Whether you are a beginner or you're passing by, it is inevitable that you have heard about on-page SEO. Of course, we are not talking about serious knowledge but rather the concept itself. So, let's try to explain it in the best possible way:
On-page SEO is the practice of manually creating a perfect optimizing formula to improve a website's technical terms in order to rank higher in Google's results.
On-page SEO is actually a technic of optimizing various elements on a webpage that you can actually see. This includes everything that can be manipulated, like titles, headings, images, overall content, keyword density, inbound and outbound links, etc. All of these elements together form what we call on-page SEO ("on-page" because it appeared on the audiences' front page).
It’s totally free to adjust a page according to your strategy. Of course, there are paid professional on-page services to consider if you’re a beginner or even rely on tools like SurferSEO. But anyway, without on-page, it’s hard to say that your page will get even a few clicks a month.
Although on-site is not primarily created to be technic that helps you attract customers with outstanding content (essay), but in recent years it has certainly become (because Google prioritized quality content that people love to read). User improvement can mostly be accomplished through good page structure, optimized tiles and headlines, images, and more.
The whole concept of on-page SEO is to optimize a page and get adopted to Google algorithms, trends, and bots in order to build trust and authority in Google’s eye and get ranked. So, you can stop dreaming about the top 10 if you’re not planning to run on-site optimization through your whole website.
Proper On-page optimization is essential for brand and business growth, as it increases the ranking and brings in customers who are specifically looking for a product like yours.
There are a lot of on-site elements, and all of them require a lot of attention. Because, if one brick is losing the tower will probably collapse. So, let's jump on on-page SEO beginners guide!
Although keyword research may not be a concrete factor, it is still important to begin with, and ensure that you're heading in the right direction.
First things first, you need to know which keywords and keyword variations you're targeting so that you can focus your efforts on the right areas. As a beginner, you want to choose keywords that are relatively easy to rank because it is necessary to get on your feet first. If you go ahead and compete for a difficult keyword with strong competition, you will just spend a lot of time and money for nothing (you can't outrank them right away, they're too strong and long term established).
For this purpose, we recommend using keyword research free tools like ahrefs.com or semrush.com. However, make sure to read our article about the complete keyword research guide for beginners; check it here.
This is by far the most important on-page SEO factor among all others. Content is like a strong foundation – you can build anything on it.
It is well-known - SEO without high quality content is like a beautiful new house without furniture, it may look nice, but it is useless. So, your focus should be on avoiding that step of ineffective possibility, and the first thing you gonna focus on is quality content that is easy to read.
Search engines prefer websites that offer relevant and unique content, and will often reward these websites with higher search rankings. So you want to rank well - start focusing on creating content that is informative, relevant, and engaging for your website.
Suppose you’re inexperienced in writing quality copy. In that case, you can consider hiring a professional SEO copywriting service to write you an outstanding copy for your website, or perhaps read our untimed guide on how to write webpage content yourself.
It's pretty simple but very critical part for every business owner to make a title with a predisposition, relatable for many people as possible to click on it and stay on a page.
When you're searching for something in SERPs, the first thing that catches your attention is probably that blue link that shows up right away, right?
If the title we read attracts us and looks interesting, we will click on it. But if the situation is the opposite, we will continue scrolling down. This is where many companies lose half of their clients. You can have the most amazing content on your page, but one bad title will throw it straight down the cliff.
So, focusing on creating a highly baitable title only requires a little of your effort. You should know that you have to create content that will help SERPs understand what your page is about. Therefore, start composing a title of no more than 60 characters, and put target keywords at the beginning of the title so it can sound good and explains everything. But anyway, you can always read our blog about properly optimizing SEO titles for better ranking.
Header tags (H2, H3, H4, etc.) or HTML tags represent a simple yet critical part of SEO.
When it comes to headers, things work hierarchically. Of course, h3 or h2 are not more important than H1, but H1 would mean nothing if there were not several smaller headers around it that have a separate purpose on a page.
The heading is important because it will help search engines understand the structure of your content and give readers an easy way to navigate through articles.
So, in order to put them right, start posting titles that don't overuse keywords and tags, but at the same time, make sure that there are a lot of different variations and relevance between them to make them readable to users, and for the end, avoid titles like step 1… step 2…
A meta description is that short summary of the page that appears under the title in SERPs, and it is also important for two functions:
- to help search engines like Google understand what the page is about.
- encourage people to click and visit the site.
Meta description itself is not a ranking factor. The thing is, the better and more optimized meta description you write, the more chance of ranking improvement is on you (the more people enter on your website and the more time they spend on it – the better). Therefore, the description occupies the largest part of a SERP snippet; it affects the number of clicks you get (it can improve or destroy ranking based on overall content), and that is why it is important to be attractive and consistent with that.
A good way to figure out what to write in your meta description is to do some competitor research. Make it up to 155 characters, keep a focus on keywords, but don't make your description just a combination of the keywords you're targeting, and make sure it matches the content of the page and as well be eye-catching.
But, with this meta description guide, you will learn how to write a description as easily as a piece of cake.
We know... we're repeating keyword research over and over, but it's clearly an unskippable part of any on-page optimization. Understandable, but how are we gonna catch customers attention?
Well, determining keywords is very easy, and the golden rule - you need to know what your target group is looking for and create content tailored to their interests. Based on that, add some magical (click-baiting) keywords, and you will get them easily.
Let's take a clothing website as an example. If you are optimizing a website for some regular clothing store, you should include keywords like [dress], [bag], [sneakers], and [shirt] to draw attention and make it sustainable for Google eye..
If the webpage is about prom dresses, you wanna make sure to include long keywords like "High school girls this summer got crazy about these [super affordable black bodycon prom dresses] that just stand out!". In this way, we use keywords [affordable], [dress], [prom], and [bodycon].
On the other side, you want to avoid the sentence like: "Highschool girls this summer got crazy with these [bodycon prom dresses] that just stand out!". The difference between the first and second sentences is that the second is just keyword empty and boring.
Pages rich in keywords, placed strategically, whether in the body, headings, or both, have the highest probability of being relevant to the search. So, if you want to place them correctly, we recommend that you research for details to take advantage of every possible opportunity. Of course, you don't want to overdo with keywords number, but stick with a natural number (few keywords on every 50-100 words).
However, there are even deeper and more complex understanding about proper keyword placement in webpages content, which we have covered in this article.
When you're looking for something specific and you can't find it, do you go straight to the Google images tool? If you do, you're not alone. Millions of people do it every day. But what you may not know is that images can actually help you to rank your website higher. Not only that, but they can also drive more traffic to your website (through the Google images tool). So, if you're not using images to improve your website, here are some reasons to start.
Images in SEO are important tools for any website, but it's especially crucial for e-commerce sites. According to Google, nearly 20% of all web searches in the US are made on Google Images. As a beginner, you want to make sure you're taking advantage of every opportunity to reach potential customers.
When you're adding images to your site, make sure to use high-quality, clean pictures. You'll want to avoid text on images, use stable and descriptive URLs, and write good ATL descriptions. It's also important to name the photos with the correct name (avoid names like IMG462839) because this helps Google understand them better.
And another thing to consider alongside image names is their ALT text. ALT text is basically a hidden description of an image that helps people understand the image in case their browser cannot load it. Additionally, ALT text helps Google understand what the image is about and whether it is relevant to the webpage's content (this is because Google is unable to see the image visually). Click here to learn how to optimize images properly.
It is not disputed that some google search ranking factors can lose their prominence over time. A factor that carried a lot of weight with Google years ago may not hold much weight these days. And a really good example of that is the website's URL (permalink).
Well, even if they simply don't have the same importance as they used to, it doesn't mean that we should ignore them and miss the opportunities they offer, right?
As things stand, URLs have the effect of improving the user experience – it's not like the audience will go crazy about it, but they want to see a clear URL on a website they're spending money on. So, for better chances and good ranking, try to be as simple, relevant, convincing, and accurate as possible because, remember, it is still crucial for understanding your users, and the possibility that search engines may change again.
Links in the SEO space are super important, but here we're not talking about niche-edits backlinks nor guest posts. Instead, we are talking about links that we place into our own content that point to another relevant page on our website or point to a completely different website.
Inner or internal links are as much important as any other links. These backlinks basically connect pages within your site – with the purpose of encouraging visitors to explore more of your website.
With frequent and strategic linking within your pages, you create something that is called a website structure or SILO. The SILO can also be imagined as a website skeleton or a body, and the stronger the SILO becomes, the higher your website will rank.
Here's an image that shows how a SILO should look like:
Outbound links follow a similar principle to inner linking. The difference with outbound is that they point to other relevant websites rather than staying within your website. Those basically provide additional information - referring to examples or sources of information that can help your audience better understand something. However, the downside is that other sites may take your potential customers (people can just click on a link and forget about your website).
Google rewards both inner and outbound links, and for that reason, you have to consider drawing a picture of a SILO strategy for your website (click here to learn more about it) and also pick websites that you will point (make sure those sites are not able to take your clients – the best option is to work with Wikipedia)
Bold, underlined, and italic formatting are used to highlight important parts of a paragraph on your page in order to catch readers' attention, like we just did here.
Although it does not help you rank better, it's still useful to learn which words should be bolded and as well how many bolded words should be there per 100 words. Therefore, we created a perfect guide which you can check out here.
Technical SEO does not deal with elements that promise good rankings but instead with elements that can only negatively affect it. Under technical SEO goes things that annoy and repel customers. These problems are bad website appearance, broken links, SSL certificate problems, and more.
Although this won't rank you higher, it will drop you in a blink of an eye. How? Well, Google doesn't like mobile (not) friendly websites nor other 3.3 billion phone users.
People nowadays don't like a slow website – fair enough. According to uptrends.com data, around 40% of people will leave your website if they wait more than 3 seconds, and another 75% won't buy due to slow load.
Slow loading speed is a usual problem these days, but it can be fixed relatively easily. If you're using WordPress as your website builder, then consider using Wp Fastest Cash for JSON and CSS compression and EWWW Image Optimizer plugin for image compression. Both of these plugins are free, and they will help you speed up your website to 100 on the PageSeed test.
SSL really build trust in customers' eye, and if your website shows this:
it's most likely that 30% of people won't buy your product just because of that.
SSL and HTTPS don't mean anything to us, but they certainly present our clients' trustworthiness. So if we don't want to lose them, we must make our websites HTTPS and SSL friendly.
A broken link is basically a dead link. It often accrues if you don't place the correct URL in your hyperlink or perhaps a linking website goes down. These backlinks cause errors while Google crawls your website and, thus, negatively impact your ranking.
There are plenty of broken links tools out there which can scene your website and tell you which one should be fixed. We recommend using brokenlinkcheck.com, which is a free tool to use for these purposes.
In the end, it’s important to remember that all on-page elements should be combined together in a perfect formula. Leaving one of them aside will cause a collapse of an entire page, which furthermore leads to SERP drops.
The downside of on-page is that google ALGO is changing all the time, and sometimes on-page requires additional optimization according to the latest trends. The good thing is that the on-page SEO is very accessible and very easy to maintain.
