SEO is an ever-evolving practice that keeps changing over time. The fundamental part of it is known by every digital marketer, but only the experts know the deets. Over the past few years, off-page SEO is becoming increasingly popular. Link building and other off-page techniques are domination the SEO world, but on-page SEO part should always come first to rank higher. But, what is the right practice for on-page SEO? Well, here we have compiled a list of top SEO tips to improve your on-page SEO. Before that, let’s understand what on-page SEO is and why it is essential.

What the heck is on-page SEO

A fundamental definition of on-page SEO could be – optimizing web pages to get a higher rank in the search engines and generate more traffic. But, is it as simple as it sounds? A straightforward answer is no. Although on-page SEO is not rocket science either, you just need to follow some of Google’s advice and ranking factors to improve your on-page SEO.

On-page SEO includes publishing high quality and engaging content, content optimization, headline optimization, title tag, meta tag, alt tag, description, image optimization, and adding the Hs (H1, H2, H3, etc.).

Is it even necessary?

A one-word answer is yes.

On-page SEO helps search engines to understand your website and the content. The Google bots crawl the site and look for the relevancy and accuracy of the website. A well-optimized site has a higher chance of ranking in search engines, which ultimately generates more traffic and revenue.

Google algorithm is changing and getting more sophisticated, and the Google bots are becoming smarter. They now understand what users are searching for and delivering the right result that meets users’ intent. To cope up with the changing algorithms, and to appear in the SERPs, on-page SEO is crucial. Let’s understand the top tips to improve your on-page SEO and to rank higher in the search engines.

Top tips to improve on-page SEO

A well structured and high-quality page content.

As they say, ‘content is the king,’  and that’s true, it is the backbone of any business that drives traffic and revenue. Write a blog that is easy to read and understand for both the users and Google. For a well-structured content, all you need to do it, write SEO friendly content (or SEO content).

Let’s understand what SEO content is:

SEO content is a way to write content that helps you to rank high on search engines. SEO content allows Google to understand what your page is about. According to SEO Yoast, there are three essential elements for SEO content: Keyword, Site Structure, and Copyrighting. Let’s get a deep understanding of the features:

• Keyword

The keyword is an old fashion strategy that is evergreen. When we talk about the keywords, we include keyword research, keyword optimization, and the keyword strategy.

• Keyword research

Whether it is on-page SEO, SEO content, content optimization, or the content strategy, everything starts with the keyword research. Keyword research is discovering the keywords people are searching for to generate traffic and to rank your page.

Keyword research works like this: You search for the keywords you want to rank your page, and you write all of them. You look for the search intent, and finally, you create landing pages for the keywords.

There are tools that you can use for keyword research such as Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest, Moz, Ahrefs, etc. For in-depth knowledge of the SEO tools, check out our post for the best SEO tools in 2020.

• Keyword optimization

keyword optimization is a way to use your keywords for maximum searchability. It includes choosing the number of keywords (or keyword density), type of keyword, and using the keyword in the blog post.

According to SEO Yoast, your keyword density should be between 0.5% to 3%. And if we talk about the type of keywords, there are two types of them, short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. The argument weighs towards the long-tail keywords most of the time. Using long-tail keywords will benefit you in a longer run. And now about using the keyword. Your focus keyword should be in the heading, subheading, and the first 100 words of your blog.

• Copyrighting

For a successful SEO strategy, copyright is as crucial as keyword research. An excellent and attractive blog keeps the audience stay and engaged on the website. A lot of SEO content creators focus on impressing Google with SEO content strategy but forget about their audience. Good copyrighting starts with the original idea and plagiarism free content. Your article should be readable to your audience. Do not use much passive voice and monotonous sentences. You can use Grammarly to check the quality of your content, or if you are using WordPress, then the plugin like SEO Yoast can tell you about the readability.

Site speed

Site speed can win the game or lose the game for you. People want things to be done secoNds; they want their results on the browsers in a blink. And if a website takes a long time to load data, the users will abandon it. Site speed plays a crucial role when it comes to user engagement. Research by Google in 2018 said that 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

According to Google, they found 79% pages with over 1 MB of size, 53% over 2MB, and 23% over 4MB. As per Google, a file size under 500 kB is the best practice for page size. A slow loading site can give a dent in your conversation rate.

Now, it’s time to improve your website speed, here is how you can do this. First, check your website score and speed with Google’s Page Speed insights. If your site scores above 90, then there is no need to worry, but if it scores below it, then you need to fix it.

• compress your CSS files & JavaScript
• optimize image size
• reduce redirects
• reduce plugins
• improve server response time

The Meta Tag Game

Good on-page SEO practice is to give attention to all the relevant meta tags. Meta tags provide additional information aboutt the webpage. They don’t appear on the webpage itself, but only in the page’s source code. Search engines like Google use metadata from meta tags to understand and crawl the webpage. They are the foundation of on-page and help you to reach your audiences organically. There are several kinds of meta tags such as Meta keywords, meta description, meta distribution, meta robots, meta google verification, meta Yahoo verification, title tag, etc. Make sure your page has all the right and essential meta tags.

Image alt-text

Image alt-text is no less important than the meta tags; it increases your chances to get discovered in the search engines. Image alt-text, alt tag, alt description, and alt attribution are different names of the same thing. It tells search engines what’s on the image and the function of the image on the page. 

Optimize the URL

The recent changes in google’s algorithm include URLs as the ranking factors. URL works for both, good user experience and SERPs. URL was designed to replace the numbers or IP addresses used by computers to communicate with servers with human-readable text. You can use your keyword in the URL to improve search visibility. To prevent issues, use only lower case alphabets in the URL and keep it simple, readable, and short.

Mobile-friendliness

According to Statista, in 2018, more than 52 percent of website traffic was generated from mobile phones. As per the reports by Google, 94 percent of Americans with smartphones are likely to search the local information on their phones, and 77 percent of mobile searches were from home or office where the desktop is expected to be available. Google also reported that mobile-friendly sites have higher chances to appear in the search result. And if the website is not mobile-friendly, visitors are five times more likely to leave it. The report tells that mobile searches make about half of the searches on search engines. Hence, making your website mobile-friendly should be your priority.

To check your mobile-friendliness, you can use Beanshost tool – test my site

Conclusion

These were the top tips to improve your on-page SEO. As advised by the top SEO experts, on-page SEO is vital to appear on the top of the search engine. All these above-mentioned tips will help your on-page SEO to score well, and your website to appear on the top in SERPs. To get more tips on SEO, social media marketing, Youtube marketing, hosting, explaner videos, etc. visit our website Beanshost.

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