ON-PAGE SEO

A successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy practice starts with your own website. There are numerous elements on a site that can make or break your ranking potential. Do you have knowledge of those? Are they optimized right?

When Google isn’t able to find your site worthy, or isn’t recommending it to users, you need effective On-Page SEO implementation.

On-Page SEO is the technique of optimizing a website for search engines and users, to improve its search engine result pages (SERPs) ranking and gain organic traffic.

There are several on-page SEO practices for optimizing webpages and blogs that include page content, title tags, heading tags, keyword optimization, meta text, internal links, URLs, images, page speed optimization and more.

To rank your page in search results, Google looks at the signals that define how relevant your webpage or site is corresponding to a particular search query. If your page contains the same keywords as the search query, the page is more likely to be relevant. Thus it improves the chances of the page to rank higher in search results.

Google and other search engines also look at other factors that affect how searchers are interacting with your site. This includes page load speed, uniqueness and value of content, and much more. All these optimizations can be done with effective on-page SEO practices only. This process does take time but once you have implemented strong on-page SEO strategy, it will improve your ranking and inbound traffic considerably.

On-Page or On-Site SEO includes all the practices done within a website, and over which you have full control. However, it isn’t an easy task. An effective on-page SEO strategy lays the foundation for a quality off-page SEO campaign as well, as no one would want to link to a site that has scrappy content or if the site isn’t working properly.

There are several ranking factors that should be in the mix of things for a successful On-page SEO strategy:

• Page Title Tags – Use heading tag, H1, as the title tag, with a 60 to 80 character limit. This is the SEO title that tells what the page is about and is shown in the search results.
• Heading Tags – Use other heading tags, from H2 to H6 for the sub-headings on the page.
• Meta Tags – Meta title, meta description, meta robots are all key factors that tell search engine crawlers about the page info.
• Schema Tags–This is kind of micro data that helps search engines to extract the content on the web pages to present more relevant and better information in search results as rich snippets.
• Webpage Content – The uniqueness and quality of the content is a big on-page SEO factor. The content should be in a well-defined structure, is relevant, rich in formation, keyword optimized, and updated.
• Keyword Use – Keywords should be used in page title, meta tags, in page summary, and conclusion. The keyword density should be 2-3%, and you should use both, short-tail and long-tail keywords.
• Text Format – Highlight important words or sentences in bold. Important keywords in answers can be highlighted in italic, and blockquotes help to highlight key points. Use ordered list form and bullets to segment the content wherever needful.
• Image Optimization–image should be named properly without spaces, and must be accompanied with an alt tag. Use image title tags, caption, and have the image optimized so that the page loads fast. Use the right file type (.jpg format is more SEO-friendly).
• URL Structure – Use the right format for the URL – all characters should be in lower case, use’/’ as page separator, use ‘-‘ to separate words, and keep the URL as short as possible.
• Links – Internal linking helps people and search engines navigate to other pages/blogs containing related information. External links from high-authority sites also help to build domain authority.
• Site Accessibility–XML sitemaps are search engine friendly sitemaps and help to alleviate crawling issues of the site or blog. Also, make site navigation easy and straightforward, along with a breadcrumb format.
• Additional Media – Use of additional media forms like images, infographics, videos help bring more value to the information you present, and it improves search appearance.
• User Experience – You need to have a well-defined UI and UX implementation that improves user experience, enhances user engagement and boosts site ranking probability.
• Site Speed – How fast the site load is a big ranking factor for search engines. It improves user experience and reduces bounce rate. Optimize each element of webpages so that it loads fast.

With E-A-T, Google wants to be clear that it will reward sites that produce high quality, people-first content, crafted by an expert and are trustworthy, and will punish sites that generate low quality, unhelpful content.

• ‘E’ stands for Expertise–As a content creator you have to demonstrate your expertise in a particular niche. This can be industry or field-wise expertise, or can be ‘everyday expertise’ as well, meaning life or experience expertise.
• ‘A’ stands for Authoritativeness – Authority is all about your reputation in the industry circles. It denotes how credible you are as a knowledge source in the field, and how much valuable others consider you citing as a source of info.
• ‘T’ stands for Trustworthiness – It takes time and effort to earn the trust of users, target audience and search engines. And as you gain trust more and more, the better your site will be trusted by all, including Google, to display and rank on relevant search queries.

What Google has been telling us, site-owners, for decades? Create great quality content to appear on top of search results.

Well, no longer we can reverse-engineer how Google algorithms work. There is no short-cut to success here. All we need to do what Google has been saying. And with implementation of E-A-T concept, it has stamped its statement boldly.

You follow E-A-T and you get your site land on the top of the rankings in search results. You need to deliver value to the users, create content that speaks to them, provide them solution, asserts your knowledge, expertise in the field, and Google will definitely put you at the forefront.

E-A-T applies to all types of sites, and it includes your site as well.

Therefore, E-A-T is critical when you want to present your website content. And it starts with on-page SEO.

• Identify the content creators with a detailed bio, crafted with a journalistic professionalism.
• The site should provide visitors easy access to business contact info.
• Replace or remove the low-quality, less relevant, outdated from the site.
• Work on creating a positive brand reputation by sharing valuable insights with your target users, uplifting your customer satisfaction process, and by creating high quality thought-leadership content.

E-A-T isn’t about what you need to do for search engines. It’s about what you need to do for your audiences. And to grow your business your audiences are the topmost priority. Therefore, there is no question of if, but how to optimize your on-page steps according to E-A-T guidelines.

Site audit helps to assess the current status of the site’s SEO performance. It includes checking for what keywords are being used in each page, what is the URL structure, how the title and headings tags are optimized, along with internal linking, site load speed, relevancy and freshness of the content, and more.

You should definitely take a leaf out of your competitor’s books that are doing really well with their on-page SEO strategy. A detailed competitor analysis provides key insights into keywords, content, site structure and much more that helps to create our own strategy.

The most critical aspect of defining content creation, keyword research helps to find out what your target customers are searching for online, what terms and phrases they use, and for what keywords your competitors are ranking. Different keyword types, including semantically relevant ones should be included.

The URL has to include terms that define the page’s topic. Instead of long jumbled numbers, the URL needs to clearly include keywords which could be related to a service, product, a subject or anything else that the page is about. Clean and organized URLs are the ideal ones, which should look like.

Your page title is what Google and other search engine crawlers look at to know what that page contains. The page title has to include targeted keywords for the search crawlers to understand the page information. It should be ideally created within 50-60 character limit (with spaces).

Use of headings throughout the page allows breaking the content and making it more readable and skimmable. H1 is the most important heading tag, which could also be used as the page title tag. Using heading tags (H2 to H6) including targeted keywords that enhance the page’s search visibility.

Meta title and meta description are both an important factor to target. Create meta description describing about the page in clear and concise way, using core and related keywords. Google highlights the user search terms in bold that appears in the meta description. All this helps to improve the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).

Accurate indexing of all the pages is important to give an organized structure to the pages. XML sitemap creation and Robots.txt file helps to ensure that search engines can easily crawl and find deeper webpages.

Search crawlers can’t read what a particular image, video or other multimedia file is about. This is where Alt attributes help to tell what that multimedia file is about. Using Alt tags along with readable link URLs enables search engines and users to access the content.

Site content across all the pages is an important aspect for on-page SEO. It provides users with information, and tells search engines the context of the page. The content should be quality, unique, updated, keyword-targeted but relevant to the page topic, and must be created based on user search intent, within a well-formatted content body. Adding blogs to the website helps improve ranking and user engagement in an effective manner. Duplicate content should be removed as it is bad for on-page SEO.

If you are targeting local customers and marketers, then local optimization should be implemented thoroughly for on-page optimization. It includes adding and keeping address and contact info consistent throughout the site. If the business serves different cities or regions, then creating particular region based helps to rank for search queries specific to those regions.

Adding page-specific schema markup helps to gain enhanced search visibility as displayed rich snippets. Such strategy with structured data embedded on webpages help give a website boost in search rankings with improved click-through-rate.

For on-page SEO, internal linking helps to provide added value to the users and search engines. It helps in accessing relevant information quickly, delivers value and improves user engagement. Generating external links from authoritative sources also help boost a site’s visibility and ranking.

Page speed is a vital ranking factor, as stressed by Google many times. The slower a site or page loads; it scales down the user experience. Attention of users is less nowadays, and they want fast access to information. Slow load speed also increases bounce rate. Page load time should be within the 3-second frame. Right from optimizing images, media files to adopting several other methods, page load optimization is a must in on-site SEO.

More and more people are now accessing sites through mobile devices. If you are site isn’t accessible in the same way on different devices, it will decreased your ranking considerably. In fact, mobile-friendly or a responsive site is a must-have requirement now.