On-Page SEO Techniques: Rank On The First Page – 2020

On-page optimization accounts for 25% of your website’s SEO. This might not be too big but it sets the foundation for your Off-page optimization which accounts for roughly 75% of your website’s SEO.

The best way to learn search engine optimization is to know the role of the SEO in a search engine. The goal is very simple and that is to get the website on to the first page of the search engine. Unsurprisingly, 95% of the traffic goes to the websites that appear on the first page of Google.

So on-page SEO is essential if you want your website to perform well in search engines.

Our web page must be search engine friendly so that search engines can easily understand the content of the website and the targeted keywords for the web page.

In process of that SEO agencies and webmasters often end up over optimizing the web page that cost them search engine ranking for the particular web page.

Before we really dive into the topic of on-page SEO let’s first know Do’s and Don’ts during on-page optimization:

Do’s

1. Add a meta tag that indicates your site as mobile friendly
2. Place relevant inbound and outbound links
3. Create a keywords list and write a good description for your page
4. Include your most important keyword at the start of the title of your web page
5. Place keywords and related keyphrases in headlines
6. Use optimized images
7. Register mobile version sites if you have a separate site for mobile

Don’ts

1. Keyword Stuffing
2. Chase for backlinks
3. Pay for links programs
4. Excessive external linking
5. Same title for multiple contents
6. Duplicate content

Let’s dive deep into the On-page SEO and understand what it is all about and not confuse On-page optimization with On-site Optimization.

On-page SEO/On-site SEO: It basically deals with everything that you can change and manipulate on your website with the thinks likes targeted keywords, heading, content, sitemap and permalink structures.

On-page SEO Techniques

1. Post Title

The post title is the most important factor for on-page SEO. It is advisable to start title tag with your most important and targeted keyword. The closer the targeted keyword to the beginning of the title tag, the more have the chances of getting ranked in search engines.

Add Modifiers to the title

Adding modifiers like “top”, “smart”, “best”, “guide”, “2019”, “reviews”, help you attract visitors, and rank for long tail keywords.

2. Permalink Structure

Avoid using ugly URLs: yourwebsite[dot]com/31-03-19/category/post-title

Leverage SEO-friendly URLs: yourwebsite[dot]com/post-title

Keep your page’s URL short and keyword rich since shorter URLs tends to rank better in search engines like Google.

3. Heading Tags

Always wrap your title in an H1 tag. It is the main title of your post. All major content management System’s (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) add the h1 tag to the post title automatically.

So if you are using any other custom CMS, have a look at the source code of the page and fix the title tag to h1 if required.

You might want to attach an engaging image or video once you are done with the h1 title tag. This will help your visitor stay longer on your web page that might lead to reduces the bounce rate.

After this featured image, consider wrapping your article’s subheading in the h2 tag.

Always remember to include the targeted keyword at least once in the subheading tag as well. You can also include synonyms or related keyphrases to avoid excessive use of the same keyword.

4. Keyword Density

Drop your targeted keyword in the first 100 words and keep the keyword density to 1.5%. It is important that you use your targeted keyword in the first and the last paragraph of the article. Implement these targeted keywords smartly and wisely in rest of the content with the helps of similar keywords, synonyms or keyphrases to make it search engine friendly.

5. Internal Linking

It is very important that you interlink your content. Add 2-3 internal links to your each blog post. Wikipedia is the best example for the internal links.

Use keywords as the anchor text for your internal content. At the same time, you need to be careful and not to overlink your content.

Never link pages with the same targeted keywords. Linking with same targeted keywords will only help you to lose the ranking of the web page in search engines.

Internal linking you web pages or post also helps you to reduce the bounce rate and get more page views on your website.

The biggest advantage of internal linking is it passes the page rank to the other pages of your website as well.

6. External Linking

External linking is a powerful technique for making your website search engine ready. It acts as a relevancy signal that helps search engine figure out the topic of your web page or blog post.

According to a recent study, web pages with outbound links easily outrank the web pages that have no or outbound links.

7. Meta Description & Tags

Meta Description: It is important that you add a unique and relevant Meta description to each and every post since it has a vital role to play in SEO rankings. The meta description should be related to your content and make sense. Again, be careful and not overuse and spam targeted keywords.

Tags: Google has already made it clear that they don’t care about the Meta description tags. But other search engines like Bing and Yahoo! Still care for this.

8. Image Optimization

Image optimization is one of those techniques that people usually don’t focus on. Image optimization helps web pages to load quickly, and get higher rankings in search engines. Another big advantage of image optimization is that it gets you a lot of traffic from image searches in Google and other search engines.

Make sure that you use the targeted keywords in your image file name (for an example, on-page-seo.png)

Use targeted keywords in the “image title” and “alt tag” of the image. These tags help you to make your web page more focused, targeted and image search friendly.

These are the technical parts of image optimization. But if you look at another important benefit, then images create engagement and help you boost the conversion rate.

More the attractive images you use, more the engagement will be and more the people will stick to your website. That will help you to increase the overall rank of your website.

Point to remember:

If you populate your web page with images / heavy images, this will slow down your website. This will lead to losing Google Rank since search engines and visitors don’t like slow loading websites.

There are some desktop softwares and WordPress plugins available for you to make you task easier.

Image Compression tool: I highly recommend an award-winning caesium image compressor tool that helps you compress images up to 90% without loosing the qulaity of the images.

Caching Plugin: There are hundreds of caching plugins available for the WordPress based websites. WP Super Cache by Automattic and W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes are by far the most used plugins for caching. I personally use and recommend Cache Enabler plugins by KeyCDN.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): Number of free and paid Content Delivery Networks are there and they all are good at delivering the content around the globe. I personally use Cloudflare CDN for my all the websites simply because it’s one the very best and backed by internet and IT giants like Google, and Microsoft.  

9. Word Count per Post

Website with low word count perform poorly in search engines compares to those that have a high word count. So create posts with at least 500 words in length.

It is highly important that you are well researched and have a lot of information about the topic. Especially, while targeting highly competitive keywords.

According to research conducted by Backlinko, longer content tends to rank significantly higher on Google’s first page.

If you ask my personal opinion, I would recommend you to write blog post above 1000 words. It is nothing like it if you can write 2000-3000 words article.

Also, remember to not to stretch the topic way too long that it becomes less informative and boring.

10. Write Engaging Content

By writing engaging content, I mean to offer something new to your audience. Since it is the key for the visitor to stay on your website, you need to mix things like bits of knowledge, entertaining and inspiring facts and content.

Your content should not exhibit bookish knowledge. If you manage to do that, people would love to spend more time on your website. They would love to read more such contents. They might navigate to some other pages that will reduce the bounce rate and increase SEO ranking of your website in search engines.

11. Include Prominent Social Sharing Buttons

The world is becoming more social and that has affected modern On-Page SEO techniques as well. Social signals have always been a topic to watch out.

Google’s partnership with Twitter, which added tweets to Google search results. It’s further evidence of how social media is impacting modern ways of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engines like Google.

Social Signals for SEO includes:

• A number of tweets and retweets, the popularity of the post amongst users, no of followers and the people who are tweeting.
• Facebook page likes and shares
• Google +1s.
• Links and mentions from social community websites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Tumblr have made a big impact on Seach Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

By keeping these important points in mind, consider using prominent social sharing buttons alongside your blog post.

According to a study by BrightEdge, social sharing can be increased by 700% if the social sharing buttons are prominent.

12. Boost Site Speed

Google has already stated that page loading speed is an important SEO ranking signal.

According to MunchWeb, slow loading websites that take more than 4 seconds to load, loose traffic. 75% of the people would avoid re-visiting such websites.

I would advise you to keep in check with your website’s loading speed.

There are hundreds of free tools available online that help you to keep track of your website loading time. Tools like Google Page Speed Insight, GTMetrix.com and tools.pingdom.com allows you to get data that helps you to optimize your website.

To boost the website page load speed, you must want to include Content Delivery Network and image compression tools that I discussed earlier.

You can also consider changing the Web Hosting Server if you are using a shared hosting plan. I would recommend you to move to some cloud hosting company as Linode or Digital Ocean. These server companies use latest machines with very tight security and their plans also fit everyone’s budget. The plan starts for as low as $5 a month.

13. Use LSI Keywords

LSI stand for “Latent semantic indexing”. LSI keywords are nothing but the synonyms that Google uses to determine the relevancy of the web page.

I hope you would have enjoyed reading On-Page SEO Techniques for 2019. If I missed something, share with us and put your views in the comment section below.