Why do people visit your site? Most likely because it contains information they’re looking for. Therefore you should write excellent content. Search engines like Google read your text. Which site ranks highest is for a large part based on the content of a website. That content should be about the right keywords, informative, and easy to read.
On-page SEO consists of all the elements of SEO you can control best. If you own a website, you can control the technical issues and the quality of your content. On-page issues should all be tackled as they’re in your own hands. If you create an awesome website, it will definitely start ranking. Focusing on on-page SEO will also increase the probability that your off-page SEO strategy will be successful. Link building with a poor site is a very tough job. Nobody wants to be linked to articles that are badly written or not interesting.
Important first step, keyword research is the process of understanding how your target users search for your product or service.
It has to be done before starting the on-page work. Competitor Analysis help to expand the research and make sure no important keyword is omitted. Although since Hummingbird, Google is more semantically driven to assess the website's content, and focussed on Voice search and entities, knowing your important keywords is still important when structuring content and metadata. We will then do an audit of your website checking content for each important landing page, site structure, metadata, images. Additional important checks will cover structured data implementation and other technical aspects.
<title>My Unique Title</title>
Page titles are often neglected, but are really important and very simple to implement. That means you need to have them spot on. Each page should have unique titles, clearly stating the page main focus, using terms that users are searching, so according to your keywords list. This also applies for the homepage, your most important page. Unless you are a major brand with already huge brand-awareness, avoid using just your brand name but your most important Keyword which best describes your business.
<meta name="description" content="my unique description" />
Meta descriptions are not required as such to have your page rank well. Even if your meta description is empty or missing, Google will take some text from the page and fill in the gap. If you have one but Google is not using it, that means Google did not find it relevant enough for the searched term. Either way, meta descriptions are important for CTR, searched terms if included in your description will appear in bold and you can also confirm to the user your entry is the most relevant for the search, and add that difference that will make the click happen.
<h1>my unique h1: page main topic</h1> <h2>Title part 1</h2> <h3>Subtitle 1</h3> <h3>Subtitle 2</h3> <h2>Title part 2</h2> <h2>Title part 3</h2> <h3>Subtitle 1</h3> <h3>Subtitle 2</h3> <h3>Subtitle 3</h3>
You should have one h1 per page with h1 being your main keyword for the page. Then use H2, H3, etc accordingly and logically, depending on the content
<meta property="og:title" content="mytitle" /> <meta property="og:url" content="myurl" /> <meta property="og:description" content="mydescription" /> <meta property="og:locale" content="countrycode" /> <meta property="og:site_name" content="name" /> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@name" /> <meta name="twitter:title" content="mytitle" /> <meta name="twitter:description" content="mydescription" /> <meta name="twitter:image" content="/logo.jpg" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
There are many tools out there such as Screaming Frog which can easily identify missing or empty metas, You can also identify and fix duplicate or unclear metas, those which are too long or too short.
alt attribute help Search Engines to understand the image they are crawling.
Alt stands for 'alternate'. It often called 'alt tag' but it is in fact an 'attribute'.
It is important to use alt attributes to describe your images to be in line with good SEO practices. Other image related optimization items are size & load time and image file name.
Image Search still represents for most industry an important SEO subchannel. Given how Image search now works, many Image visits are only virtual and therefore invisible in analytics reports. Image Search is still a fantastic opportunity to improve brand awareness.
<img src="/image.jpg" alt="yourimagealthere" title="furtherinfohere" />
Make sure images are well optimized: from image hosting to image alt tags. In case your website actively uses images, use Image Search to improve brand awareness.
Alt Attribute often called alt tag gives important information to the Google bot regarding what the picture is about. If the image path is incorrect, the alt (alternative) attribute will show instead.
The title appears as tooltip when there is a mouse-over above the image. Use it to give more information about the picture. Although not as important for SEO as the alt attribute, it should not be neglected. Avoid copy and pasting the same text you have as alt attribute.
If your image is too big, this will affect pagespeed, especially for mobile traffic.
Internal Linking is core for on-page SEO, especially for big websites. Link juice redistribution, prioritization of key pages or site sections to name a few reasons. Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Google bot. This bot arrives at the homepage of a website, starts to render the page and follows the first link. By following links Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts and other content. This way Google finds out which pages on your site cover similar subject matters.
Review and audit your current internal linking settings, including navigation, sub-navigations, breadcrumb and tags, taking into account business prioritization. In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the greatest link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on. Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage, instead of only on the category page. And Google will find new posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.
The most important content should be on top of the pyramid, that being the Homepage. There should be lots of links to the most essential content from topically-related pages in the pyramid. However, you should also link from those top pages to subpages about related topics. Linking internally to related content shows Google what pages hold information about similar topics.
Using a top navigation will give the most important posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google’s eyes.
Breadcrumbs have two positive impact: for users: navigation and where they are in the site, and for SEO and boost internal linking and site mapping.