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Are you structuring your content in a way that is Google-friendly? Can Google understand what your article is about? It goes beyond writing keyword-rich articles. If the Almighty doesn’t understand your pages, you’ll be lost in the billions of webpages all across the net.
There is a certain “fit” that goes into how Google crawls and reads your pages. Today, we’re going to break it down for you.
On-page optimization is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO that helps in pushing your Google rankings of your articles up. After you are done with keyword research, you should always optimize your post with good on-page SEO practices.
The first question that comes to everyone’s mind is what on-page SEO actually comprises of.
At A Glance
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO are the steps that you apply on your site page for increasing its visibility in search engines. All the changes are done on the website or blog itself, hence the name “on-page” i.e. on the page (of the site)
Here’s a complete list of the best on-page SEO practices to get you started:
1. Keyword Placement
Keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO campaign. How do you optimize a site for keywords? This is not as difficult as it sounds.
All you have to do is have your keywords placed naturally in the following sections of your blog post or web page:
Title
The title, which is also your H1 heading, is the most important part of your webpage. It is what draws eyes to your article and the main consideration to capture your audience’s attention in a search engine. Your primary keyword(s) should be right at the beginning of your blog post’s title.
Make sure it is catchy, attracts your audience’s attention, and delivers as promised. You can use this free Headline Analyzer to access your headlines. The tool gives your headline a score and teaches you how to improve them.
Meta Description
You can also use the same title in your meta description and write a two-line description about what your entire blog post is about in the meta description tag.
For the meta description tag, the best practice is to limit it up to 160 characters.
Headings
Headings not only make your content readable, they are also another area where you should place your keywords as part of a good on-page SEO practice.
Although there are 6 heading tags such as H1, H2, H3 all the way to H6, H1, H2 and H3 headings are the important ones.
H1 heading, which is also the post title, is the most important of all the heading tags, and where your keywords will get the most value from.
Use it once, and only once, in every post as Google doesn’t like more than 1 H1 heading in each page. Your content body should not have any H1 headings.
Section your content with H2 and H3 headings for clarity and organization of your content. This also helps in making your content appear in the “Featured Snippet” section in search results when Google understands your content structure
URL Slug
The URL of your blog post or webpage is another important element of a good on-page SEO practice. You should always include your keyword(s) in the URL slug of your blog post. Not only are they are consideration
Keep your URL slug short. Try to aim for 3-5 words within the slug. URLs that have more than 120 characters may negatively impact your chances of ranking.
Use lowercase. Your URL should only contain numbers, letters, and dashes, and you should avoid using extraneous characters such as: !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), [, ], ?, {, }, ;, :.
Remove stop words where possible e.g. a, an, or, but.
First Paragraph
The first paragraph is significant for Google. Try to include your target keywords in the first 100 to 150 words of your article.
Image Descriptions
Google cannot read images if you don’t describe it to them. Therefore, to help Google understand what an image is, you should always fill in the description of the images you upload on every article.
Your keywords should appear in your image Title, Description, and Alternative Text (Alt Text). It will help Google perceive the relevancy of the keywords you’re targeting on your article and plays a part in helping your article rank higher for your target keywords.
2. Linking Generously
Linking either means to internally or externally link to other blog posts/ pages from your existing post/ page.
Internal Linking
Internal linking, as the name suggests, is all about internally linking the relevant pages or posts within the same website. This helps search engines to associate and crawl relevant content between interrelated posts.
Internally linked pages help search engines to easily find the other pages through keyword-rich anchors. The anchor text that you’re using to include your internal links should be a keyword that your post you’re linking to is trying to target.
Internal linking also helps in passing link juice from one page to another. This helps to increase the PA (page authority) of your low PA posts by linking it from high PA posts.
Internal linking is also done to decrease bounce rate.
Don’t neglect going back to other previously published posts and link your new post on older, relevant posts on your site. To do so, always search within your site for related keywords that your new post covers.
For example, If you are writing a post about “Best Kebabs in Morocco,” go back to your other Morocco posts to include a mention about kebabs and then link them to your new post on “Best Kebabs in Morocco.”
External Linking
External linking is when you link to other sites within your post. External linking is usually done to authoritative and trustworthy sites and helps Google in considering our blog post as trustworthy. It is good SEO practice to do so as by associating your post with other authoritative sites, it plays a part in building your expertise in the topic you write about.
Aim to link to at least 2 relevant, authoritative sites in each post.
Orphan Pages
Pages/ posts which don’t have any internal or external links are called orphan pages. These are regarded negatively by search engines. While it is not your intention, orphan pages are used by some sites to artificially boost their keyword rankings and hence they signal to Google that you’re hiding a page from them.
A page also cannot get any authority if nobody links to it, that’s why it’s important to always aim to have every page linked, either via internal linking or via backlinks, where other sites link to your page.
3. Content Format
We have all heard that “Content is King,” and it really is so. Valuable and informative content is what Google prioritizes in seaerch results. Top ranking pages are pages that answers readers’ queries and straight to the point.
Here are some features that all top ranking pages possess:
Long content
Writing long articles shows Google that your content is valuable. Make sure it is well- researched, backed up with stats (where relevant), unique and without any plagiarism.
Although there is no specific word count on how long your articles should be as a rule of thumb rule, you need to make sure that your article covers all the main points of your written topic. It is also known as cornerstone content. Users and Google do not like half-cooked content.
Compare top ranking posts of your target keyword(s) to see how many words they have. That could be an indicator why Google favours them. Take them into consideration when crafting your own post.
As a rule of thumb, depending on your niche, I recommend at least 2000 words. The average web page that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 1500 words.
Try to place your primary and other relevant keywords naturally where possible throughout the entire article.
Short paragraphs
Not only do short paragraphs help with easy reading, it also ensures it’s mobile-friendly. You can use Hemingway to check your content’s readability. Aim for a Readability Grade Level between 5 and 9.
Images
Your article should also have images to break up chunks of text. This also is a benefit for SEO when keywords are used to describe the images.
Using different multimedia
Try to incorporate diff forms of multimedia to cater to different user preferences e.g. video, slides, infographics. Research has shown that blog posts with video embeds tend to rank better than a comparable blog post that doesn’t.
This doesn’t mean you have to recreate your content. You can simply repurpose your existing blog content to fit into different mediums e.g. images for Pinterest, slides for Linkedin, video for Youtube. This gets you reaching a wider audience beyond Google search, and audience with different preferences for consuming content.
Click to download!
Feel free to download this free On-Page SEO Checklist for easy reference whenever you create a new post, or for re-optimizing your old posts.
Use it every time you write a post and not before long, you’ll be able to easily achieve an SEO-friendly post each time.
These are all the important on-page SEO techniques for 2022. By successfully applying all of the mentioned on-page SEO practices, you will be able to not just boost your articles, but be closer to ranking your articles at the top of search engines before long.
