reach of keywords and instead focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust).
So then what is the ideal keyword frequency? There exists no magic number for keyword frequency. It is a tie between making the Search engine believe that your webpage is about this particular keyword yet also not spamming it with over usage of the said word and have your page removed from its index.
When choosing a keyword, here are a few things to keep in mind. The keyword should be:
- In line with the subject of the page.
- Easily searchable.
- Easy to use and works within the text
Page loading speed:
This one comes without saying. Page speed has a direct influence on user satisfaction. Google reports that 53% of users are known to leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Additionally, as smartphone web usage increases, Google has announced to include this matrix in its mobile-first index of ranking.
To check for your website’s loading speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for results on one webpage. For an overall picture, websites such as Ahref offer a complete Site audit and highlights problematic areas.
But how do you increase loading speed? Two of the easiest ways to achieve faster loading pages are to reduce the size of your images and remove unnecessary details from your HTML code.
Image optimization:
Images help break the text monotony on your webpage. This not only enhances user experience but also helps your ranking since you are now included in Google images search results as well.
Image optimization for SEO includes
- quick to upload images
- Keywords in the alt tag of images
All these techniques are bound to bring your customer to your site. However, other important criteria for Google to rank its pages is the time viewers spend on a certain page. Bounce rates negatively impact your rankings. One way to help users stay longer on your webpage is to include relevant internal links within your website. Hyperlinks such as ‘More like this’ or ‘You may be interested in..’ succeed in captivating users’ interest.
SEO is an ever-learning art. As search engines innovate to become smarter, webpages gradually keep up with their techniques and adapt to changes. Hence for consistent results, it is imperative that your SEO learning never stops.
