You may have heard about SEO techniques on-page and off-page. These are techniques that should be considered on the search engine result page to rank your websites.
The SERP is filled with all types of content; this may or may not be helpful for SEO. People who search for a keyword will have an intention to find out about that keyword.
So Google shows content on the SERP if the keyword is relevant to the user’s search.
Google ranks content based on user behavior, not just keywords.
I will clarify here that the techniques to be considered while doing on-page SEO. Once this article has been completed, you can examine the techniques of optimization off-page.
- On-page optimization technique
The optimization is done on your website, or page is known as on-site SEO. Here you have complete control over the SEO part because on-page optimization is done through your experience and effort. Also, optimizing your page will make it much better.
Following are the variables or techniques used for SEO on the website.
- TLD and SLD
Top-level domains (TLDs) or domain extensions and second-level domains or domain names have a role in SEO.
I have listed it here as site optimization, as it has been done on our behalf. Once you make the website live, no changes can be made to SLD or TLD.
Therefore, you should be so careful while choosing the domain name and TLD.
People usually buy domain names with target keywords. It used to increase SEO so much in the old days. But it is not promoting so much now, but it still has a positive impact on SEO.
TLDs still have a large impact on rankings. If you target globally, the best ones are TLDs.com, .org, .net. If you are only targeting your country, you can go to for.in, .co.in, .uk, .co.uk.
If you live in India and target the Indian audience, you can go to in.in.co.in. People who browse the UK Internet may not see your ranked content, but Indian viewers will see it at the top of the SERP.
Like other domain extensions, TLD is dominated by 75% of all websites on the Internet.
- SSL Certificate
If you are new to this, you may wonder, ‘What is an SSL certificate? ‘
It is nothing more than a certificate that can be added to the website to secure the user’s details. This will protect details such as credit card details and debit card details. If you apply the SSL certificate to your website, then your HTTP website will switch to HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) website.
It should be safe for users. This is what Google is saying. So Google announced in August 2014 that HTTPS would be a ranking factor.
That allows you to keep your users safe as well as rank your website.
- Page Performance (Speed and Responsiveness)
Page performance on various devices will include page speed and website responsiveness. These are also on-page SEO techniques that will help with ranking.
The website should not have much unnecessary code like HTML, CSS, etc. which make the site slow.
And images must also be optimized so that the page does not take long to load.
If you use Word Press, you’ll get plugins such as HTML and CSS, photo optimization plugins (Smush), Lazyload (the site loads only when users scroll) and so on.
You should be very careful when it comes to accountability. Because it can be useful to see the website on Windows, but when it comes to mobile devices, half of the page will not be there.
This website will affect the ranking of the website. Most of the viewers are using mobile in the present era to access the internet. So for all devices, you should optimize the website.
- URL Structure
- When creating an article permalink or slug, it should always be short.
- URL should not contain Date, Month, Numeric, etc. It is best to give the URL as simple, just with the post name.
- The main thing is that the primary keyword should be included in the URL so that users know what the content is.
- User Intent Content
- The primary on-page SEO technique in 2020 is user-intentioned content. Provide information to the information seekers.
- That would include keyword optimization but should be knowledgeable about keyword stuffing.
- Keywords can help you fool Google, but users are not going to fool. They want value instead of a keyword.
- Write content naturally with knowledge, and always with content that is deeper than rivals. If people find it informative, they will return to your blog.
Good content helps link baiting. If your content is so informative, people will start engaging with your content. On their websites, they will mention your content URL. Therefore, always write informative content that helps to link.
Infographics will help to link easily. It usually takes a little time to do research and create infographics, but if you do, and if it is meaningful, people will also associate it with their content.
Writing unique content such as how …, top lists, video tutorials, etc. will help users to get information about what they are looking for and will help you build your brand.
Blogging on your website will then allow you to rank more quickly. As some sites will not change again and again, but when you come to the blog part of the site, you will update more information and content often.
- Therefore search engine crawlers may come to crawl the website again and again.
- A regularly updated website, which is liked by crawlers.
- Even you will be ranked for keywords by writing content, which will help to make your website accessible online.
- Page Titles
- The title of the page tells you about your entire content. Therefore your page title should always be attractive and your primary keyword in it should be informative.
- According to research, at the beginning of the title, most pages that rank first has their primary keyword.
- Therefore, try to optimize your title with the primary keyword.
- That is going to be suitable for both the user experience and the search engine crawler.
- Meta Descriptions
The description that appears under a heading in SERP is a Meta description.
To motivate users to click on our link, it should be a brief description of what the content is and include a call to action.
The Meta description should include the primary keyword and the LSI keyword to let users know that the content is what they are looking for. And the search engine crawler will see the details for keywords to Rank.
The Meta description must not exceed 155 words. But even though it is 155 words, Google can cut the characters and add a date with the description (this is often not the case).
- Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6)
Some people who write blogs provide bold and large font sizes for titles (without headings tags).
Such titles will not affect the user experience, but they will affect the Google crawler. Google will crawl through the heading to check for keywords.
If there are no head tags, your page will not be easily ranked.
The head tag also defines the structure of the article. This will help the readers to know what comes under.
So on high-level head tags; use your primary and LSI keywords. One thing to note is that as per SEO guidelines, only one H1 tag is allowed on a page. If it is more than 1, it will have an adverse effect on page ranking. However, most of the time, you can use other heading labels (H2-H6).
- Keyword Density
The density of keywords was one of the major on-page SEO factors, and still has an impact on some marketers. This is the number of primary keywords you use for the content. Google has not yet revealed how much the keyword density should be and they will not show it in the future either. But other SEO experts have different views on this. Some of them say that we should not look at density, because instead of writing content naturally, we can start filling in keywords. But some suggest that keyword density can vary from 0.5% to 3%, but it should be a natural way.
Keywords must be present within the first 100 words of the content.
- Image ALT Text
Image is a Visual content that expresses more than words. It appeals to consumers and makes them interested in reading. They will get bored of reading by just giving content, so adding images is suitable for the user experience. If there are infographics and pictures, it will help the users to get more information and share the information with others as well. Also, add optional text (aka alt text) when adding an image.
This text will help Google crawler to read the image. Without alt text, crawlers cannot read pictures. So it is an on-page SEO technique.
- Internal Linking
Internally linking will allow the website to be indexed more quickly. When search engine crawlers come in for indexing and when they find internal links, they will index it faster. Internal linking makes a good structure for crawling as well as the website for users.
When users read the content and we motivate them to take action on any other internally linked content to read through the call, the user will get more information to let them stay on the website longer.
And when they engage the page, our website’s bounce ratio will decrease.
It helps to spread the link juice from one page to another; it will also help in ranking other pages.
- External Linking
Perhaps you are thinking about how external links will help in on-page SEO? Right?
It does. When we write statistics on our blog, it will be either based on our research or based on other’s research.
If it is other research, it should be linked to the source. Upon receipt of facts and figures, readers will find our content valuable from the evidence (source). Here will help you build trust and retain readers.
You can also reduce the bounce rate by opening an external link in the new window option. In a new tab, readers will open the external link and can return to your content to continue reading.
External links to bad websites can affect the quality of your page, so always include only backlinks for sites with high rank and accurate information.
- Search Engine Submission
How to submit your website to the search engine? Should you use a paid tool for that?
No, by submitting your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and other search engine tools, you can index all your web pages on search engines.
A sitemap is an XML file that shows how many links the website has to crawl. Submitting sitemaps will help in proper and fast indexing.
If you are using CMS to create a website, you can use plugins for sitemap generation. If you want manually, you can use any sitemap generator on SERP.
There are also websites where search engines can be submitted. For many other search engines, they will do the submission part. Along with SEO Boost, this will also help. So it can be considered an on-page as well as an off-page SEO technique.