In online marketing, the goal of every marketer is to get as much traffic as possible. The more traffic a webpage has, the higher the chances of getting more paying buyers. All in all, getting the right traffic to your website is never easy. There are, however, a couple of things you can do in in-depth page optimization.
The purpose of this post is to focus on the best tips for on-page SEO.
Before you publish a page, it is important that you consider the on-page optimization factors. These are important to your overall search engine ranking. Start by understanding Google’s ranking factors.
Below are the key things you need to do to boost your overall ranking.
Fix the 404 errors
The HTTP 404 Not Found Error will cost you a lot of traffic and also impact your online reputation. This is an error that tells your visitors that the page they are trying to reach couldn’t be found on the server. It tells them that the page has either been moved or removed.
This error often happens when the URL was not changed properly when relocating your website.
Fixing 404 errors can help maintain your good ranking. If pages cannot be accessed and had already being indexed by search engines, your reputation with Google will be impacted.
Since Google will not be able to notice that a page has been deleted, the number of customers who click away from the 404 error page will be conceived as a high bounce rate. This is not good for SEO.
Ensuring that deleted or changed pages are properly changed will help prevent this error. You should also keep track of all your pages to ensure they are all working properly.
Picking an easy to type and remember domain name will keep customers from landing on the wrong websites.
Title tag
For better search engine ranking, you have to pay more attention to the title tags. Start by creating titles with keywords. A keywords planner will help you do a better keyword research to find the ones that rank well. Use the keywords at the beginning of the title tags.
Numeric digits are good for creating unique titles. Try using dates to make Google think yours is the latest content.
This is a good thing to do if you publish content on a daily basis. You should also update your sitemap as frequently.
In summary, when optimizing your title tags, do thorough keyword researches, place keywords at the beginning of the title, make use of numerical digits, and avoid unknown symbols. Last but not least, you need to keep up with the trends on title tag SEO.
Using permalink
Links are important in search engine optimization. They are what Google uses to determine the quality of your webpages.
However, to rip the benefits of this option, you have to keep the permalinks short. You should also only use keywords in the URL to boost ranking. Don’t use other words.
Meta tags
In on-page optimization, your pages will need Meta tags. This is the search result snippet that helps Internet users determine whether your page contains the information they need or not. The description needs to be short at no more than 156 characters else it will not be displayed in full.
Although this will not directly boost your ranking, it will surely compel people to open your website if the description grabs their attention.
The snippet you create should contain a relevant keyword and should also be relevant to the content or what your page is about.
External and internal links
The links that point to you and the ones that point to other websites will have an impact on your online reputation. If the websites you are linking to have a bad reputation, chances are your reputation will also be tarnished.
It is therefore important to be careful of whom you link with.
Learn how to make use of the no-follow Meta tags. These are rules you add to your website asking the search engine robots not to follow specific links. You can do this for the low-quality external links.
However, before adding this rule, confirm that the link is not as valuable.
Don’t forget to use internal links. These links signal the search engines that another page within your website is also equally important.
More quality links on your website will add more quality to your site and help it get better ranking.
Page content
One thing you can never ignore in in-depth on-page optimization is your web content. In addition to making sure that your content is of high quality and relevant to your audience, you should consider publishing lengthy content. Well defined topics are great for users.
This is one of the reasons Wikipedia pages rank first on search engine results. However, this does not mean you fill your content with unnecessary information. The idea here is to describe your topics as extensively as you can.
The titles need to be wrapped with H1 tags. These play a crucial role in SEO. In addition to that, you need to embed multimedia content. This includes videos and graphics.
They will help with your ranking.
Page speed
Last but not least, the speed of your page will determine how well you rank. If your pages take long to load up, there is a good chance visitors will click away.
This is perceived as bounce rate by Google and this will impact your ranking. The goal is to ensure that your page loads up within 5 seconds or less.
Reducing the number of elements on your page, optimizing image sizes and using ALT tags will boost the load speed of your website. You also need to think about leveraging on browser caching.
On-page optimization is important if you want to stay ahead of the competition. However, for this to happen, you need to keep up with the SEO trends and ensure you follow all the rules.
If you are not sure of what you are doing, don’t hesitate to hire professional help.
Author bio
Derek Iwasiuk runs a national digital search engine optimization firm headquartered in Minneapolis. He also spends a lot of his free time educating the minds of thousands of young SEO’s and top agencies. To gain from his in-depth SEO experience, you can check out his articles at Engage the Crowd.