One thing that can take your website straight to the first page of Google and that is totally in your control. Its the on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the single most crucial thing if done right can take your website to get top positions of the search engine results. Do you want to see how? Let’s get to the point. We have brought this On-page SEO Complete Guide to unveil some of the top on-page SEO techniques that will surely skyrocket your website traffic in a matter of time.
On-page SEO won’t be the end-all solution for your website ranking, but it is the foremost step towards better google ranking and getting higher traffic to the website. With that said, let’s get to the detailed guide.
Understanding the searcher’s intent
The first step in an on-page SEO guide is to identify the intent of the searcher and design your on-page seo strategy around it. For instance, if someone searches for “shoes at a cheap price”, they might be looking for shoes listed on the online shops.
As we know, Google gives preferences to the websites which carry a higher satisfaction rate from its users. To see that, conduct a search and closely look at the search results that comes first.
As an example, if you sell a range of organic food, and for that, you create a webpage aiming at ‘best organic diet‘. Put your keyword in the search and observe the Google search results.
By closely looking at the results, you can quickly determine that most blog posts follow a list-style presentation. In that case, we wouldn’t recommend creating a webpage targeting the keyword ‘best organic diet‘ instead, go for this ‘organic diet available online.
Bottom Line: If you aren’t putting the search intent correctly in place, you probably will not list in similar searches.
Now, you can jump-start your on-page SEO practice right away, but wait; we would like to do a little more. We highly recommend opening these results and seeing what they have in their content. For instance, one of them targets organic food by categorizing them by type.
Takeaway: Studying the topmost resulting pages is a way of assessing the results from Google’s point of view because they are at their very best to answer the most accurate result given to any query.
Make short URLs
In a study based on numerous on-page SEO ranking features, it is noted that there is a direct relation between the numbers of letters in a link and a website’s rank in Google.
What you can do is make them short at the very beginning. Let’s say your post title is “10 best weight-loss diets in 2022′ and you are using WordPress, so when you will make this post in the editor, it will automatically create the URL tags as per the post title and fill the spaces with dashes.
Most of the low-rank URLs are way too much in length than they should be. It is just because they were not going through the consideration of an on-page SEO guide.
You can make a difference; see how. Make it short and put your targeted keyword in the URL string. There are some other advantages of using short URLs:
- People tend to go for the closest result to their intent, and keyword-contained URLs can highlight your page as a close result of that intent.
- Since descriptive URLs have your targeted keyword, they have an edge while referencing as hyperlinks.
Now, if your websites have links that are not short and non-descriptive but make good website traffic, please do not sweat about making them short for just the sake of it. For the future, try making URLs that contain short keywords.
Include Relevant Keywords
According to a study, the topmost result at google searches is also rankable for many other related keywords. So, you need to search relevant keywords to ensure that your piece of content is comprehensive enough. These are some ways by which you can get the list of the relevant keywords against your primary keyword.
- Search for relevant keywords in top-ranking websites by going in-depth
- Make good use of Google’s auto-suggest
- Include ‘people also ask’ box to cover the relevant topics
- Scroll down at the end of the result page to get more related keywords.
Now, The only drawback of these techniques is that you are kind of playing a guessing game. So, to authenticate your guesses, you can opt for an SEO tool that will show you mutual keywords that the topmost websites have.
No doubt, with a well-structured outline, backed up by an on-page SEO tool; there is nothing that can stop you from making a compelling copy for your website.
Label your images with alt tags
This technique is straightforward yet effective in taking on-page SEO to the next level. Alt tags let you attach descriptive texts to images posted on your website. We highly recommend doing so due to these remarkable factors:
- In a slow loading process, alt text is the first thing to appear on a webpage.
- Around 8.1M US citizens have a vision loss; alt text provides real-time assistance relying on screen readers.
- Alt tags let you rank in google images search. John, Mueller confirms this by saying, “Alt text is beneficial for google images if you want your images to rank there.”
Once you practice this, you can witness millions of impressions on Google’s console data from the images only, which indeed can lead to thousands of clicks coming to your website.
Bottom line: It is in your best interest to include alt text in your images to get the most out of your on-page SEO.
Integrate the targeted keyword in the title and Meta description
We highly recommend integrating your targeted keyword into the title and H1 and meta descriptions. See why;
- Upon conducting a study on 2 million keywords, there was little association between google ranking and strategical placement of matching keywords.
- It shows the searchers that your site is the best-related one against their search intent.
- While using them wisely in title and tags is advised, some exactly matching keywords may look spam. Make them use but never overdo.
Bottom line: There is no goodness in overstuffing exact matching keywords in your page headings or copy. Instead, use substitutes and other connecting words because Google is nifty enough to sense any glitches. Instead, make an effort to bring genuine content.
Include structure data where applicable
Frequently, you have noticed some search results listing with star ratings. It is generally due to the review structure data that can positively influence the CTR of a website. Keep that in mind that it is not about giving you a higher chance to appear in Google searches, but it lets search engines understand your page’s context and relevance.
While it is not a direct approach for an on-page SEO practice, it can still support your aim for a higher ranking in google. As John Mueller said, “There is no generic ranking boost for SD usage; however, the structure can make it easier to understand what the page is all about, which makes it easier to show where it is relevant (improves targeting and maybe ranking for the right terms).”
You can create your code by using google structured markup helper. Besides, if you have a website on WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that make adding the marker super convenient.
Straightforward content with a higher readability score
Considering the 3Cs (clear, concise, and consistent) while creating your content can take your website to places. Meaning it will ease the search engine to decide where it should be positioned in ranking. Also, it is essential to make it readable for the people it is intended for. It is said that Google takes notes of users’ signals such as max time on a page and conversions.
A bogus and hard-to-understand text will lurk your visitors away, and they most likely backstep or even head towards other searches, which is not a good sign.
Follow these bits of advice to score high at readability:
- Avoid irrelevant terms and complex vocabulary if it is not a research-based content
- Make compact sentences and sections
- Write in a conversational tone
Finalwords
With this, we like to conclude our on-page SEO guide and hope that it will be equally beneficial for you as it did wonders for us. Remember, you can get the maximum results by putting all these techniques together. Also, a web page requires around 30 – 60 days to affect the on-page SEO techniques. So be patient and persistent to reap your fruit.
