All SEO strategies ever implemented focus on one goal, i.e., to rank your website as high as possible in the SERPs. To achieve this goal, webmasters try to design and develop a website that is loved by Google's secret algorithm.

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Becoming a part of the first page of Google can be a game-changer when you target the right keywords. Search engines like Google and Bing work to provide you with the best results every time you enter a search query, and as you are aware of the fact, “the higher the search engine ranking, the more traffic you get.”

The hard part itself is earning the top spot in search results. Yes, SEO business is not so easy!

If you want to get the maximum ROI from your campaign, you need to focus on 2 key areas of marketing:

  • The quality of the content (On-page SEO)
  • The number of relevant backlinks pointing out to your site (Off-page SEO)

Here, we’ll cover the very first topic in detail.

What is On-Page SEO?

As the name suggests, on-page SEO includes all the technical elements of your website, including all the technical setups, the quality of code, optimizing the visual and textual content, improving the meta title and description tags, and the user-friendliness of your website.

On-page SEO is critical. Before you even think about providing your website with high-quality, relevant links and doing local SEO and listing, your priority task must be to optimize your web page with on-page SEO best practices. Also, its a good practice to perform on page content SEO analysis on a regular basis.

Keyword Research

It's common-sense that Keyword research is the foundation of every on-page SEO optimization campaign. How can you optimize a page without even knowing about the search terms that you are targeting?

That's the trick, of course, How to find the most effective keywords to target.

If traffic brings in visitors and visitors bring in business, then shouldn’t we optimize the keywords that will get the most traffic?

The need for keyword research has not changed by far, but choosing the keywords has definitely been impacted. Nowadays, it all comes down to these simple goals:

  • Getting Traffic
  • Increasing Conversions

The state of on-page SEO landscape is in a constant change. Algorithmic updates, Content Quality and competition are all impacting on any given on-page SEO optimization approach.

Not all Traffic sources are created equal though, more traffic doesn’t always mean more revenue. The same holds true for the keywords.

There are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration when looking out for search queries that your target audience will search on Google.

So, we recommend to choose the keywords with low to medium competition and should also have a decent search volume. The more search volume the harder it will become to compete with and vice-versa. Moreover, to boost your SEO services, you can also join hands with the right SEO agency to get excellent results. 

On-Page Optimization Considerations

On-Page SEO consists of all the important aspects that are in your own hand. Your web pages will already start ranking once if you have created an user friendly website. Having a great on-page SEO optimization strategy will increases the probability that your off-page strategy will be successful.

Consider a bathtub filled with water with lots of rubber ducks floating, now the water inside the bathtub are your backlinks or off-page activities, the rubber duckies floating inside water are your webpages and your bathtub represents the on-page of your website.

If you have a crappy bathtub (website), then no matter how much water you fill inside, if the tub is not strong enough to hold the water it won’t be enough to keep your rubber duckies (webpages) afloat.

According to the bigwigs over at Google a lot has changed over the past few years. While the off-page is statistically important, On-page should also not be neglected. Hence, the golden rule still implies “Content is the King”. So, always create effective content framework to grow seo traffic. 

Here are some On-Page Optimization techniques to Follow in 2021

1. Permalink Structure: URL is one important on-page metric that helps in getting your webpage ranked. Make sure you are using your targeted keyword in the URL and strictly avoid using any special characters, commas, brackets, etc., in the URL structure.

Dashes should be used to differentiate between the strings in the URL structure. The end result is an SEO Friendly URL, which is supported by most browsers. A good URL structure should look like this: https://www.example.com/Category/seperate-with-dashes

2. Title Tag: This is also an important on-page SEO optimization factor. One reason is that the more attractive and optimized the title is, the more of it will appeal to the audience and hence, providing more clicks and every webmaster aware of the fact that the more clicks your web page gets, the higher it will rank in SERPs.

Try not to repeat the same keyword in the title tag to achieve higher rankings because it won't and would backfire and cause a drop in your rankings. The best practice is to keep the title tag to a character limit of roughly 70 words, including spaces. 

3. Meta Description: You should always add a relevant yet unique meta description for every of your web pages.

The on page SEO checklist suggests that you should use the targeted keyword in the meta description, but don’t overdo it and keeping the optimum character limit of 160 characters, including spaces.

Search Engines lookup up the keywords in the web page description, but the end-user needs to click on the web page. Writing user-friendly descriptions related to your posts can help you achieve your desired goals.

4. Keyword Density: There are many tools out there that indicate the perfect amount for keyword density. But, in our experience, there is no IDEAL %.

This is what Matt Cutts explained regarding the keyword density “There is no one-size-fits-all.” We certainly don't believe that either; after all, search engines are not that easy to fool in 2018.

There may not be a perfect percentage to aim for but stuffing your web page and every element present on it with your focus terms can cause havoc and might get you penalized for keyword stuffing.

5. Sprikle LSI Keywords: Search Engines like Google always tend to look for the most relevant content for any particular search query.

It is a tough job for Google to examine and denote what exactly the content is about; hence, it uses LSI terms to judge the given web page's relevancy.

6. Multimedia: We don’t have any evidence that suggests whether embedding videos and Images directly affects your rankings.

But, engaging diagrams, videos and images can help reduce the bounce rate and increase user time on the website which provides behavioral signals to search engines, which definitely affect ranking.

7. Using Outbound Linking: By far, the most efficient white hat on page SEO optimization technique to get more traffic. Providing outbound links to related pages gives google a hint about your web page's topics.

It also shows the search engines that your page has some quality and relevant information.

8. Website Speed: The bigwigs at Google have clearly stated that Website speed is a critical ranking factor and stats suggest that 75% of users don’t revisit your site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

To improve your loading speed you can start compressing the images and switching towards a faster hosting, you can also use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

9. Optimizing Images: Make sure you use your focused keyword in the Image alt Tags. Optimizing the Alt Tags gives google an indication of what your webpage is all about.

The alt tag must describe what’s in the Image. You can’t use the Image of a “water bottle” and provide the alt tag “charger”.

10. Using Social Sharing Buttons: Google has already stated that they won’t approve the social share counts. So, why are they important? Well, the simple answer is social engagement.

Google won’t count social shares but what it looks at is the percentage of people sharing the content and engaging with it. Keeping the SEO point of view aside, this will lead more traffic to your website and that’s the whole point of it.

11. Internal Linking: Back in 2012, Google's Penguin update penalized the sites with over-optimized anchor texts. Well, The good news is Penguin only sees anchor text ratios that are from external sites.

With Internal linking you can either link to other pages using anchor texts or create SILOS to create relevancy (refer to Wikipedia for this technique).

12. Sitemap: What is an XML Sitemap and why is having one important for SEO? Good question! Think of your website as a house and each page of your site as a room. 

You can think of an XML Sitemap like a blueprint for your house and each web page were a room, your XML Sitemap would be a blueprint—making it easy for Google, the proverbial home inspector of the web—to quickly and easily find all the rooms within your house. 

XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites.

13. Wrapping your title in H1 Tag: You must wrap your title in the H1 tags that are meant for the headlines. However, try not to over-optimize the page by adding keywords to subheadings like H2, H3 & H4.

14. Increase content length: Length is the main strength in SEO, so try to aim for the lengthier content piece. It is always about finding the right balance between word count and the value offered to optimize a page.

15. Canonical Tag: A canonical issue arises when 301 permanent redirections is not placed correctly. This means that search engines can access your website from different URLs, which means the search engine will potentially index your site under different URLs, thus arising duplicate content issues.

16. Responsive Design: Google started penalizing non-mobile-friendly sites in 2015. Responsive design lets the webpage adapt to any layout according to the device used by the user.

On-Page optimization tools

To get your website's on-page SEO optimization done right, you need some good hands by your side, and we have compiled a list of excellent tools that can help you with on page SEO analysis and master your on-page optimization techniques ultimately.

  • Google Ad Words Keyword Planner: As mentioned above, keyword research is an integral part for any SEO, so who else can come up with the best keyword research tool other than the Google. Google’s keyword planner helps you search for new keywords and different ad group ideas and also determine how specific keywords may perform.
  • BuzzStream Meta Tag Extractor: Buzzstream meta tag extractor tools pulls title tags, keywords and meta tags for multiple URL’s in a list. To use the tool you need to add the list of URL’s in the text box, click GO and the tool will automatically fetch meta keywords and descriptions.
  • CopyScape: This tool looks for plagiarism and finds any unauthorized copies of your website's content anywhere on the web. To use this tool, enter your site URL and click on the go, which will show you the copied results.
  • Screaming Frog: Screaming frog is an excellent tool for analyzing large websites that are difficult to check manually. It quickly reviews, analyses, and audit's the website from an SEO point of view.
  • Google Developers PageSpeed Insights: This tool measures the website load speed both with mobile user-agent and desktop-user agents. The page speed score ranges between 0 to 100. And if a page scores 75 and above, it is evaluated as a well-performing page.
  • Feedthebot: Feedthebot comprises of dozens of SEO tools to analyse page speed and other performance metrics.
  • XML-Sitemaps.com: XML-Sitemaps create sitemaps for your webpage. By implementing a sitemap to the website you are ensuring that Google knows about all the pages on your site and reads it properly. It acts as a directory to the website.
  • Semrush: Semrush is a powerful tool for SEO professionals and digital marketers. It helps to identify opportunities and threats in the organic search results. It also provides keyword research and competitive analysis of the top 10 ranking pages for a given keyword. If you want to try Semrush for free then you can get Semrush free trial for 14 days.

Importance of On-Page SEO

Search engine optimization does not specialize in tasks that will make pigs soar high up in the sky. Its real task is to dig deeper into a website's genetics and re-engineer the essential elements until it transforms into an eagle. – Bruce Clay

Many emerging internet marketing channels are taking up a sizable amount of digital marketing, and many are shifting their online campaigns to other channels such as social media. They are dropping their SEO efforts without even analyzing the data leading to the arousal of the myth “SEO is dead.”

SEO is not dead and is still fully alive and is still the most important source of targeted traffic towards websites. This is why it becomes evident to optimize your on-page SEO if you want targeted visitors knocking at your doors online. 

This doesn't mean you should drop out other channels; to get maximum results, you need to utilize every channel and select which should be implemented with SEO to get the desired results.

On page SEO optimization can only be done well when you understand why and who you’re optimizing it for? This checklist shared with you will make your optimizations a lot easier.

Frequently Asked Questions

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings and relevance for specific keywords.

SEO can be categorized into three main types: On-Page SEO, which optimizes individual web pages; Off-Page SEO, focused on building authority through backlinks; and Technical SEO, ensuring technical website aspects like speed and mobile-friendliness are optimized for search engines.

On-page SEO involves optimizing content and elements on web pages, while technical SEO focuses on optimizing the website's technical infrastructure and performance. Both are essential for effective SEO.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings by optimizing content, meta tags, and other on-page elements. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, focuses on strategies outside the website, such as building backlinks and online reputation, to enhance its authority and visibility in search engine results.