Top 11 On Page SEO Best Practices

If you are a website owner or have any kind of involvement with IT world, I am sure you are very much acquainted with how much important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is for a website. SEO helps website to rank on the first page of search engines and most importantly let visitors inform about a website and drive them to the site. SEO is often divided into two broad categories- On Page optimization and Off Page optimization. On page optimization deals with all the strategies and works that are implemented within the site itself and off page optimization refers to those activities that are done in some other places outside the website.

Off-page SEO was very much effective even couple of years ago. Any website having low quality contents could be in the first page of Google only through building plenty of low quality backlinks. But after some contemporary Google algorithm updates, such situation has been totally changed. In these days, Google pays much more priority on on-page SEO than off-page SEO. In fact, some studies have shown that on-page SEO occupies 80% importance of total SEO strategies. So for attaining better results from your SEO strategy you will require to emphasize on on-page optimization at first.

There are lots of strategies that you might follow in case of your on-page optimization. In this post, I will share some of the most effective on-page optimization techniques that will boost your ranking on SERP.

Title:

One of the most effective on-page SEO strategies is to have targeted keyword in your page/post title, preferably at the beginning of your title. You should place your keyword at the beginning of your title but always make sure that it makes sense to your visitors.

URL:

In order to make SEO friendly URL, you should keep your keyword in the permalink of your post. Your permalink may be like “www.yourdomain/keyword”. Always try to keep your permalink short so that visitors can recall that permalink if they need to visit your site in later times.

H1, H2, and H3 Tags:

You have to be sure that you are effectively using H1, H2 and H3 tags throughout your contents. H2 and H3 tags carry less SEO value as compared with H1 tags. That’s why your content title should be in H1 tags and other subheadings of your contents should be in H2 and H3 tags.

Keyword Density:

Keyword density is the percentage of times the keyword or keyword phrase has been used as compared with the total number of words used in the overall content. Keyword density must be between 1.5%-2% within your content. If you use more than 2% keyword density, search engines may regard this as keyword stuffing of spamming.

Keyword Location:

Your targeted keyword must be at the first and last paragraph of your content. These two are the most important places where keywords must be present to get the best results from on-page SEO. Sometimes, using horizontal and vertical keywords instead of your targeted keyword is also effective.

Meta Tags:

Use your targeted keyword in meta title and description to get the best results. But make sure that you are not copying meta description from your main content. Write meta descriptions separately for each of your posts. You can use “Yoast” plugins for WordPress CMS to easily insert meta title and description in your contents.

Bold and Italic:

Always write some keywords of your content as Bold and Italic. Bold and italic keywords tell the search engines about the importance of keywords. Normally, Italic keyword gets more SEO value than that of bold. So to get the full benefits of on-page SEO, you may use both bold and italic once in your content.

Content is King:

Although many people overlook, but content covers an enormous part of your on-page SEO strategy. Content is blood of your site and for on-page SEO, contents should be your main focal point in these days. If you publish compelling and high quality contents in your site, such contents will not only attract visitors, but also force them to share in different social networking sites which will ultimately improve your site’s ranking.

Image Alt Attribute:

Alt attribute is the text that tells search engines about your images. If you are using any image in your page, then you must use image alt attribute for your image since search engines can’t render images.

XML Sitemap:

For better crawling of your web pages, you must generate a XML sitemap and submit it using Google Webmaster Tools. Sitemap helps search engines know about any updates of your web pages instantly. Sitemap allows Webmaster Tools to inform search engines about when the site’s URLs are updated and how frequently they changes. If you are using “Wordpress” CMS, then simply use “Google XML sitemap” plugins to generate sitemap and submit it using Google Webmaster Tools.

Links:

Links can be of internal links and external links. Usually, external links have more SEO value than internal links. So focus on external links but makes sure that you are building external links with well known reputed sites otherwise it may harm your SEO strategy. Besides, interlinking within your own web pages is a great strategy to engage your visitors within your sites and spread your PR juice to all other pages.

There are many other techniques that you may follow for better ranking of your web page, but the above are the most effective on-page optimization techniques which will give your desired results almost instantly. Now it’s up to you that how well you apply all these on-page SEO techniques in your website. Best of Luck!!!