What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO includes all technical activities carried out on your website to optimize its performance. This can include optimizing the metadata on your pages, improving meta titles and descriptions, adding internal links, and much more.
There are many on-page SEO techniques that come into play to make this possible. All these techniques help websites in gaining better visibility to search engine algorithms and ensure your website works at an ideal functionality. Some of these techniques include:
- Image optimization for faster page loading speeds
- Internal link building for better display of website structure to Google’s algorithms
- Technical SEO
Why On-page SEO is Important
On-page SEO helps search engines understand your website and identify if it’s relevant to users’ searches and queries. Search engines have become more sophisticated over the years which has increased the need to focus on content relevancy in SERPs.
Google’s algorithm focuses on understanding what users are searching for and delivering the most relevant results to the user searches. Adapting according to these ensures that search engines rank you higher on SERPs. You can do this by ensuring that your website and its content are optimised according to the latest algorithm updates and focus on users needs.
How to create SEO content
Before we get into the SEO technicalities and optimising keywords, remember that content is still the king. As mentioned before, Google and other search engines pay a lot of attention to the content and thus your focus should be on creating amazing content that people would want to read. To create SEO content, you need to focus on these four things along with your keywords.
1. Relevant content
Relevancy is unarguably the most crucial part of SEO content. Aligning your content with your audience’s search queries increases your chances of getting noticed. Google understands search intent and thus the type of content you put, the format you choose matters a lot in SEO.
2. Unique Content
Serving what the user is looking for is crucial for search engines. If your content is not bringing something new to the table, you will fail to attract an audience and search engines.
3. In-depth content
When someone searches on the web, they look for complete and useful information. If your content fails to deliver in-depth information on the topic, they most likely wander to some other site for the information. Good content covers all the aspects of the topic and that is what the search engines also look for.
4. Clarity
Clarity in the content is another important trait of good content creation. A clearly designed and written piece attracts the readers because they can quickly skim through it. When creating content for your website use bullets, subheadings, images, easy to understand language, and short sentences.
How to optimize your content
Creating content that readers and search engines are looking for is the hardest part of SEO. After that, all that’s left to do is to optimize the technical details on your website like the URLs and meta tags, etc. Here are a few points on which you should keep a checklist for:
- Including keywords in the title. This is the most conventional and important SEO technique. Keep your title simple, natural, use conjunctions, and ensure it makes sense. If your keyword does not fit in the title, use a close variant of the keyword.
- Use descriptive and short URLs because this helps the readers to understand what the page is about. You can optimize your URL by adding target keywords in the URL slug and informing your visitors about your page.
- Always optimize your title tag and create short titles. You can use your post title too for your title tag.
- A compelling meta description is important for enticing readers and gaining more clicks even though they don’t contribute to ranking much. You should use this space to expand your title tag, show your intent and include keywords.
- Optimizing images is the next important step. Always name your images appropriately and use descriptive alt texts. Compress your images so that they load faster.
- Link relevant external and internal links to help the visitors with everything they might be interested in or are looking for. Don’t overdo it and link anything just anywhere. Only link resources that make sense to your page or product or service.