What is On-page SEO and How You Can Use it to Rank Your Website
On-page SEO is a set of practices that optimize web pages so that they rank higher in search results and receive more traffic. It is a way of increasing your website’s visibility in the organic search results of Google and other search engines.
Our search engine marketing experts in San Diego, California, created a list of On-page SEO factors that search engines look for when they are ranking a webpage.
Selecting the right Keywords
Before you begin optimizing our website you need to decide on the keywords that your website will rank for. Suppose you have a business selling green tea. You know that when potential customers are looking for tea online, they are likely to type in words such as “tea,” “green tea” and “weight loss green tea” into the search engine bar. Your green tea business would like its name to be right up there at the top in search results when these keywords are typed in. There are several keyword tools that can help you identify the right keywords, including the Google’s keyword planner.
Meta tags
Meta tags are part of the HTML code of a website and are placed in the head section. They do not appear anywhere on the actual website to the visitor. There are several Meta tag attributes such as title, description, keywords Meta tag and robots. Among these, the most important one for SEO is the title tag, which offers search engines an indication of the relevance of your website. Most San Diego, SEO experts believe that the best format to use your keywords in the title tag is to use the primary keyword first, followed by the secondary keyword and then the brand name. It’s also recommended to use no more than 60-65 characters in the title tag. And finally, the closer the keywords are to the beginning of the title the better it is. The description tag may no longer carry much weight for SEO, but it’s vital in enticing a visitor to click on the listing. Because description tag appears in the search listings, it is important to come up with a highly effective description. Check out this article to learn more about the importance of title tag for SEO.
Clean up your URL
The shorter your URL is, the better it is for On-page SEO. Place a keyword or two in there, and it can give a boost to the website’s ranking. In other word, search engines prefer something like https://www.sabaseo.com/search-engine-optimization/ instead of www.sabaseo.com/folder!/507/htm
Internal links
Internal links are an important ranking factor for On-page SEO. These are links between the pages of your website that help potential customers navigate through your site and find relevant content. For instance, the Media page for the Green Tea Shop should link to the Contact Us page and the About page could link to the History of the Green Tea Shop and also to the Contact Us page.
Headers
Use the keywords in the first three heading of a post of your website. This sends a strong indicator to the search engine that the content on your website is relevant
Keyword in alt.text of images
So far search engines are not very efficient at seeing images, so you need to indicate to it that the image of the steaming hot cup of green tea that you have put up on your website is relevant and adds value to the webpage. This is where an alt.text (or Alternate text) can help. alt.text works as a label for the image and helps the search engine understand what it is about. Adding keywords to the alt.text acts as another indicator to the search engine.
Mobile-friendly
Mobile searches have shot through the roof as more and more users are shifting to mobile as their device of choice for accessing the internet. Google has also announced that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the US and Japan.” So having a mobile-friendly and responsive website will help your On-Page SEO rankings.
Keyword density
The keyword should appear in the content, but it should not be stuffed to the brim. Don’t say “Green tea is one of the healthiest drinks around. You should drink 2 to 3 cups of green tea every day. Add some honey to your green tea to sweeten it. Next, add lemon to your green tea to give it a zing.”
In these four sentences, the number of times green tea is mentioned could easily have been cut down to two or even one. Stuffing your content with keywords is the kind of writing that puts off people and also search engines.
A general rule of thumb is that your keyword should appear in the first 50-100 word of the content and also in the last 50-100 words.
Long content
Since content is king according to Google, this is not surprising. Content must be at least 300 words and ideally much longer.
All kinds of content
Play around with content to attract visitors to your site. Apart from text, also use images and videos that help engage the audience of your website.
It pays to tweak your webpage for On-page SEO. Using several of these On-page SEO techniques in synch will help your website rank higher on Google and other search engines. SEO is all about spending the time and testing different things out. If you work on these elements, you should see improvement in your website’s ranking in the long run.