On-page SEO is one of the most relevant strategies that need to be adopted by anyone that has the intention of increasing search traffic to a particular website. Without proper on-page SEO not only will there be potentially penalties but also the landing page does not achieve its highest potential. Here are the 9 key elements to correctly execute on-page optimisation.
Short-URL. One of the recent key findings was that shorter urls tend to perform better than longer urls. So, ideally, you should
Most of the times this is not possible, however. So at least be aware that the longer the url the less the competitive advantage of your particular landing page.
Ideally the user should never be any more than 2 pages away from its end destination.
Meta-Data. This used to be a core distinctive factor in the past. It used to be the case that well developed meta-data made all the difference. But what is meta-data. Meta-data, as understood here, is basically a title tag, a descriptive url and a meta-description.
Once we found a particular useful keyword that we want to target, identified in our keyword research phase, then we need to embed our core keyword in the meta-data.
Google likes to understand what the page is all about and one of the simplest ways to indicate this via the meta-data. Meta-data continues to be one of the most useful medium to optimise a particular landing page for seo.
Meta-data will make your website go higher in rankings.
H1, h2 and h3. Another important element is to explicitly tell google what the main purpose of the content is. This can be done by clearly identifying during the text the title, sections and sub-sections.
H1 should always go in the title and in the title the core keyword should also be identified. H2 and H3 should further dissect what the sections and sub-sections are. Although clearly less relevant than H1s, h2 and h3 also help google in understanding what the landing page is all about.
Core Keyword in First Paragraph. What one should also do is to insert the core keyword in the first paragraph of the text. Among the intellectual community of SEOs the idea seems to prevail that the higher a particular keyword appears in the landing page, the more relevant it becomes.
So, and if it’s possible, you should always try to insert the core keyword in the first paragraph.
Long and Engaging Content. Content is king – and with content density you will understand why. One of the core ranking factors that google started to consider was the time that a user spends on a particular landing page.
Having long and engaging content should therefore be a top priority to conduct a proper on-page SEO strategy.
Images. Images play a crucial part in the above strategy as well. And images are also important because they further help consolidate the core keyword in the text. Let’s discuss these two issues then.
If content is king and if google is increasingly assuming as relevant the user experience, then images play a particular important role in this strategy. Images allow users to feel more engaged with the content, they serve as breaks from words.
But images are also important because they provide descriptive data of a particular landing page. And here inserting the core keyword on the image file and in the alt text is crucial.
External Links. The last element of on-page optimisation are external links. In a very interesting study, Brian Dean and his colleagues realised that landing pages that included external links tended to rank higher than those that didn’t.
And this seems to be more or less easy to explain.
Google is increasingly making it clear that content is relevant in search engines results. Writing good and authoritative content therefore is important. And in google’s eyes if there are external links pointing to other people’s resources this seems to be the end result of well-executed research.
Internal Links. One of the key elements that is still important in on-page optimisation are internal links. And this mainly because it allows the juice to run through your landing page and, therefore, it allows for the authority of the website to be transferred from one page to the next.
Ideally, therefore, internal links should be from the internal pages to what should be established as money pages.
But also, the way you should do internal links should be natural and in any way manipulative.
