On Page Optimization in SEO

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page/on-site SEO optimizes your website for users as well as search engine bots. On-Page optimization is the process of optimizing your web pages to get a higher rank and more visibility in Search Engines. This includes improving your page content, title tags, and internal links thus improving search visibility.
This is an ongoing process because slight changes in Google algorithms can lower your rankings and visibility. Search Engines like Google reward optimized pages with top rankings and low-quality web pages with no optimization with less visibility.

Google's algorithm ranks your website on three main factors: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO:

What are the basic on-page SEO factors?

• High-quality website content
• Keyword usage
• Site speed, technical features, and setup
• Use of external media like images and video
• Site structure and internal links
• Structured data and search appearance

                           

Why On-Page SEO is important?

Search engines use your keywords and other site elements to check whether it matches a user’s search intent. Google assures high-quality user experience, that's why it recommends writing for users, not for robots.

On-Page SEO can be divided into three categories:

• Content 
• HTML 
• Site Architecture

                         

Content Optimization

Writing and using original content and copy is the main key to On-Page SEO. Good content makes it easier to understand your website and its purpose for bots and humans.

Google always promotes high-quality content on your website. Google bot crawls your website content using Google's EAT Quality Guidelines. Google EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.


                     

    

Follow the below guidelines while writing content;

• Content should be original and insightful.
• Should have good sources/references and expert authorship.
• Relevant external links to trustworthy websites
• Backlinks from high-quality websites

Image Optimization

About 23% of the Search engine market share is solely from Google Images (which is more than Youtube, Bing, Yahoo etc). Hence more optimized images mean high traffic to your webpage. That's why you will need a perfect Alt text for your images.

Search engines can’t read your image perfectly, but they can read the alt text that describes the image.

Image Alt Tag

The image-alt tag tells the search engines as well as the user about the images used on the webpage. The image alt tag is also known as the SEO for the images. Image alt tags are relevant since Google now delivers equal no.of image-based results as well as text-based search results.

How to write a good Image-Alt tag?

• Make it descriptive and specific.
• Make it relevant to the page content.
• Keep it shorter than 125 characters.
• Don't stuff your image-alt tag with keywords.

HTML Elements

HTML elements refer to the elements in the source code of your website.

Note: Open the browser, Click View>Developer>VIEW Source

                              

Title Optimization: 

Your website page title is one of the important On-Page SEO elements as it gives an idea about your webpage to users and bots. Include a focus keyword naturally on the title of each page.

Note : <title> Name of the Title </title>

How to write a good title?

1. Make your title under 60 characters because Google's display title is at a max of 600 pixels only.         Keeping it under 60 characters ensures full title visibility in SERP.

2. Avoid keyword stuffing on the titles.

3. Make the title relevant to the webpage content.

4. Don't use all capital letters for your title as it will exceed the max pixel range of 600.

Header Tags

Headers also known as body tags refer to the HTML element <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.

Note : <h1> Name of H1 tag </h1> , <h2> Name of H1 tag </h2>

Include your most relevant keywords under h1 or h2 tags.

Header tags help the organization of content for readers and the search engine. Depending on search intent, it helps to make understand which part of the content is more important and relevant.


Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the short description that appears under the title in search results. These descriptions can influence whether your page is clicked by the user.

How to write a good Meta Description?
1. Meta descriptions should not be longer than 160 characters.

2. Include your relevant keywords in the meta description

3. Use compelling content which makes the user click on the link.
4. Avoid numbers and other alphanumeric characters.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text on the link. It helps both Google and users to understand what the website is about.

Note : <a href="http://www.example.com">Example Anchor Text</a>

How to write an optimized anchor text?

Use descriptive keywords to accurately describe the page on the anchor text

Use desirable and target keywords on the anchor text

Use generic anchor texts like Click here is a bad SEO practice.
Use unique anchor texts on your webpages, never reuse them.


If you would like to know more about history of SEO, then you can find it in my previous blog History & Evolution of SEO