Today we are going to talk about something very important for website optimisation and web pages as we are going to talk about the guide to on-page optimization.
In this SEO guide, we will talk about how search engine optimisation (SEO) is done and we will talk about one of the two primary types of optimisation techniques for your website. There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO. We will talk about on-page SEO in this blog.
So, welcome to the on-page SEO guide in 2023. Let us start with the basic question of what is on-page SEO.
What Is On-Page SEO for Beginners
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The simplest way to explain on-page SEO for beginners is to say that it is everything you can do to improve your website search engine rank or SERPs from within your website.
That means on-page SEO is simply optimising your web page and your websites by doing a few things. It is everything you can do internally and it does not include things like guest posting or content marketing etc.
We call these different things as elements for SEO and we create checklists so that we do not miss optimisations on any of these elements.
The simplest way to do all these things is to create a website SEO checklist. This checklist can contain certain tasks such as internal links as well as utilising proper keywords and meta descriptions and much more.
The more we dig into on-page optimisation tips the more we will understand what are the things you can do to improve your on-page SEO.
This on-page SEO checklist can also contain things like title tags as well as headers and URLs and so much more. The more you optimise all these important elements the more your website will be recognised as relevant by search engines.
And the more search engine recognizes your website as relevant the better search engine rank you will get.
So, How Is On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO Different?
The difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO is simply that when it comes to off-page SEO, it’s everything that you can do externally with your website.
Every external change that you make and every external optimisation that you do such as link building or social media marketing or even publications and influencer marketing falls under the category of off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is everything you can do internally from within the website to improve the SEO, off-page SEO is just the opposite. It is external.
This is the primary difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO helps you get a lot more control over what you can do and what you can change. This is because on-page SEO will help you change important elements of the website.
Off-page SEO is more like a passive way of improving SEO. If you do not utilise on-page SEO techniques and website SEO best practices then you cannot expect any good results from off-page SEO.
Important On-Page Elements
Let us now look at the important on-page SEO elements that will help you optimise your SEO in the best way possible. You can create an on-page SEO checklist with the help of these elements and make sure they all are taken care of.
Headers
We will start our list with headers because they are one of the most important elements in this SEO optimisation guide.
This is because headers help the readers understand the different parts of the content. Since this is very helpful for readers this will definitely make your web page more relevant.
Headers are usually classified by HTML elements of <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. If you want to improve the effectiveness of your headers and improve the new website SEO then all you need to do is to have keywords in the headers.
That will make your content even more relevant and helpful and the search engine crawlers will give it a better rank.
Well Written Content
One of the other elements that gets forgotten is content because if you do not have proper content then all the other elements cannot save the website.
That is why you must make sure to write well-researched content that is keyword-rich and is written on a relevant topic.
If you want to have the most effective content then you must keep in mind a few simple things. You must never use keywords forcefully. Even if you use the keyword forcefully you must make it look natural so that it does not stick out.
Search engines do not like it when they find out web pages are artificially trying to improve their relevance. That is why you can use short or long-tail keywords but you must make sure they are used naturally.
You must also make sure that the content is helpful and in order to do so try using bullet points instead of long paragraphs.
Page Titles
When we are talking about on-page SEO checklists and elements, we cannot miss page titles because page titles are one of the most important elements. Some would argue probably the most important element.
This is because page titles will help your audience identify the topic and it will be the first and most important thing that will lead traffic to your web page.
Not just that because your title will also lead search engines to the content and it will be the first thing that they see and utilise to determine if the content is relevant or not.
But you must keep a few things in mind when you write the page title. The first thing is not to utilise all caps because that gets search engines confused.
The second thing you must keep in mind is that the titles are not too long by that we mean under 60 characters. This will make sure that the whole title is visible in the Google search results.
The same rule of keywords also applies here because you do not need to force too many keywords into the title.
If possible, you must include the name of the website or the company to make the title even more relevant and effective for your brand.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are easy to understand. They are the little description that you get to see if you search for something on any search engine and you see the search results with the title and small description below that.
While meta descriptions officially do not have a lot of influence but they can surely make the readers click on the title.
That is why when you write meta description you need to keep in mind a few important things so that they are just as effective as the title.
You need to make sure the meta description fits under the title and that is why you should not write a meta description longer than 160 characters.
You must also make sure that the meta description has relevant keywords. Additionally, you must also make sure that the metre description actually makes sense and that it is not incomplete.
You must also not have the first line of the blog as the meta description because that does not help in any shape or form.
You can use numbers if you want but try to make sure to avoid alphanumeric numbers.
Mobile Optimisation
One of the most important things you can do for on-page SEO is to make sure that the web page and website is mobile-friendly.
This is because your web page will probably be opened by the user from a smartphone. Smartphones contribute to 70% of all searches on any popular search engine which means such engines prefer web pages that are mobile-optimised.
You can utilise different tools in order to test out the mobile-friendliness of your website such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
You can also make sure to try out the loading speeds on different devices and on different operating systems to make sure that the website loads perfectly in each of them.
Image Alt-Text
AI is still not seeing perfect use when it comes to search engine crawlers and that is why the search engines still do not have any way to understand all the images you have on your web page.
In order to get around that you need to make sure to add alt-text for all the images that you have on the web page.
This is like a description of the image that will help the search engines understand what the image is all about.
When you create this description, you need to make sure to not forcefully use keywords. In fact, you should never forcefully use keywords in any element of your web page.
You must also try not to make the alt-text descriptions too long because that will confuse the search engines and make sure that the characters do not exceed 125 characters.
When you are writing the description and adding the alt-text, you must make sure to create the alt-text in a way so that it matches with the entire topic of the blog or the page content.
Your job is simply to help the search engine understand the content of the page better and alt-text is one of the simplest things you can do in that direction.
Webpage Speed
Faster-loading websites and web pages are always ranked higher than slow web pages. This is just something taken for granted and all search engines follow this.
If you want to have a better rank then you need to make sure that the site’s speed is fast. In order to have a fast-loading website you can do a few simple things.
You can make sure to avoid large pictures that take a lot of time to load and it might be unnecessary because it will be also annoying for the users. Try compressing the images.
The other thing you can do to have fast-loading web pages is to not have too many redirects unless they are absolutely necessary.
Another thing you can do is to enable browser caching. This will give permission to the browser to keep data loaded in the background so that it does not need to load it every time the user opens the website.
If you follow things like this then you will have a fast-loading website which will improve the relevance of the website.
The other reason why this is important is that a fast-loading website is better for user experience and that makes the website more helpful.
This is something that is very important in Google’s eyes.
Add Internal Links
If we talk about on-page SEO elements then internal link is very important. It is when you add hyperlinks on your web page to other important data and other web pages from your website.
The more you do it the better SEO you can expect. This is because if your website has important hyperlinks then that can be very helpful for the users.
If it is helpful for the users then your website has more relevance and the search engines will automatically rank your website higher because it is more information-rich.
But the other thing you must understand is that you should not overuse this because if you overuse this your web page speed will get bad. It is all about the balance between including internal linking and not using it.
When we talk about on-page SEO the simplest thing you must keep in mind is to make sure your web page is helpful for the users.
Now it is up to you on how you make your web page helpful and it can be with the help of images and it can be with the help of good content or even internal links.
Markup Optimisation
When you are creating the web page and the content has been added to it, you must make sure that the structure data looks good.
This is important because the best-case scenario for your web page is that it will be shared by people.
This means it will get shared on places like Twitter(X) and it will get shared on other places such as messaging apps like WhatsApp.
That is why if the web page markup is structured then it will be easier for your content to be understood by people.
That is why you should make sure you are marking up the source code into neat elements. This is so that it is featured properly in knowledge panels and snippets.
It will definitely improve your ranking because Google will see it as an element that is useful for visitors.
Essential On-Page SEO Checklist
Now that we know a little bit more about the different elements that contribute to on-page SEO, let us look at the essential on-page SEO checklist.
If you maintain this checklist then you can take care of all your on-page SEO needs.
Never Forget to Crawl
One of the most essential things that you should never forget to do is to crawl the website.
This is because if you do not do it then you will never understand the potential of the website and that is why you can utilise free link crawlers.
You can then export the results to understand the situation of the website.
You can also utilise powerful performance tools that will bring you the entire data of the page and some will even provide the data to you in real time.
The more data you have the more you will know what change is to make and what changes to not make.
Keywords and URLs
When you are writing the URL you must make sure that important keywords are there in the URL.
This has two benefits and one of the benefits is that it will be better from the standpoint of search engines and it will help the relevance of your URL.
The second thing is that if this URL is shared then the person receiving the URL will understand the content of the web page easily.
Keywords in General
If you want to have the most effective website and webpage with the finest on-page SEO then you cannot skip on keywords.
You can utilise any free keyword tool to find out the most popular keywords in a particular category or industry.
And you should utilise those keywords in your content but there is something even more important that you should keep in mind.
You should never overuse keywords and you should never forcefully use keywords. The way in which you should use keywords should look as natural as possible.
If your keywords stick out in the content then that means they are probably not used for well. That will actually have a negative effect on your ranking.
Disguising keywords in the content is a whole different topic and we can write a separate blog on that and all you need to do is comment below.
SEO Audit
We cannot have the on-page SEO checklist without an SEO audit. We would not recommend you do this on your own and utilise professionals when you do it.
A proper SEO audit needs to have site architecture assessments done so that you can find out if the site is in perfect order.
You also need to make sure that the site does not have necessary code that can slow down the loading speeds.
While there are automatic tools for this but we would still recommend you to hire professionals who actually understand this and know what they are doing.
They will help you understand the problems with your website SEO so that you can understand the primary points of weakness.
The professionals will also help you in solving these problems and in fact we are just the professionals for this and we will talk more about it at the end of this blog.
Understand Audience Targeting
You can optimise your SEO in two ways. You can do a general optimisation and this applies to both on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
But this general optimisation will not lead you anywhere simply because you are not focusing on key areas.
The second thing you can do is to have a targeted approach and the best target approach you can have is to optimise the website keeping the target audience in mind.
If you always keep the target audience in mind then you will always utilise that everywhere which might include keywords and topics.
The SEO will not only be more effective but so will the relevance of the web page if you will always keep a targeted approach in mind. That way your chances of making it to the first page of Google are much higher.
Keeping the target audience in mind is also important because that will help you create a useful web page for the visitors. This is something that more search engines are focusing on which is the usefulness of the web page.
Keep Content Updated
If you have a website and you have blogs on it as well as service pages and content then it is highly probable that the content can get outdated.
Perhaps you have a service page and you have mentioned all the services that you offer on it but it was 2 years ago.
Now that you offer more services, if you list them then your chances of getting more relevance and a better rank will increase.
Along with that, if you have blogs on your website then you might have dated blogs that provide solutions for a certain year.
That is why your blogs will never come to the forefront if people search for solutions in the current year.
That is why you can either run a script that automatically changes the blog’s years or if you do not have a lot of blogs, you can do it manually.
But if you do it will have multiple benefits because then your blogs will get back the relevance.
Don’t Forget Meta Descriptions
When you are creating the on-page SEO checklist you should never forget meta descriptions. You must always add the meta description and make sure they are not more than 150 characters.
This is because if you write a meta description that is too long then the whole meta description cannot be spotted and the whole point of the meta description will go to waste.
The other important thing you must keep in mind is to not forcefully use keywords when it comes to meta descriptions.
Meta descriptions are a very powerful tool if they are used properly and you must always use them instead of relying on the first line of the blog.
Don’t Skip Images
If you want to have the best results with your content then your first goal should be to have helpful content and one of the ways in which you can make sure the content is helpful is to have images.
Whether it is a service page or whether it is a blog post or even an FAQ if you have images then it will assist the users and it will actually make your content more relevant.
That is why when you add images you should make sure that they are not the highest quality because that can take up loading speeds and make the web page slower.
You must also make sure that the images have a good file name because that is an indication of the content of the image.
Additionally, you must never forget alt-text. Alt-text is just a way for crawlers to understand what the image is about.
This may change in the future when more AI implementation is done and the images get recognised even better but you should have alt-text as of now.
Links Improve Usefulness
A well-return content can be categorized by multiple things. One of the categorizations is good and well-researched data.
But if you utilise different graphs and data without the sources of it then the content will not have any validation and authentication.
That is why you should always incorporate links and when we talk about links, we mean different types of links.
These links can be links to other important pieces of content and important links to research articles and research papers.
They can even be links to your other older content so that you can redirect the audience from one blog to another.
Links are extremely useful if you do it correctly and you can even redirect the visitors to the product page.
If you use links correctly then it will have a great effect on your on-page SEO because links used properly are also useful and that will provide a better relevancy to your website.
Utilize CTAs Properly
Your website should be a balance between being helpful for the visitors and also making sure that it is optimised for conversions.
If your website does not lead to conversions then the whole point of the website will not work. But you should not be very open about it.
You should not have annoying pop-ups in the name of CTAs. You should make sure that the call-to-action buttons are placed strategically.
The whole point of on-page SEO is to convince search engines that your website is actually helpful instead of being just a business machine.
But that does not mean you should stop trying out conversions but all you need to do is to make sure that the conversions are not very apparent.
Utilise Page Title
If you want to create the on-page SEO checklist then you cannot miss utilising the page title because it is one of the most crucial areas for you to implement different optimisations.
If we leave aside all the optimisations then again, the simplest thing you can do is to have a title that is short and rich in meaning.
This means that the page title should be able to convey the whole meaning of the blog without a lot of effort.
But if you want to take it a step further then you should implement the most effective as well as the most popular keywords in the title.
But the mistake people make is that they try to have the title with only keywords and try to force keywords into the title.
We are going to say this for the title as well as anything else, you should never force keywords into the content whether it is the title on the headers or even the matter description.
Utilize A Balance of Keywords
People make the mistake of utilising the same set of keywords throughout the website on different pages whether it is the service page or landing page.
People even use the same keywords in the blogs of the website but that is wrong because that way the on-page SEO will never be effective.
In order to get the best results, you need to have a balance of common keywords that can be utilised throughout the website and unique keywords that are page-specific.
For example, if you are writing the product description of a page on your website then you should have a mix of common keywords that describe the brand and unique keywords that describe the product.
But the only thing you must keep in mind is that it is better to not use a keyword rather than forcefully using it.
Google detects when keywords are used forcefully. Search engines actually penalise content that has forceful use of keywords.
That is why you should stay away from that and use keywords as naturally as you can. You do not necessarily have to use keywords because it will do you no harm but if you forcefully use keywords, it can reduce your rank.
We have this blog has been helpful for you to understand everything you need to know about on-page SEO. The fact of the matter is that anything related to SEO is best left to experts.
That is why we are here to help you because we are Think To Share IT Solutions Pvt Ltd and we are the finest SEO experts whether it is on-page SEO or off-page SEO.
We are also the market leaders when it comes to web designing and development as well as app designing and much more.
We are the renowned IT name when it comes to every IT solution out there and we would love to help you with all your IT needs.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we have to offer.
Common On-Page SEO FAQs
How do I optimize my new website?
If you want to optimise your website then you are probably wanting to optimise the website so that your website can have a better ranking on search engines.
We call that search engine optimisation (SEO). In order to do that, you need to understand how search engines rank websites and you need to optimise those areas.
You need to optimise things like better content and you need to make sure that the content has effective keywords and so much more.
You need to make sure that you do not stuff keywords unnecessarily. But the most important thing that you need to do and that is prescribed by Google is to make sure the website is useful and helpful for visitors.
If you can make sure to have a lot of data that makes the website helpful then it will do the trick and you don’t want to worry about anything else. We suggest you read the whole blog for a detailed understanding.
How do I use page optimization on my website?
We would not suggest you try this on your own because things can go wrong and your website and ranking can drop.
But if you really want to do it then the first thing you need to understand are the different areas of the website. Then you need to read guidelines on all the factors that affect website rankings when it comes to search engines.
Then you need to read this blog because this blog will help you understand all the different elements that affect the SEO of your website.
After you do that, you need to make changes to the content and make the website more useful and desirable and also make changes to the different areas of the website.
We would suggest you to go deep into this matter and not just rely on a simple answer on an FAQ because SEO is quite important.
What are the 6 uses of on-page optimization for your website?
If you want to utilize on-page optimization on your website then you need to take care of a few things. Here are the six things you can take care of.
The first and most important thing is to have good quality content because without that content every kind of optimization will fail.
The second thing you must keep in mind is to have effective keywords but you should never force utilize keywords and use keywords naturally.
The third thing would be to make sure the images and other forms of multimedia do not take up a lot of space because that will result in slow loading website which will reduce your search engine rankings.
You must also make sure to utilize both internal as well as external links as it is seen as helpful by search engines and also improve the relevance of your website.
You must also optimize the meta tags as well as the meta description. And the last thing you should do is to have URLs that are understandable by everyone because if you have simple and clean URLs then they have the best effect.
How do I start on-page SEO as I am a beginner to this field?
If you need to start on-page SEO then the first and most important thing you should do is to understand the different elements of on-page SEO.
These elements are meta descriptions as well as page titles and headers and so much more. When we talk about elements, you need to understand that these elements will help with your website ranking on search engines.
If you want to improve your website ranking then you need to make sure your website is relevant and in order to do so you should optimize all these different elements.
Additionally, you need to take care of so many things such as the speed of the website as well as utilize things like image alt-text.
But if you are a beginner then this answer should not be your final source of understanding and you should do more research on this topic.
You can start while reading the entire blog which we have for you.