Did you know that plenty of elements on your websites can help you rank high in the search results and get qualified traffic? You just need to optimize them, which we call On-Page SEO. If you’re new to these concepts and want to learn how to optimize your site for search engines, this blog post is for you. Even if you’re already familiar with On-Page SEO practices, you’ll find expert tips here to enhance your strategies.
Let’s get started!
On-Page SEO: Basics
| Your site will be easily crawlable by search robots. |
| Quality outbound links will be present. |
| Site architecture will be logical and clear. |
| Images will be search-engine optimized. |
| Pages will render well on all devices and browsers. |
| Pages will load quickly on all devices. |
| URLs will be user-friendly. |
| Pages will target specific search intent. |
| Keywords will be placed in relevant spots. |
| Text will be readable and user-friendly. |
| Title tags and meta descriptions will be optimized for a good CTR. |
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, involves improving the content and various elements of your web pages to make them more friendly for both search engines and users. This practice focuses on optimizing the components within a website, such as internal links, URLs, content, and title tags.
The key elements of on-page SEO include the following:
Keywords
Keywords play a crucial role in telling search engines what your webpage is about. If you place them strategically and naturally in your content, it will boost your ranking. You can place them page title, headings (H1, H2, etc.), meta description, URL, and within the body text. Additionally, make sure you choose the right keywords for effective targeting. Research relevant topics and target keywords to create high-quality content that meets users’ search needs.
Title tags
Title tags are essential for on-page SEO because they inform both search engines and users about the content of a page. They can impact a website’s click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people who click on a search result. Title tags help search engines deliver the most relevant search results to users. If a title tag is irrelevant or misleading, users may bounce back to search results, which can negatively impact a website’s ranking.
Pro-tip: Use keyword-rich title tags to provide search engines with information about the page’s content.
Meta descriptions
A well-crafted meta description helps users preview the page and understand what to expect. So, write click-worthy meta descriptions that include your keywords and accurately describe the page’s content.
Image optimization
By having the image optimized, you can significantly improve the speed and performance of your website. To optimize images on your site, you should compress images to make the website load faster. Add alt texts to images so search engines can index them and improve your website’s ranking. At last, avoid the common image SEO mistakes for a successful online strategy.
Internal linking
Internal linking makes it feasible for search engines to discover your pages and index them. It is also helpful in helping the search engine understand the hierarchy of your content and distribute the “link authority” across your site. This is crucial in signalling which pages of your site are most important and helps in boosting your ranking.
Ignoring internal linking can lead to orphan pages, which can be difficult to find and fix. So, it’s better to optimally perform internal linking when creating a new page for your website. Internal links also create a clear pathway for users to navigate your website, making it easier to find relevant information and enhancing user experience. By strategically linking related pages, you can group content into topic clusters, helping search engines understand the structure of your website.
Pro-tip: Using descriptive anchor text within internal links helps Google better understand the topic of the linked page.
External linking
External linking is considered a very important part of on-page SEO, as it significantly impacts a website’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines. By linking to relevant, high-quality external sources, you can nurture better search rankings and increase organic traffic. This is essentially true when you link to reputable websites as it acts as a “vote of confidence” for your own content, signalling to search engines that your page is a trustworthy and informative link to related websites in your industry to help build your authority.
Page speed
Google announced in 2010 that page speed would significantly impact the search rankings. Google recommends that a website’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric occur within 2.5 seconds. They also consider a score of 90 or above to be good, 89–50 to need improvement, and 49–0 to be poor. You can check your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Please note that this tool will show you the result of one page at a time.
Schema markup
Schema markup is a set of tags that help search engines understand the content on a web page, and is important for SEO because it can help search engines index pages better. You can use schema markup to provide search engines with structured data about your website and its content. Schema markup can help a website get more clicks from increased visibility. It can also help users find the information they’re looking for more quickly.
Why is On-Page SEO important?
| Reason | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Improves Search Rankings | On-Page SEO helps your pages rank higher on search engines, making your content more visible. |
| 2. Enhances User Experience | Optimizing content improves readability and navigation, leading to better user engagement. |
| 3. Boosts Click-Through Rate (CTR) | Proper meta tags and compelling titles encourage more users to click on your page. |
| 4. Targets Search Intent | On-page SEO aligns your content with what users are searching for, driving more relevant traffic. |
| 5. Increases Page Speed | Optimized elements lead to faster loading times, which are crucial for both users and search engines. |
| 6. Helps Search Engines Understand Content | Proper use of headers, keywords, and structured data makes it easier for search engines to index your pages. |
| 7. Builds Trust and Credibility | High-quality content and a user-friendly structure foster trust and authority with your audience. |
On-page SEO acts as a guide to search engines. It tells Google where to find your content and what it is about. Only creating a site is not enough; to fulfil the purpose of creating it, you need to optimize it for Google and make it easily discoverable to users.
On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines understand your website and how it provides value to users, which can improve your website’s ranking in search results. It helps search engines accurately index your pages, which can improve your website’s visibility. When your website’s visibility improves you are more likely to drive targeted organic traffic to your website. This further leads to higher engagement and conversions on your website.
Apart from this, on-page is instrumental in improving the user experience and keeping visitors for a long time and ultimately reducing bounce rates.
How to do On-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO comprises various aspects; let’s go through each one by one in this section:
Technical stuff
On-page SEO largely includes technical optimization. Here is how!
Indexability
The accessibility of your site is the basis of your technical SEO. Search engines send their bots/crawlers to web pages. These bots then crawl your pages and index them into databases, and based on their relevance to keywords, results are displayed to users.
Google Search Console allows you to check whether your page is indexed or not. This tool can help you analyze your keyword rankings, possible Google penalties, site indexing, and CTRs.
To check whether your page is on Google, open Google Search Console. In the coverage view, find “Excluded.” This shows the number of pages that Google has not indexed yet.
You will usually see a lot of excluded pages, but this may certainly not always be a problem. There will be pages where URLs are automatically created in your CMS, pagination pages, etc., and you don’t need to index them. It’s up to you whether you want to get listed pages indexed by Google or not.
But if you spot any important URLs of blog posts, categories, landing pages, and products, there must be some problem. These issues could occur due to minor mistakes on the website, like a misplaced attribute such as “index.” However, sometimes, this could also be a result of serious issues like duplicate content or thin content.
If this seems to be the issue, you must try to find the reason and troubleshoot the issue. Choosing a professional On-Page SEO agency can keep you immune from such issues. SEO Toronto Experts can quickly fix such issues and not let them negatively impact your site.
As an experienced SEO agency, we have all the essential tools like Google Search Console, Google Page Speed Insight, Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and more in our inventory. We have an extensive team of qualified experts who are adept at using these tools to identify any shortcomings and fix them to achieve the best possible results.
Build an organized site structure.
Site structure has a significant impact on crawlability and user-friendliness. Let’s examine how to have a well-optimized website architecture.
If you have a large website, you should use a sitemap. A sitemap is a file with all your website’s URLs. It helps crawlers find all your pages in one place.
Structure Depth
Many people aren’t aware that having too much content can be hurtful to their website. It can worsen the user experience by making their pages hard to find. So, always target a lower depth in the structure of your website so search engines can quickly crawl the important content and users can easily spot the desired information.
So, while designing a website, there is a general rule you must follow. It’s three-click rule which tells users they should be able to find any information with not more than three mouse clicks from the homepage.
Usually, you must focus on achieving two kinds of clicks: structural links and contextual links. Both of these are types of internal links on a website.
As we discussed even earlier, there are many benefits to internal links, so let’s skip to the next part about what type of internal links you can form. Firstly, you can create long-form posts; it’s called creating pillar content. Then, you can create supporting blog posts explaining subtopics in detail, which is called creating cluster content.
Make sure you are adding the internal links naturally and not exaggerating.
Now, let’s move towards external links. Many are afraid of not performing much external linking as they believe it could split the link juice. The quote by John Mueller bunks this myth very well. He says
Here, as well, you have to make sure of certain things like:
- It is practiced in moderation.
- You are not linking to spammy or low-quality websites.
- You are performing only natural and relevant external linking.
Page Speed
We already discussed how important it is to optimize your page speed, as it is one of the most crucial ranking factors. Let’s learn how you can improve your page speed.
Google looks at your website through a mobile device. So, you better focus on creating a mobile-first design. You will also need proper web hosting, Image SEO and optimal browser caching to improve your page speed.
Kinex Media is Canada’s leading design and development agency. It can help you create responsive and mobile-friendly designs. If you already have a website, they can help you with making tweaks.
Secure your website
If you’re still using HTTP// and have not adapted to HTTPS, you might land in trouble someday as it risks your site. An unsecured site has a negative impact on CTR, sales, bounce rate, and credibility.
Make sure your URLs are short and simple.
Are your URLs defining and simple? It’s a good practice to focus on URLs that are short, have focus keywords and do not include special characters or digits.
When your URL is descriptive, users find it easy to understand the context. For example, if your content is about “How to do SEO for Multilingual Websites,” the ideal URL for it would be:
https://seotorontoexperts.ca/seo-for-local/
And not be,
https://seotorontoexperts.ca/local/
As it can be misleading to readers.
Content Optimization
No matter how good your content is, if you don’t optimize it for Google, it will all be in vain.
Here is how you can optimize your content for both robots and humans:
Keywords Research
Keyword research tells you what people search for, what their queries are, and how they put them on the search engine. It provides insights into all this, and that’s how you can craft content that perfectly aligns with your target audience’s search intent.
However, keywords alone cannot save you if your content is not helpful to users. Another thing that’s worth noting is that your keyword research shouldn’t simply be based on finding a focus keyword, but also on understanding the entire topic and the topics surrounding it, along with the related terms.
Most importantly, don’t just focus on finding keywords with high search volume or low competition, etc.; it is equally important to pay attention to the search intent.
Focus on search intent.
Google is surprisingly good at understanding what users want to see. Using the GoogleRankBrain, which is a machine learning algorithm, it gets insights into users and learns to satisfy the intent of the user.
Mainly, there are four types of search intent that you have to target:
Informational: The user is looking for general or high-level information
Navigational: The user is looking for information about a specific place or thing
Commercial: The user is interested in a product or service and is looking for more detailed information
Transactional: The user has decided to act and is looking for a specific specification
The best way to hit the right search intent is to search the term you are targeting to rank on Google and observe the results.
How to optimize for the focus keywords?
Usually, SEO is mistaken for finding one keyword and forcefully putting it wherever it can be fitted. But one should understand that focused keywords just give you a target around which you have to focus your content. So, if your focus keyword is “Exotic Toronto Holiday Destination,” it does not mean you force it in the content when you could simply use “Exotic holiday locations in Toronto.”
- Use your page’s focus keyword in the title tag and meta description. Make sure your meta description is of ideal length and totally relevant so that Google does not replace it with random text from your page.
- Place your keyword in the URL, but be sure to use it appropriately, as we discussed earlier. While it doesn’t directly affect your ranking, it can help improve your click-through rate (CTR). Just ensure that the URL is simple and descriptive, rather than overly complicated or misleading.
- Strategically use keywords in your header tags. In the H1 tag you can use the same words as used in the title tag as it’s commonly practiced. In the remaining tags, you can use other words like synonyms or related terms, etc.
- Naturally, include the keyword in the body of the text.
- Google Images alone makes up 23% of the search engine market share, which means there is huge traffic potential!
That’s why you should add alt text to your images. Search engines can’t read the content of your image, but they can read the alt text.
Content
So, you’ve heard that longer content ranks better, right? Well, it’s true to some extent. But let’s not get too caught up in word counts. What really matters is providing value to your readers.
Google’s smart enough to know quality content. They want to give their users the best possible answers, and that means rewarding content that’s informative, helpful, and easy to understand. So, instead of aiming for a specific word count, focus on creating content that truly answers your reader’s question.
And let’s talk about readability. Nobody likes a wall of text, right? Break up your content with headings, subheadings, and bullet points to make it easier to scan. Use clear and short language, and avoid jargon or overly complex sentences.
Remember, your goal is to keep your readers engaged. Use visuals like images and infographics to break up the text and make your content more visually appealing. And don’t forget about grammar and spelling! A few typos can really hurt your credibility.
Focusing on quality, clarity, and user experience can help you create content that not only ranks well but also drives traffic and converts visitors into customers.
Click-through-rate
You have got all the technical SEO locked away, and your content is spot on. Now, let’s just make sure that the user actually clicks on those results. That’s what you need for CTR optimization.
What’s CTR?
CTR or Click-through rate is simply a representation of how many people come to see your search result before they click on it. The higher your CTR will be, the more people are going to visit your site.
How to Boost Your CTR:
Write Clickable Headlines. Tailor headlines to be at least 600 pixels long so they don’t get cut in half. Use strong, action-oriented words: Words like “ultimate,” “best,” and “secrets” work well to grab people’s attention. Use numbers. People love lists!
Ask questions and help your readers wonder with questions like “Why is. ” Or “How to.”
Write persuasive meta descriptions. Be clear and short, just simply state the main point of your page. Use strong Calls-to-Action. Tell them to “Learn More,” “Shop Now,” or “Read More.” Add keywords to your meta description so that your optimization targets your relevant keywords.
Use Rich Snippets
Apply schema markup, so search engines understand the context and can represent your content richly, attracting users’ attention. Take advantage of product, review, and FAQ snippets for enhanced CTR.
Your Favicon Isn’t Optional
Select a recognizable and visually appealing favicon. It will make your website stand out in the search results. Implement the above tips and make your search results more irresistible to more organic traffic to your website.
Maximize Your Online Potential with Expert Optimization
Don’t let below-average on-page optimization hold you back! Partner with SEO Toronto Experts to unlock your website’s full potential. Our experts will craft a customized optimization strategy to drive more traffic, leads, and sales. Contact us now!
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