If you want to succeed in organic search, that requires optimizing for factors that search engines consider important to users. These factors are divided into On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO. It’s important to know that Off-page SEO won’t do much good if you don’t pay attention to fundamentals covered by On-page SEO.
On-page SEO (on-site SEO) is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher on SERPs and get more relevant traffic. On-page SEO refers to optimizing both the content and the HTML source page. Besides helping search engines interpret page content, it also helps users figure out what the page is for, and whether it addresses their search query (keywords).
That’s why On-page optimization should be constantly prioritized. You should know that, unlike Off-page, On-page SEO is fully under your control. While off-page covers mostly link building, on-site SEO covers content and keywords.
Content, Keywords, and On-Page SEO
When it comes to On-page SEO it’s important to stay up to date. Things are changing constantly, for instance, in the past keywords were the center of On-page SEO, but that’s not the case anymore. While the keywords were the focus, user experience was secondary. It was important to make sure that search engines found keywords and ranked a site as relevant. In this way, keywords were at the heart of SEO practices.
Today, keywords still matter but methods like using the exact-match keywords in specific locations are no longer important for On-page SEO. The important thing is how relevant the content is to the user intent behind search queries. Keep in mind that on-page SEO is not about finding one keyword and stuffing it everywhere possible, it’s about understanding who your users are and what they are looking for. When you know the answer to that question, you can create content that fulfills users’ needs.
When you are creating content you need to think about certain criteria.
Don’t make thin content because Google doesn’t like it, focus more on in-depth content. Pay attention to the readability of your content and make sure it’s easily navigable. Never forget that your content needs to be unique. If it’s not, that may impact the site’s ability to rank on SERPs. Your content has to be authoritative and trustworthy. Additionally, content topics need to align with the search queries for which they rank.
Good User Experience
Creating a good user experience is not only about content topics. Some of the other elements that are influencing a page’s on-site optimization are:
Link use on a page. Here, I’m talking about internal and external links. Internal links are the links that go from one page on a website to another page on the same domain. On the other hand, external links are hyperlinks that point to a domain different than the one link is originating from.
Page Speed can be also described as “page load time” which is actually the time it takes to fully display the content of a specific page. This is important because Google has indicated site speed as one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.
The use of markup such as Schema.org Structured Data is very helpful. It’s a semantic vocabulary of tags that you can add to improve the way your page displays in SERPs.
Page URL structure needs to consist of the protocol, domain name, and path. It must be shorter than 2083 characters. When a URL is structured properly, it provides a clear indication of what the destination page is all about.
Mobile optimization and metadata are alongside the other elements, crucial in creating a good user experience.
Optimizing a Page
A fully optimized page on your website requires both text and HTML-based changes. You need to keep in mind that the way your page is optimized can have a huge impact on its ability to rank. The biggest on-page factor is content, right after content the second most important factor is the title tag, and don’t ever forget how important URLs are.