If you are want to increase the traffic and ranking of your website, and then it’s necessary to think about search engine optimization. It’s one of the internet marketing ways that help you improve your website and therefore your business as well. There are two major techniques available in the case of SEO. These are on-page optimization and off-page optimization. A combination of both techniques is important to ensure that search engines recognize your website and rank higher in those search engine results. Most people make the mistake of only concentrating on off-page optimization, where they need to get more back links for the promotion of their website. Even though it may increase ranking in one or two weeks, there is always going to be the problem of link spam. When you consider what the major search engines, especially Google, look for, they tend to favour organic link building and search results.
So, an excess of inorganic links may result in your website getting penalized. In order to avoid this, it is necessary to concentrate on on-page optimization as well. Most website owners are ready to offer high quality content for other websites. But, they fail to think about the content quality of their own website. When a search engine crawls your website, it checks for the quality of your content and tags. In the case of on-page optimization, it is enough to spend one or two hours to optimize your website.
The result will be a higher and efficient one
- You have to select a good title for your website. This helps visitors identify your website as well as broaden their search.
- Description about the web page should be mentioned
- It is necessary to have relevant content in your website that is of high quality. Content which is poor in its content can give off a bad impression and cause your visitors to not return to your website.
- Another important thing is to tag all the relevant keywords of the website and the content. This makes search engines highlight that keyword which enhances the search options.
When you consider all these on-page optimization methods, then there are many advantages for your website. They are:
- It increases the page rank of your website
- Visibility, readability and branding of your website can be earned through on-page modification techniques.
- This helps search engines get to your website easily and thus your website will be placed in much better position in Google or other search engines search results.
All these things offer your website extra visibility and popularity. It will be more helpful to earn more money and to get good revenue for your business.
On-page optimization basically refers to all the factors that will have considerable effect on a website/page listing on search engines. These factors can however be controlled by source coding on the page. Some examples of on-page optimization are keyword placement and density, title, heading, URL, article length and page load speed. It is actually one of the most important steps in SEO. Below are some on-page techniques that are quite useful in 2022.
Keyword Density: Don’t over optimize your article with keywords
Keyword placement and density needs to be balanced to make your article readable and clear. If this is done correctly, the keyword is emphasized and the text captures the attention of the reader.
Use your main keyword in the title of your article and place your main keyword in the H1-H6 heading tag because search engines give more emphasis on the heading tag. Use your main keyword in the first and last sentence of your article. Also, it is very important to use LSI keywords in your article because LSI keywords help search engines understand your content topic easily. The use of power words such as free, top, and cheap also captures the attention of readers and increases traffic flow to the site. You can use modifiers like 2014, best, top, quality, and review which can increase the chance of ranking well in the long tail versions of your main keyword.
Keyword Density is one of the most important factors of on-page optimization. You may ask, what is the safe keyword density percentage? You will not get any exact answer because maximum search engines update their algorithm frequently with very complex mathematical calculation and it varies depending on various factors and key words. Many SEO experts suggest keeping keyword density between 1%-4%.
Here is the ratio I follow:
- If the article length is over 2000 words- Try to keep it bellow 1%
- If the article length is 1000-1500 words- Try to keep it at 1%
- If the article length is below 1000 words- Try to keep it between1-2%
Article length: Write longer and better quality articles
If you write a 300 word post in 2014 and expect your short article to rank well in Google SERP then you are wrong. I’m not telling you that a short post will not rank well but if your post is at over 2,500 words then there is a better chance of it getting on the front page of Google SERP easily. In this article Neil Patel mentioned SERPIQ.com analysis which found that the average article length for a web page that ranks in the first page top ten results for any search query on Google has at least 2000 words. The articles which used lists, italics, bold, tables and block quotes in the body of the article ranked higher in search engine ranking results than articles that only used plain text ranked.
Longer articles not only rank for one main keyword. A quality, long article has more LSI keywords so the article can rank more keywords.
Google prefers long articles because those articles are more likely to fulfil their users’ needs because they cover more detailed information and statistics. Use of attractive images, videos and info graphic in your article can increase user engagement and decrease bounce rate which help your article to rank well in SERP results.
Site Update: Update your niche site with unique and fresh content regularly
Creating a stunning and well written article is great thing and it can help you to rank well in search engine results but that isn’t where the work ends. If you created your website a long time ago and you don’t update the content regularly then there is a big chance that your website content loses its freshness and may drop it’s ranking in the search engine results page due to a lack of fresh and unique content.
So if you want to rank your site higher it is absolutely essential to keep the old content fresh, correct and up-to-date. Also you need to add new individual articles or posts in the website frequently because search engines love and give higher freshness scores to sites that post new content on a regular basis. So keep your content fresh and relevant for your user.
Titles & Headers: Use these tags wisely
HTML tags are important in showing parts of your site that you would most importantly want your readers to see. They can be in the Title tag and H1-H6 tag. They define the page title or other sections that are important in the site.
Title optimization is the very first technique that helps in website optimization. The website’s title tag should be tiny, precise and descriptive. A Moz.com study found that pages that started their title with targeted keywords ranked better than pages with the targeted keywords in the middle or at the end of the title. It is the first item that will be shown and indexed by search engines. Therefore it will be given priority and so should you when making a title for your website. You need to try and make it appealing in order to get higher rankings. The title may include the site’s name, business name, product on sale, a phrase or even your own name.
Article URLs: Make it clean and readable
When it comes to on-page optimization there is one thing that many website owners may forget, to make the website URL readable. This is important because search engines don’t like ugly URL’s. An URL with good structure is among the most important aspects that search engine optimization requires. It may not come across your mind because the web master only thinks that search engines crawl for the use of proper keywords within the contents or title.
An URL with good structure has to include a hierarchy of categories on the page. An example of a good readable URL is:
http://nichechallenges.com/the-on-page-seo-optimization-you-need-in-2014/.
This URL gives a clear idea about the page content.
Here is an example of a bad URL structure:
http://www.nichechallegnes.com/page/77650.html
In this URL, it does not give any idea about the page content.
A readable URL is very vital in increasing the chance of a website to get good position on SERP. Bad URL structure cannot help the website in being seen on search engines. This is because a major search engine like Google understands the importance of relevancy. Besides, a well-structured URL supports the anchor text as internet visitors prefer to link with the relevant phrase when the keywords that they search are included within the URL.
Website Load Speed: According to Google developer tools you need to make it over 85%
Page load speed is a factor considered by people visiting the sites and it can be a great obstruction if it is slow. Do you like to visit a website when it loads slowly? I am sure you don’t. Also you don’t want come back to websites that load slowly and that’s the reason Google doesn’t like a website when it takes a long time to load.
Google uses a large number of factors to decide how to rank search engine results. This post on the Google webmaster blog mentioned that web page load speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. In order to have increase your web page load speed here are some ways that will come in handy.
USE CDN :
This a collection of web servers distributed along a network to deliver more effectively and efficiently to its users. It is also known as content delivery network. This can be achieved by hoping the server with the lowest number of networks or using the server with the highest response time.
OPTIMIZE IMAGES :
If the website has many pictures or large ones it will take time to load hence becoming slower. This can be greatly enhanced by knowing what type to save as an image. You can use image editing software that will help you reduce image size.
MINIFY HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT CODE :
You can minify or compress your HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT code of your website that can speed up your webpage loading speed. There are many online tools that you can use to do this.
USE QUALITY HOSTING :
If you use lots of plugins and heavy themes in your website then your website speed may decrease dramatically. In this case I strongly suggest you use a quality hosting provider like Hostgator to host your website. Hostgator serves your website really fast and they use top quality dedicated hardware to speed up your website load time. Read my review why Hostgator are better than other hosting providers.
Images : Optimize it correctly
You know, images can be a great source of traffic for your website. If you want to grab this free traffic you need to optimize your images perfectly. It’s not very hard either. Once you know what to do it’s actually really.
The first thing you need to do is to add an alt tag. If you don’t know what it is? Well the answer is, it’s the text that the search engine uses to understand image topic. To ad alt text, you simply need to put your text in the alt attribute of the image tag. Here is an example:
Next thing you need to keep in mind is to reduce the image file size without sacrificing quality because small file size images load faster than heavy images.
Another important image optimization technique is to pick a meaningful file name for your image before you upload it. Preferably you should include your target keyword in your file name because search engines not only crawl the text on your article they also search for keywords within your image file names. You could use the generic name such as “DMDD220.jpg” but it will not rank well because the search engine can’t recognize what topic the image is related to. Itt would be much better to name the image file “dog-training.jpg” so the search engine can understand this picture is about dog training.
If your site uses image galleries or image pop-ups, you can use Google images site maps that will help your site to get Google attention.
Backlinks: Internal page & external page links
Here is another killer on-page strategy that many website don’t give too much importance to. If you want to have stable and high rankings in search engines then interlinking is the most effective technique that you need to implement in your site. Interlinking means that you connect two articles of the same website. Well, if you want to see a perfect example of an internal link I suggest you to check out Wikipedia. If you use it perfectly then it will help you to increase average visit duration of your visitor by lowering bounce rate. Not only will interlinking increase the number of page visits of your site it will also help you get backlinks for your post or article with exact keyword matches in the anchor text.
Another strategy that you can implement is to put 1-2 outbound links to authority external webpages on your article topic because it will increase the relevancy of your article or post and increase ranking of your article.
That’s my wrap up on my On-Page SEO optimization check list for 2014. I guess you already get the idea about what you need to do on your on-page optimization and I want to hear your thoughts and what techniques you use on your on-page optimization. Don’t feel shy to share your thoughts in the comments box bellow because that will help me and others to learn more.