After you enter a search term in Google’s search bar and press enter, you will find about ten to eleven websites, four to five ‘People also ask’ questions, and, sometimes, one Featured Snippet on the first page of the result page.
There may be a million websites related to your search query, but the sites featured on the first page will receive about 95 percent of search traffic. If you own a website, you might have yearned for a spot on the coveted page. The good news is that it’s achievable with effective and high-quality on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s frontend and backend components to enhance its rankings and organic traffic on search engine results pages. The word ‘on-page’ specifies both the text and HTML source code of a website or web page.
At PeddleWeb, we specialize in on-page SEO and have helped many businesses enhance their on-page SEO. In this blog post, we describe the elements of on-page SEO and the methods to optimize. If you want to adopt effective on-page strategies, this post will be extremely valuable to you.
- Craft high-quality on-page content
On-page content is the major decisive factor in your website rank. To rank your website at the top of search engine results pages in 2022, the on-page content must be high in quality, unique, useful, and valuable.
The best way to start is to ensure that the content fulfills Google’s E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) principle. Be crisp and succinct with the words but make sure not to miss out on key details. If possible hire an expert to write the content from their own experience and knowledge.
Write different types of content for different stages in the buyers’ journey, such as:
- Blog posts and videos for buyers in the awareness stage.
- Buyer’s guides and case studies for buyers in the consideration stage.
- Product demos, product, and pricing pages for buyers in the decision stage.
- Integrate keywords strategically and optimize search intent. Include attractive, relevant, and engaging visual content.
- Optimize title tags
A webpage title is extremely useful for SEO and your target audience as it tells everything about a webpage’s content. For instance, check the title of this blog post…
It tells you everything about the blog content as well as helps search engines to crawl and index the website. If you see this web page on the search engine result page, it will show you a brief but correct description of the content.
To be attractive and click-worthy, titles need to be short, crisp, and precise. Here’s how you can ensure the efficacy of your titles. Keep them less than 60 characters. Backlinko researched five million websites and found that web pages with titles ranging from 15 to 40 characters have the maximum click-through rate.
Also, use only one primary keyword in the title and avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Ensure the title is relevant to the webpage and avoid using all uppercase letters. If possible, add the brand name to the title.
- Use accurate and optimized header tags
Header tags are HTML elements that denote headings and subheadings. They are the H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s, and so on. You might have known that they organize content for readers and make the overall text look attractive and improve its readability. But did you know that they can enhance a webpage’s SEO?
Optimized header tags actually do that. They are more than just ‘headings’ and help search engine bots read a webpage efficiently and extract the most relevant and useful content and display that on search engine results pages. Now the question comes “how to optimize header tags?” The answer is simple, by adding primary and secondary keywords. Add the most important keywords in H1 and H2 headers but make sure that they’re different from the page title keyword.
- Craft compelling and interesting meta descriptions
Would it be surprising to know compelling, interesting, and relevant meta descriptions attract more clicks? Not quite. The very purpose of meta descriptions is to give a short description of a webpage. But attractive and well-crafted ones pique the interest of browsers and entice them to click on the webpage.
While writing captivating meta descriptions can be an engaging experience, it’s crucial to know some basic things. Though meta descriptions don’t have any character limit, they get truncated if they are over 160 characters. As per an Ahrefs study of over 192,000 pages, about 40 percent of the total pages have truncated meta descriptions. Make sure to keep the length between 150 and 155 characters. Add important keywords and use one or two captivating statements. Avoid alphanumeric characters.
- Write image alt-text
Did you know that Google image searches account for almost 20 percent of total search queries on the search engine? The study, which found the data, said that Google image search is going to be one of the biggest digital marketing trends in 2022.
As per another data, nearly 63 percent of Google image search clicks convert into website traffic. In recent years, image searches have increased considerably due to the rise of image scanning tools.
Apart from telling search engines what the image is all about, image alt-text can help visually-challenged users and enhance their user experience by describing the images displayed on the webpage or website. All of this makes Google image SEO extremely relevant. For a robust alt-text, create a precise but descriptive alt-text and keep it below 125 characters. Use only one keyword to avoid keyword stuffing.
- Shorten your URLs
You must’ve known that URL is a ranking factor in Google. A well-optimized URL can help a website rank more than a non-optimized URL. The former has the right keywords, the right length, a security certificate, and the right characters. When the keywords are used strategically, the URL can rank a site for relevant search queries.
To optimize your URL, add one or two keywords but don’t go beyond that. Though the maximum character limit of URL is 2,083 characters, keep it short. As per a recent stat, URLs in the first position on search engine results pages are shorter by 9.2 characters than the ones in the tenth position. Use an SSL certificate so that visitors can see HTTPS in the address bar. If you must have subfolders, then make sure that it’s concise. Canonicalize your URLs and avoid using upper case letters and underscores. Use hyphens instead and make sure the URL is readable.
Let’s take a look at the URL of this blog page and count how many boxes it ticks. Short and crisp, check; a relevant keyword, check; an SSL certificate (HTTPS), check.
- Use structured markup
Do you know what the language of search engines is called? Structured markup—an authoritative vocabulary that enables search engines to contextualize, comprehend, and match a webpage’s content to relevant search terms. Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and select the data type and type in the URL.
- Internal links
Like many other elements, internal links are among the major on-page SEO ranking factors. They help visitors to navigate through the website easily and effortlessly. They also enhance the average on-page and on-site time and inform search engines that your website is useful and valuable.
At the time of linking internal pages, make sure that the hyperlinked URLs take visitors to relevant web pages on your website. Even though a webpage can contain more than a hundred internal links, it’s prudent to set a limit depending on pages. If it’s a product, the page can have many links but if it’s a blog post page, it shouldn’t have more than four links. Also, check regularly for non-indexable or non-existent pages. If found, remove the links immediately.
- Website speed
What’s your website’s load time? Is it less than three seconds or more than that? You may wonder why three seconds? Well, a Google study found out that more than half of visitors will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Therefore you need to do whatever it takes to keep the load time under three seconds or risk losing half of the potential visitors to your website. Now, the question is how to optimize the load speed? Well, there are many ways to do that.
- Select an optimized hosting provider
- Compress and optimize your images
- Minimize redirects
- Cache web pages
- Enable browser caching
- Remove unnecessary plugins
- Use a content delivery network
- Mobile responsiveness
With more than half of total website traffic coming from mobile devices, making sure a website has a responsive web design and is mobile-optimized is an extremely practical on-page SEO technique. Mobile responsiveness is a major ranking factor and it matters a lot after Google’s mobile-first policy.
Is your website mobile responsive? Use a responsive web design. Make sure you have a website hosting service, content layout, and website design and theme that’s navigable and readable on mobile devices. Check your website’s mobile optimization by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
- External links
When it comes to on-page SEO, external links are as critical as internal links. As per a study by SocialMedia Today, a majority of successful website owners and online marketers spend equal time building internal and external links. To build high-quality links, ensure the relevancy of the external links and link to trustworthy and reputed sources. Run a link audit to make sure that the links aren’t broken.
Wrapping up
On-page SEO is critical to a website’s ranking and visibility on search engine results pages. If your webpage or website has high-quality on-page SEO, then nothing can stop it from ranking well and gaining more traffic. At PeddleWeb, we help our clients with just that. If you’re looking for effective on-page results, then consider contacting us today.
