On-Page SEO – A Detailed Guide to Boost Online Visibility

In today’s digital landscape, it is crucial to have a strong online presence for the brand. One of the ways to boost online visibility in search engine result pages is on-page SEO. It helps in improving rankings, attracting more visitors, and building authority. By optimizing all the on-page SEO factors, you can appear at the top of the rankings and outperform your competitors. In this post, explore on-page SEO factors and effective techniques that can drive relevant traffic to your site and boost online visibility.

Let’s get to it!

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the optimization process for all the website’s internal elements to rank higher on search engines. This helps to boost online visibility and convert visitors into potential customers. We all know that On-page SEO takes time and that is okay. But you can optimize all the factors in this guide to seamless your workflow.

Important On-Page SEO Factors

Website URL structure – Optimizing URLs with target or focus keywords is crucial as it will help to rank higher on search results.

Best Practices

Keep it concise, clear, and clean.
Avoid special characters and stop words.
Optimize the URL by using categories and subcategories
Breadcrumbs allow to add proper structure
You can decide how you want the URL structure to be and you can select it in WordPress>Settings>Permalinks

Meta Title – Title is the most important on-page SEO factor as it can make or break SEO efforts. The title is the blue line beneath the URL on search engine result pages.

Best Practices

Keep it under 60 characters
Keep it meaningful
Maintain the relevancy
Add the focus keyword at the beginning of the Page title
Write short and interesting meta titles including numbers and powerful words.
You can avoid using the domain name and optimize the available characters for the title.

Meta Description – Description is the answer searchers are looking for and if they satisfy then they will click. It plays a crucial role in the click-through rates.

Best Practices

Keep it under 150-160 characters.
Maintain the content relevancy.
Keep the pitch conversational rather than sales.
Make sure you do not use auto-generated descriptions.

Heading Tags – Heading tags are a sub-topic to the main topic. Add the proper tags from H1 -H6 where H1 to H3 are crucial for boosting SEO efforts.

Best Practices

H1 should relate to the Main title
Add your target keywords to H1
Use semantic or related keywords for H2- H3

5. Keyword Research – Research keywords that the target audience is searching for in search engines is essential. It is an important factor in on-page SEO to convert searchers into customers. You can strategically target keywords in the content to appear high in search engine rankings. Use tools like SEMrush.

Best Practices

Follow the search intent depending on the top, middle, or bottom of the marketing funnel.
Research and target keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty.
Leverage the power of long-tail keywords.
Add low-hanging fruit keywords.
Use keyword variations in the content
Add related or semantic keywords.

Keyword Density – The number of times a particular keyword appears in context with the total number of words in the content. Ideally, it should be 2-3%.

Best Practices

Add target keywords to maintain a 2-3% keyword density.
Don’t stuff other words beyond 2-3%.

7. Keyword Proximity – The distance between keywords in the main content. Search engines count keyword proximity as a key factor when ranking as it represents how closely keywords are placed in the body of text. It helps in targeting long-tail keywords.

Example – travel Leh is a search term

Main Content – travel plan to Leh from Bangalore

Best Practices

Avoid stop words to keep them proximate
Place the keywords naturally in content and avoid keyword stuffing to place them together.
Ensure that content is valuable and provides great user experience.

8. Image Optimization – Place the main keyword in the ALT text of the featured image in WordPress. Add text describing what they are about for the other images.

Best Practices

Add ALT text for every image.
Keep the image size under 100 kb. You can use the GIMP tool to compress the image without losing the quality.
Practice lazy loading if required.
Add short descriptive file names
The alt attribute should be properly added to make it understandable for search engine
You can also add a caption giving the image credit or important textual information
Images play an important role in the presentation so make it engaging.
Use original image or otherwise mention Image credit
Use descriptive file name
Add content delivery network

Internal Linking – Internal linking is the fundamental process of creating hyperlinks for the other pages on the website.

Best Practices

Whenever you add content, make sure you add internal links.
Add it as a daily on-page SEO task as a professional.
Don’t always target keywords and make them natural.
Add internal links where users find it useful.
Do not add too many internal links and make them relevant.
Wherever possible add internal links in the main body.

Site speed – Optimize the site to load fast before 2.5 seconds for better user experience and lower bounce rates.

Best Practices

Go to the page speed test from Google and optimize all the suggestions generated in the report.
Ensure your website’s theme is not heavy.
Add lazy loading or content delivery network for fast speed.

Quality & Optimized Content – Create unique content that generates user engagement and interest. Ensure quality and optimize it for both search engines and users.

Best Practices

Keep the content’s tone an active voice.
Use transition words.
Provide valuable and as much information as you can.

Content Relevancy – Keep the content relevant by sticking to the main topic. It defines how well content satisfies the user’s interests and preferences.

Best Practices

Understand the search intent and create content that the user wants.
Create internal linking to navigate sub-topics
Prioritize relevance against promotions

Content Freshness – Visitors and search engines love the content that follows freshness as it helps ranking. You can also leverage user-generated content for better results.

Best Practices

Update old content regularly by performing a content audit.
Improve readability for a great user experience.
Repurpose content.
Stay up-to-date to keep content fresh.
Maintain a content calendar.

Responsive Design – Websites that automatically modify their appearance and elements based on screen size to view it.

Best Practices

Focus on navigation.
Pay attention to designing mobile-friendly.
Utilize the negative space.

Schema Implementations – Rich snippets that provide valuable information about the website such as ratings, reviews, price, etc. They enhance meta description and entice clicks.

Best Practices

Use JSON-LD as Google recommends it over microdata and RDFa.
Markup only visible content.
Use structured data markup helper to generate the code

Social Sharing Buttons – Social media shares help reach new audiences and drive more traffic. It also helps in promoting your content and makes it easy for users to share the content.

Best Practices

Add social buttons in the header or footer of the post.
You can check the heatmap to learn the more engaging area and place social buttons accordingly.
Social Warfare is a good WordPress plugin to show the social counts.

User Experience – SEO and UX go hand in hand to ensure a website’s good performance.

Best Practices

Optimize the website’s speed.
Image Optimization.
Implement intuitive navigation.
Embrace internal linking.

No Follow – The links signal Google to ignore them and don’t pass the link juice. Add a nofollow tag to the external links on the post to avoid diluting the page authority.

Best Practices

Always use nofollow for untrusted sources.
Use it for sponsored and user-generated content.
For affiliate links, always add a nofollow tag.

Noindex – The tag indicates search engines do not index the page. It is crucial for the folders you don’t want search engines to access and should be added cautiously.

Best Practices

Avoid using the noindex tag on duplicate content and use the canonical tag instead.
Audit and monitor your website regularly to ensure that no index tags are only added on pages you wish to not index.
Avoid using noindex tags on sitemaps.
Ensure the webpage is not disallowed in the robots.txt file.

20. Visual Assets – The assets in the form of images, video, and graphics in the content to enhance its value and grab attention. It improves user experience, boosts search engine rankings, and enhances online visibility.

Best Practices

Ensure images are optimized in supported formats
Embrace responsive images
Use an Image sitemap

SEO Writing – Optimizing and writing content for humans and search engines so that they know what your webpage is about. It is about creating interesting information that people like to explore.

Best Practices

Create content for humans
Keep in mind Google Algorithms or Updates
Choose long-tail keywords and phrases
Use long-form content
Embrace semantic or related keywords
Optimize meta tags
Utilize subheadings

E-E-A-T – The acronym means experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. It is the foundation of Google’s quality rating guidelines and represents the quality reward by Google.

Best Practices

Create high-quality content for users
Embrace credible resources
Harness user-generated content
Perform regular audits and updates to maintain relevance.

Core web vitals – The metrics that determine loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The 3 pillars of core web vitals are the largest contentful paint (2.5 sec), interaction to next paint (200 ms or less), and cumulative layout shift (0.1s or less).

Best Practices

Reduce page size and keep it under 500 Kb.
Consider the speeds of the target audience
Avoid unnecessary Java script and large rendering updates.

24. Geotagging – The process of placing a target location with keywords. You can drive local people by optimizing it for local SEO. There are 3 main tactics to optimize. First is generating citations (Name Address Phone number and website). Second, is optimizing for words such as “near me”. Lastly, adding schema markups such as local events. It helps in improving the local visibility.

Best Practices

Use precise geographic coordinates to help users and search engines find content easily
Add the same geotags across all the platforms including GMB profile, social media, etc.
Use geotags for relevant pages focusing on local SEO.
Create location-specific landing pages.

25. Website Hierarchy – This represents the architecture or structure of the website. It helps search engines find and index all the website’s content by providing additional context. Authority is spread via internal links.

Best Practices

Use proper navigation and structure
Embrace an internal linking structure
Ensure users can access your page with few clicks
Add categories and tags
Optimize the Site URL structure
Use an easy-to-follow navigation menu including header, footer, and mobile.
Add sitemap XML and HTML
Use breadcrumbs.

26. Links – The links are the hyperlink keywords that point to your or another’s site. There are 3 main types of links –

Internal – The link that directs to a page on your website.

Outbound Links – The links that direct to different domains or sites.

Inbound Links – The links pointing to you from other websites.

Best Practices

Link to the text that provides value to the visitors
Only link to an authoritative website that you trust.
Link to the website that has original and unique content
Do not forget to add a nofollow tag to an external website.
Add internal linking to avoid any orphan pages.
Perform a strategic contextual internal linking.

Essential On-Page SEO Techniques for Higher Rankings

1. Publish the Impressive Content

When it comes to content, you always need to do great with quality and optimization as a website with good content also comes with better ROI. Publish the original content text, images, and infographics and avoid the copy of the content.

Content should be useful and researched well before publishing. It should also satisfy the informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial intent. If you do not target the right content based on search intent, you will get less traffic.

You can browse the Google results for target keywords and note the elements such as domain authority, page authority, level of details, and page structure.

Make sure to build the right content with complete information, easy to read, and presents unique details.

2. Create an attractive meta title and meta description

Creating the right title and description is essential to make search engines understand what the page is all about. Once they discover the page

information, they rank them by comparing domain authority, links, and competition for the same key terms and then decide the position on search engine result pages.

3. Perform Effective Keyword Research

Keyword research is the backbone of on-page SEO and has much to do with optimizing the content for your target keywords. Perform thorough keyword research before publishing the piece of content. Create a list of related words in headings including H1, H2, and H3. Use keywords strategically in the entire content, maintaining the keyword density and proximity, and avoiding keyword stuffing. Using LSI, related and long keywords are essential for optimizing content. Search the keywords according to seasonality or trend using tools like Google Trends. You can use tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner.

There are different ways to take advantage of Google’s features.

Google Autosuggest
People Also Ask
Related searches

4. Optimize Headings and Subheadings

The page structure needs to be properly optimized with H1, H2, and H3. Make sure you only have one H1. If you are using WordPress then by default your title is the H1. For search engines, the title is the key element to display on the search engine result pages with a blue line. Ensure it is user-friendly and attractive enough that users go through the entire article.

Use the headings hierarchy of placing H1, H2, H3, and H4 in order. The best practice is to use related or semantic keywords in your headings. Make sure your page is readable by using the proper content formatting. You can use bold, underlined, and italics to make content stand out and engaging. Use enough white space to make the text easier to read.

5. Properly Optimize URL or slug

Optimizing your URLs is vital and there is a permalink where you can add your slug as the focus keyword. The best practice for URLs is to keep them less than 255 characters and separate the keyword by hyphen. Keep your URL SEO friendly, short, and descriptive.

6. Place Internal Links & External Links Properly

Search engines crawl and find the links on the page including internal and external and this way they land on more pages through the links and index them. It is also a way to tell search engines about the important pages on the site. Internal links also increase engagement by allowing users more time to spend on the site.

External links help in linking the content of other websites and you can ask them to share it on social media or mention them on the website and ask them to do the same aka relationship building.

7. Optimize Page Loading and Speed

Make sure that website loads fast taking into consideration all Google’s recommendations. The ideal speed is less than 2.5 seconds. Quick-loading sites are good for SEO, customer retention, and conversions. Rectify all errors in the generated by page speed insights tool by Google.

8. Mobile Friendliness

According to a study, 60% of searches happen on mobile devices and it is important to make the website mobile-friendly. You should test the mobile for friendliness and fix all errors for indexing using Google search console recommendations. Make sure it provides a great user experience by having a proper display of the call-to-action button.

On-page SEO Checklist

 Use short, clean, and descriptive URLs targeting the main keyword
 Add target keywords in the title and description tag.
 Keep title tags length under 60 characters.
 Keep meta descriptions length under 155 characters.
 Use heading and subheadings tags in form of h1 for main heading and h2 and h3 for subheadings
 Add the target keyword naturally in the first 100 words.
 Use LSI or related keywords
 Maintain Keyword density and Proximity.
 Use keyword variations throughout the content.
 Include alt text with keywords for all images.
 Use descriptive file names with target keywords for images.
 Ensure content is unique, engaging, and optimized.
 Perform internal linking to relevant internal pages using descriptive anchor text.
 Ensure a logical flow and user navigation with internal links.
 Ensure content is mobile-friendly with responsive design.
 Improve website hierarchy and navigation for better UX.
 Implement structured data using schema.org.
 Validate markup with Google’s rich results test.
 Add visual assets in the form of high-quality images, videos, and infographics, to enhance content and optimize them.
 Pay attention to User experience including core web vitals, especially LCP, INP, and CLS.
 Use geotagging for location-specific pages and wherever applicable.
 Optimize Page speed and improve UX
 Use hreflang tags as international targeting for multilingual and multinational sites.

Best On-page SEO tools

Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Ahrefs
Screaming Frog
Google Trends
Moz
Semrush
PageSpeed Insights
Yoast SEO
Schema Markup Validator
Bing Webmaster tools

Adding the important on-page SEO factors and following essential SEO techniques can help to improve ranking and visibility. You can also use the SEO checklist to boost your online SEO presence.

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