Udemezue John
Introduction.
SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” It’s the process of increasing your website traffic through search engine results.
This helps your website become more discoverable. For example, when potential customers search terms related to your brand, they have a better chance of discovering your website and becoming a customer.
Do you want to learn the in-depth SEO? In this article, I will be touching on one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation, called on-page SEO.
Sir Thomas Browne was the first to put the expression into print in the form we now use, in Religio Medici, 1642:
Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world: yet is every man his greatest enemy.
Let’s assume you have read dozens of SEO articles online, and you feel you are not doing enough when it comes to SEO, you don’t have enough organic traffic pouring into your website, then it’s time to rethink how you handle SEO.
Many bloggers make off-page SEO a priority; all they do is build backlinks, guest blogging and social media without taking care of their in-house SEO.
To rank on Google, you need to be able to optimise your website for proper on-page SEO.
If you are new to SEO, I wrote a comprehensive guide to help you get started with SEO; click the link below to get started.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO (also called on-site SEO) is optimising web pages to rank higher in search engines. It includes optimisations to visible content and the HTML source code.
On-page SEO is called “on-page” because the tweaks and changes you make to optimise your SEO is directly on your website.
Why Should You Optimize Your Website For On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is necessary because it tells search engines useful information about your website and how you provide value to visitors and customers.
It helps check if your website can be monetised and optimised for human eyes and search engine bots.
Simply creating and publishing your website is not enough. You must make sure that they are optimised appropriately for Google and other search engines to rank and attract new traffic. You should take your on-Page SEO seriously because it determines if you type or not.
1. It brings in targeted customers.
Search engine optimization and on-page optimization help bring in targeted customers quickly.
The drive behind every successful online business is to position itself for target customers who are actively looking for such service.
Google has been averaging 5 Billion searches per day, making about 3 Trillion searches for the whole year.
Just imagine if your business could harness the power of Google’s search engine and get just a tiny fraction of this search traffic right into the doors of your website and into your business.
This could change the course of your business forever, the ability of your business to harness the power of Google search and other search engines, for that matter.
2. It increases your search engine ranking.
Paying attention to On-pages SEO gives you the ability to be recognised by search engines whenever someone searches for something related to your brand. That is what every online business strives for.
Ranking high on search engines like Google is key to capturing the audience you’re looking for. Many people will search for something and then click the first link available on the first page out of convenience and suspected credibility.
Proper on-page SEO increases the possibility of your website being found whenever a search relates to your brand or business.
3. It is essential for brand & business growth.
Proper on-page optimisation significantly impacts your business’ growth online. You get a chance at more reach and increased rankings on search engines, and you reach customers who are specifically looking for a product like yours.
4. It helps to increase website traffic.
Your website needs traffic to grow; at least, it’s a metric used to measure any online business’s success. But unfortunately, your website might experience little or no traffic without using on-page optimisation techniques, which is terrible for your business.
By doing a quick check on your on-page SEO, your website can get in front of more potential customers who will eventually become paying customers.
5. On-page SEO is Cheap.
SEO is the cheapest method of promoting your online or offline business. All it takes is just following set guidelines to optimise your website for search engines, and you will be amazed at how far your business can get.
If you choose to bring in a specialist to take this on for your company, you might pay for such a service, which is recommended. However, you could choose to tackle some basic optimisations yourself and reap the benefits, but it takes hours and days of learning before you can master them.
Trust me; there are poor SEO pieces of advice out there; I understood when I started this blog as a fresher.
It would help if you choose your mentors wisely; not everyone on the internet understands how SEO works, even though they might write about it on their respective blogs.
However, if you need guidance, I recommend you follow the link after this section to the “understanding SEO for beginners guide written on this blog”, or better still, you can look out for this experts online such as Brain Dean (Backlinko.com), Neil Patel (Neilpatel.com), Adam Enfroy (AdamEnfroy.com), Harsh Agarwal (Shoutmeloud.com).
How To optimise Your Website For On-Page SEO.
On-page SEO is one aspect of SEO; we still have off-page SEO, but prioritising on-Page SEO can do your brand good online.
Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Along with on-page SEO, these include several of the factors of basic SEO that help a site rank.
Off-page SEO involves developing a search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
Most bloggers seeking out quick influence on the internet prioritise Off-page SEO and violate the Google search policies, which cause their website to rank low in search engines and may throw-away tons of hard work in the drain. Off-page SEO should complement on-Page SEO to not appear spammy on search engines.
1. Subscribe to a reliable web hosting company.
A web hosting provider is an online service that allocates space on a web server for a website to store its files. Web hosting makes the files that comprise a website (code, images, etc.) available for viewing online. Every website that you ever visited is hosted on a server.
For a search engine to crawl your website, you need to be subscribed to a reliable Webhosting company with a record of successful uptime service. Unfortunately, not all web hosting services are reliable, and you should always do your research before subscribing to any of them.
Failure of your web hosting to respond to search engine spiders will ruin your on-page SEO for good. So many websites have seen huge revenue go down the drain because of a bad web hosting company; they rank for a while and stop typing as soon as their Webhosting company begin to experience downtime.
My personal experience taught me a lot about choosing a bad web hosting company, and I learned the hard way; I had to lose out on rankings for months before switching to a new web hosting provider.
I wrote a comprehensive guide on this blog on some of the most reliable web hosting companies on earth; click the link below.
2. Design a Responsive Website.
Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behaviour and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.
The practice consists of flexible grids and layouts, images and intelligent use of CSS media queries. In addition, as the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate resolution, image size and scripting abilities.
Having responsive websites helps you reduce the bounce rate on your website, which is a metric that allows Google to perceive the quality of your website.
Having a responsive website also helps Google effectively crawl your websites without errors. One of Google search engine ranking factors evolves around using page speed as a Google ranking factor.
How well your website would rank is determined by user behaviours on your website; an increase in mobile device use means a paradigm shift for how Google bots crawl, index, and display results in SERP to satisfy people’s needs and promote customer satisfaction.
Designing a responsive website requires technical skills not everyone possesses; you may have to hire a web designer or a developer to help you with the task.
If you seek out an effective way to do it yourself, there are influential online website builders that can help do the job without getting to know about web development, and one of those builders is WordPress. You get to install WordPress on your website when you subscribe to a web hosting provider; WordPress is open-source and is free; it also comes with tons of website templates that help you design a website as quickly as possible.
This website is built on WordPress, and so is over 70% per cent of other websites on the internet.
I wrote a comprehensive guide on the best website builders to choose that suit your business. Click the link below to get started.
3. Start creating content on your Blog.
Having a website is different from having a blog; though two of them can live together, the purpose of the two is entirely other.
Most people design a website with a couple of pages to show their friends and family that they have a portfolio online; they don’t understand that it takes more than just having a responsive single page website to rank online.
You have to design your website so that Google ranks your website, which includes creating a blog. Blogging can also be called content marketing.
Blogs are an unprecedented marketing tool. Think of them as mini-magazines that give businesses and individuals a dynamic vehicle to attract potential customers online.
Businesses of all kinds start blogging to build up a long-term audience. However, to build a sustainable online business, you need to pay attention to organic growth, which can only be done by paying close attention to blogging.
One of the biggest challenges new businesses face is building an audience for their online business. But, no matter which group you fall into, having a blog can accelerate your success.
There are various ways to create contents that rank on Google; I wrote a comprehensive guide to help you get started. Click the link below to get started.
4. Use long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are search queries that get a small number of searches per month.
They usually contain more words and are more specific than their “head” counterparts, making them have higher conversion rates.
Using the long-tail keyword strategy can help you out when you have lots of competition in your market that you want to outrank on search engines.
Every business should aim for long-tail keywords because fewer websites compete for these keywords on search engines and all you can do is write more comprehensive content on these keywords.
The longer (and more specific) your search terms are, the easier it is to rank for the time. Because of the vastness of the internet, it is easier to find your audience for your particular niche. Focusing on a group of long-tail keywords can result in a great deal of traffic.
I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to get started with long-Tail Keywords; click the link below to get started.
5. Google analytics is Key.
Google Analytics is a free online website tracking tool created by Google to provide you with information on how users interact with your website.
For instance, let’s say you own any website and you want to know how many users visit your website and how users are interacting with your website, The Google Analytics tools by Google allow you to achieve that.
Information on how users interact with a website is beneficial to the growth of such a website. Bounce rate, Page Views, User Location and Users source, can help you measure your website’s performance
to see if your marketing efforts are working, and finally, Optimize website pages to boost traffic and conversions.
6. Set up Google search console.
Google search console allows you to see how your website is ranking on Google. It shows you how many of your articles are indexed on Google; you also get to see how many backlinks you have and the number of pages that are not ranked.
If you have a sitemap that you keep updated for your site, you can submit that sitemap in Google Search Console to make it easier for Google to crawl your area and let it know about new pages you’ve published.
To optimise your website for organic search, you probably use Google Search Console to learn which pages receive the most impressions and clicks and which queries are driving them.
You can quickly assess your SEO performance in a dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics.
7. Update your content regularly.
Search engines gravitate toward freshness, which is more reason why the SERPs are dynamic.
The results you get a particular query this today are different from what you get in the next six months.
Your frequently updated website offers search engines a haven for fresh content and new information sources for their search requests.
If you often update your website with high-quality content, search engines will love you.
Like I always say, writing more content is not the key to ranking on search engines; even if all you can write is a minimum number of appropriately search optimised engine articles, the search engines will reward you more than those websites with a vast number of low-quality contents.
I wrote a comprehensive guide on this blog on how to write blog posts that rank on Google; click the link below to get started.
8. Do deep linking
Deep linking is a hyperlink that leads to a specific part of the content on the same website.
When deep linking is done correctly, it can rank your site higher on search engines, drive traffic to your content, and increase your domain authority.
It also allows you have enough content that your audience can chew on while browsing around your website.
If you have a deep linking strategy to boost your SEO, you need more content around a particular topic.
For example, let’s say you write about web development in general; you will generally have to break the topic into different content and reference at least three of them in each blog post.
9. Optimize images on your website.
Google offer search engine results options for web, image, and map search.
Optimising your images for search engine optimisation helps search engines understand your site and content more.
You can get more exposure in image search results, which likely leads to your blog.
Optimising images requires that you go through the following steps.
1. Compress the image or, better still, convert it to WebP. WebP is a modern image format that provides exceptional compression for photos on the web, making web page loads way faster.
You should also know that WebP lossless images are 26% smaller than PNGs.
2. Add keywords to the alt tag. Adding keywords to alt tags enables your image to rank for that search term on Google.
3. Customize the images you use on your websites. Tools like Canva enables you to design your image to attract a high click-through rate.
10. Optimize your schema mark up
Schema markup is the language of search engines. It is code designed to provide information to search engines to understand your content.
Search engines like Google understand a certain kind of language, and that language is called Schema language or structured data.
No matter how smart we think Google is, it still struggles to understand what a webpage is actually about. This is where Schema was coined.
Depending on what platform your site is built on, there are ways to implement schema. For WordPress, for example, there are plugins you can install that automatically configure your blog to use Schema, one of those plugins is called RankMath.
Conclusion.
SEO is a competition that cannot be won in one night or a few days but can be won in a few months when the proper steps are adequately followed.
SEO can prove highly complex, but knowing the basics will give you a head start; while others may be wasting time figuring out things for themselves, a basic understanding of SEO gives you an advantage.
It is something you should continually improve upon. It would help if you treated this On-Page SEO as a living, a guide that will help you adjust and optimise your Search engine optimisation strategies.
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