On-page SEO is a critical component of search engine optimization. It involves optimizing the content and structure of your website to make it visible and relevant to search engines. This includes optimizing meta tags, headlines, HTML tags, images, and content. It also means ensuring that your website has a high level of experience, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Paying close attention to these 10 areas will help you improve your content and authority, and boost your rankings, traffic, and conversions.
The title tag is an HTML element that exists in the main section of each web page and provides an initial clue or context as to what the current topic of the respective page is. The title tag alone has little impact on organic rankings, but meta descriptions are often shown in SERPs below the page title. While Google argues that meta descriptions don't help with rankings, there is anecdotal evidence that indirect attributes of better descriptions do help.
Creating compelling headlines is essential if you want the content of your website to work well in search. Header tags are HTML elements (H1-H6) that are used to identify headings and captions within the content of other types of text. While header tags aren't as important to your site's positioning as they used to be, they still play an important role for both users and SEO.
Writing SEO means writing content with both search engines and users in mind. But simply having content isn't enough to help your site rank according to the keyword terms it targets. According to a study by Ahrefs, 91% of online content does not drive traffic from Google. So, what do we know that search engines reward? In fact, it can be argued that the relevance of content to user intent is its most important ranking factor since if your content is not relevant to a search, it will be devalued.
Deep or extensive content addresses as many user concerns as possible while providing new perspectives on a topic. Even search engines seem to prefer long-form content for many informative user searches. A study by HubSpot found that content between 2,250 and 2,500 words tended to receive the most organic traffic. This appears to be the sweet spot for SEO, although creating pages of much more than 2,500 words when needed can also be beneficial.
SEO tags continue to play an important role in content creation, despite the rise of semantic analysis. Ultimately, we design websites for both people and search engines. When you're designing for users, it's always good to look at your website and the content of your website from a new perspective.
It has long been suspected that user participation or user signals is a ranking factor for Google, even if it is indirectly. Next, we need to consider how our technical structure is affecting user engagement and our keyword ranking. Technical SEO could be considered the foundation of SEO where everything else is based. Without a solid technical foundation, your content house will collapse.
This makes the practice of interconnection very important which we will discuss later. For now, we'll just make sure that our website is trackable and that the crawl budget is optimized. The number one technical error we find on customer sites is linking to mixed content or HTTP pages.
This can occur during an SSL migration and can be caused by several causes. While pages should theoretically redirect to their HTTPS counterpart, it's not advantageous to have links to mixed content. More importantly, these links don't always redirect.
Just as important is that you don't want content that links to broken or redirected pages. Not only can this affect speed but it can also affect indexing and crawl budgets. You usually want clean URL structures with 200 status codes.
However, as websites age and businesses change it can be difficult to maintain site-wide consistency and a strong interconnection structure. Creating an interconnection structure organized around similar themes allows the lower pages of your site to gain some authority from the pages of higher authority.
Labels are even implemented to help organize content and allow readers to understand the context of certain topics. On-page SEO is essential because many of the signals Google uses to rank web pages come from on-page elements. The most important thing is the content of the page itself.
Because the elements on the page are what your users interact with the most it pays to make a considerable effort to make sure that your on-page SEO works well. Page speed has been cited as one of the main SEO ranking factors for years. Google wants to improve the user experience on the web and fast-loading websites will.
On-site SEO was the highest priority area in the early days of search engine optimization. Some consultants are still mainly working on improving the site's architecture in the hope that it will influence their rankings but most experts agree that implementing on-page SEO techniques isn't enough.
To get ahead in today's competitive landscape you need more than just on-page SEO techniques; you need a comprehensive strategy that includes off-page SEO tactics such as link building and social media marketing as well as technical SEO tactics such as improving page speed and optimizing crawl budget.
By focusing on all aspects of SEO you can ensure that your website has a strong foundation for success in organic search results.
