The Complete On-Page SEO Guide for Beginners
Published on 28 Apr 2022 inAre you looking for the easiest methods to implement on-page SEO or ways to boost your organic traffic? We’ve got you!
If you’ve been struggling to attract potential users and leads to your website, then this guide is for you. On-page SEO can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t know where to start.
This is why our experts from Morphosis are here to help break on-page SEO down into easy, actionable steps for you.
As a specialized SEO company in Bangkok, we’re focused on helping you better understand SEO in all forms. In this guide, we’ll tell you what on-page SEO is and why it is important, as well as the techniques to push organic search traffic to your website.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing each web page on your website to rank higher, gain more visibility and boost traffic from search engines. To do this, you need to adjust the content on your key pages, as well as implement some HTML tags for SEO purposes.
The changes implemented in these aspects will go a long way to help ensure that your marketing efforts will generate additional organic traffic and conversions for your online business.
If you find yourself getting lost in what SEO actually is, we’ve got a complete SEO ultimate guide you can check out.
Why do you need on-page SEO?
On-page SEO plays a key role in helping search engines like Google better understand your website. It also helps your page rank higher and appears on the first page of Google when users search for a target keyword.
More importantly, the goal of on-page SEO is to optimize content strategically so that search engines can easily understand your web pages and rank them higher on the search results, leading to more online traffic and brand visibility for your business.
On-Page SEO also improves the user experience on your website as it involves implementing easier navigation on your website which offers excellent value to users.
7 actionable on-page SEO techniques for 2021
The main concept behind on-page SEO is to create useful web pages that offer users what they are looking for whilst giving them a memorable user experience.
The following seven tactics will help you to achieve this goal.
1. Find out what your target keywords should be
You need to do some research in order to find the right target keywords for your business. When searching for target keywords, you should consider the user intent and optimize your SEO approach accordingly.
Firstly, identify who your target audiences are and what they are searching for on Google or other search engines. There are lots of great tools and processes for doing keyword research.
Next, you can start brainstorming some ‘seed’ keywords you can use to identify real queries users are searching for with the keyword research tool of your choice.
For instance, if your seed keyword is ‘shoes’ you can use it to discover other long-tail keywords such as men’s shoes, black shoes, running shoes, and so on.
Ultimately, you need to be careful when choosing the right keywords to optimize for.
The best keyword is a phrase or term that is:
Relevant to the main topic or theme of the content.
Has a reasonable search volume.
Not too competitive.
2. Optimise title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are important as they are the first things users see when they search on Google. To better optimize your title tags, consider adding unique, descriptive, and concise titles to each page of the website to entice more clicks from users.
A good rule of thumb for making title tags is to keep its words 30 to 60 characters.
For meta descriptions, try not to exceed the 155-character limit, or else your description will be cut off in the center. Be concise. Keep it around 120 or fewer characters.
3. Optimise the URL slug
The URL slug is part of a URL that identifies a page on your website. Today, URL slugs can have impactful SEO results, making it important to maximize them as part of your on-page SEO strategy.
To optimize URL slugs, keep them as short as possible, a maximum of 4 words. This makes it easier for users and search engines to understand your pages and also boosts organic CTR. Try to also use the page’s target keyword in the URL slug, as it could help you rank higher for the target keyword.
If your page was published for some time now, try not to change your URL slug unless absolutely necessary, particularly when it is already ranking in the SERPs
These are the SEO best practices for URL slugs:
Use ‘-’ to separate words
No dates in slug
Doesn’t need to be a full sentence
No special characters if possible
4. Use the proper heading tags
To highlight various headings, subheadings, and relevant points, you need to use heading tags.
Your H1 tag tells the users and search engines what your page is all about, and H2s describe the main topics you’ll cover in sections of the article. Lastly, we have the subsequent headers, H3s to H6s, they serve as additional subheadings within each section.
Each header serves a different purpose, allowing search engines to better crawl your page for valuable information.
When writing content, using one H1 is enough, avoid more than one H1 tag on the same page. And as with anything Google pays attention to, it’s worth including target keywords in your heading tags. But avoid keyword stuffing as it can get you penalized.
The rule of thumb for keyword placement is: that whatever is natural and informative for the users will be good for SEO.
5. Images with alt text
‘Alt text’ is a contraction of ‘alternative text’. It’s a short written description of an image. It helps search engines identify what the image is which can also help your site rank higher on google image search and boost traffic.
Image optimization helps a great deal to push traffic coming in from image searches. Since search engines are still not very good at figuring out the contents within images, alt texts will help you do the trick.
The best practices that work include:
Keep it relatively short and descriptive
Describe the image specifically
Use keywords but moderately
Don’t start with an image of” or “picture of”
6. Use internal and external links
Internal and external links help Google better crawl your website, as well as provide signals to Google as to which pages in your site are more important than others.
Linking between different pages on your web is also a smart way to encourage users to spend more time on your website, increasing the likelihood that they will eventually convert to paying customers.
When using internal linking, make sure that the ‘anchor text’ is optimized for the destination page’s target keyword. Try to use different variations of the target keyword in the anchor text each time to avoid getting penalized by Google.
7. Add schema markup
Schema markups help you win more features when ranking in the SERPs, such as rich snippets, knowledge graphs, and featured snippets. Here is an example:
While featured snippets do not generally make your pages rank higher, they can go a long way to make your listing on Google search stand out from your competitors. This, in turn, increases your organic CTR and hence, can boost your website traffic.
You can read more about structured data and how they work here.
On-page SEO checklist
Here’s a compact on-page SEO checklist that you can use while doing on-page SEO on your website.
Perform in-depth keyword research and only use the relevant ones.
Create your title tags and meta description with targeted keywords and unique descriptive words to attract your audience.
Make sure you have a short and descriptive URL with the keyword included
Use only one H1 tag per page and use the proper heading tags structure (H1 > H2 > H3)
Optimize your images and create alt text
Add internal and external links to your content.
Add structured data to your posts
On-page SEO tools
Before you get your On-page SEO running, take a look at a few tools to help with everything mentioned above.
Yoast SEO – Add titles, meta descriptions, and structured data to posts and pages.
Semrush – Find competitors and optimize websites to rank higher.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – Find missing issues with title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text across your site.
MetaTags.io – Preview how URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions will look in the search results.
Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator – Create different types of structured data
Rich Results Test – Check the structured data on your page to see if it’s eligible for rich snippets in the Search Engine’s Results Pages (SERPs).
Optimize your page with On-page SEO
Now that you understand what the on-page optimization techniques are, you’re ready to revive your SEO strategy and rise above the competition.
It’s important to take time to understand which one will work with the company goals effectively and then spend time making them function.
If you need help with anything SEO-related, our experts at Morphosis are here to offer you all the consultation that you need. Contact us to find out more about how we can help grow your SEO campaign today.
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