Being an SEO professional, getting frequent heart attacks from Google's rapidly changing guidelines and policies has become a part of our job routine. With every new update from Google HQ, the SEO community goes crazy about making sure the updates do not decrease their search engine rankings. It may feel frustrating at times but, guess what? Sticking to the latest updates is what differentiates the best SEO practitioners from the ordinary ones. Read through the article to know what works the best now and what can create a mess for your search engine rankings in your on-page SEO project as part of your digital marketing efforts. Click here to navigate to the on-page SEO checklist.
For the new folks discovering SEO for the first time, let me elaborate on the meaning of On-page SEO in simple words.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of ensuring your site is readable to search engines. The process includes all the techniques which can be applied on a web page to boost your page rankings.
This process ensures that search engines easily read and understand your page and also contributes to a smooth user experience which ultimately improves your SEO project.
Let us directly jump into the factors contributing to boosting your webpage in the search results or simply put, the on-page SEO guide. Know how to apply it and also understand what not to do to mess with these factors.
Factors Affecting Your Search Engine Rankings
1. Search Engine-Friendly URLs
Messy URLs are a quick way to confuse search engines and also users. Hence, affecting the crawlability of your web page. Using clean URLs which are search engine-friendly as well as user-friendly is a logical practice to be included in your SEO project.
Consider the below two URL examples and pick which is a clean URL.
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Which one do you think is a clean URL? Think as a site visitor. Which webpage URL do you prefer to click?
2. Using Keywords Judiciously
The general rule is to avoid keyword stuffing in a way that indicates to Google that the content is spammy and intends to trick the search engine. The key is to find a balance while using keywords on your webpage. The best practice is to use your keywords in the content naturally.
Google considers the use of different variations of keywords along with your actual keywords in the content, to be natural.
For example: Keyword variations for jackets for men can be men's jackets or male jackets.
Try adding some semantic keywords to your page. Pondering what is semantic keywords?
Semantic keywords are words or phrases related to the given topic or keywords.
For example: semantic keywords for education can be schools, universities, knowledge, discipline and so on.
To sum up, use a combination of keywords, their variations and some semantic keywords to get the best results.
3. Filling Meta Tags
Meta tags are simple pieces of code that helps your webpage appear in Google search results. If you fail to fill out the meta tags, Google shall automatically use the text from your site to show the search listings and I am sure you don't want that!
Think of the content on your page as a product of your business and meta tags (meta title and meta description) as the sales pitch. So, put all your sales wisdom into it and convince the searcher to click your webpage to use your product(i.e: your content)
Caution: Meta titles have a character limit of 55-60 characters and meta descriptions have 155-160 characters. Google shall not show the characters exceeding the limit in the search listings. (source: SEO 2024 by Adam Clarke)
4. Creating Content As Per Google's Guidelines
Try creating content which is engaging, informative and serves the user's intent and more importantly, avoid content that lacks depth.
Google has released its Helpful Content Update 2024. According to the update, Google prefers content that has a depth of knowledge and adds value to the visitors. To conclude, Google wants quality. Remember, quality content enhances both user experience and search engine results.
For deep scrutiny of Google's Helpful Content Update, check the link below
5. Limit Your Popups And Advertisements
Pages stuffed with lots of popups and advertisements are often ranked poorly in the search results. Also, let's view it through the user's lens. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if you saw 10 advertisements around 2 paragraphs of content? How would you feel if you got multiple popups while navigating different pages of a website?
Don't you get annoyed and frustrated?
This means adding unnecessary popups and advertisements impacts user experience and hence your search listing preference.
Pro Tip: Cut down popups and advertisements which can hinder your user's seamless experience. Make it easy for the users to access all areas of your website without getting annoyed.
6. Internal Navigation
The thumb rule of any SEO technique is simple. If you don't make it hard for visitors and search engines, they will make your job easy. So, structuring your internal navigation for a smooth experience is essential.
Consider two things while structuring the internal navigation:
Make sure your navigation contains real text with hyperlinks to the pages. Do not use images in your navigation. Images create difficulty for Google to recognise your linked web pages.
Add the link to your page which you want to make visible, on the homepage. This will make that page important in the eyes of Google.
7. Optimising Load Speed
Run your website or webpage in Google Page Speed Insights to get immediate suggestions to improve your site's loading speed. Ask your web developer to work on the said suggestions. If you wish to do it yourself, start with compressing file sizes on your webpage like images, videos, documents, etc. Make sure you don't compromise on the quality.
Google Page Speed Insights:
Load speed is the bread and butter of any SEO project. With readily available alternative resources on the internet, even a few seconds delay in loading the page will result in frustration and bouncing back of the visitor. Trying to cut down loading time by even 1 second can boost your rankings substantially.
For complete information of site load speed in SEO, check the article below.
How Important Is Page Speed For SEO in 2024:
Want more techniques to maximise your SEO efforts, contact us to avail our SEO services now!!
*** On-Page SEO Checklist ***
Note: The checklist contains only those on-page SEO techniques and factors which are discussed in the above article. This is a supporting material for our visitors and does not contain all techniques in its entirety.
Download the Checklist For On-Page SEO from the link below:
FAQs
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the process of ensuring your site is readable to search engines. It also enhances user experience.
What is the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
Why on-page SEO is important?
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