Has anyone ever told you that you should work on on-page SEO?
What were they talking about?
How is that different from SEO in general?
And why should you care?
In this quick 5-minute guide, we’re going to answer all of these questions.
We’ll take you over the basics of on-page SEO and show you how it can help your business grow.
Ready?
Start your timers, and let’s dive in!
On-page SEO is a branch of SEO that deals with everything on your page (contrast that to off-page SEO, which handles external factors and links). Good on-page SEO makes your page easy for Google to index and rank for the right keywords.
To understand on-page SEO, you have to understand what SEO is for and what you’re trying to accomplish.
You can check out our 5-minute SEO guide here for a quick overview.
In a nutshell, SEO is all about ranking your website in search engines (such as Google) for relevant keywords.
When you rank for these keywords, many potential customers are going to find you organically.
Several factors go into SEO and ranking your page – with on-page SEO being one of the most critical.
Here’s a question:
If you’re writing about motivational speaking, how does Google know that your article should rank for the keyword “Motivational Speaking” and not something like “Best Air Conditioners?”
The answer?
On-page SEO.
Good on-page SEO helps Google and other search engines understand what your article is about. This makes it a lot easier for them to index for the right keywords.
Now, Google and search engines are incredibly smart.
Even if you publish your motivational speaking article without doing any on-page SEO, there’s still a big chance they’ll figure out what your article is about.
But why make it hard for them?
Why take a risk they’ll get it wrong?
If you really want to rank at that #1 spot, why not make it as easy as possible for search engines to index your article?
If you’ve read our previous lesson on SEO writing, you might notice some overlaps here.
And you’d be right.
Technically, writing falls under on-page SEO. However, because there is so much that goes into writing, we’ll separate that one for now.
With that, here’s a basic on-page SEO checklist:
Include Target Keyword In Title
Using the keyword you’re trying to rank for in your title is crucial for getting search engines to understand your article.
Additionally, you should also include your target keyword in your introduction, in a subheading, and 1-4 times in the body of your text.
Use Secondary Keywords
Variations of your target keyword and other closely related keywords should go into your text’s body.
If possible, add these into subheadings as well!
Body Should Have 1,000+ Words
300-word articles are almost no good, especially when it comes to blogging.
While there are varying reports on the ideal word count for SEO, here at TGC, we try to go for over 1,700+ words whenever possible.
No Duplicate Content
Never copy and paste content from other blog posts, even if you were the one that wrote them.
Google and search engines don’t want to give their readers content that they’ve read elsewhere. That’s why all your content should be unique if you’re going to rank.
Use Internal Links
Adding internal links – or links to other pages in your website – are another way to boost your on-page SEO.
This way, when search engines crawl your website, they’ll find meaningful connections between your pages.
Add High-Quality External Links
Aside from internal links, linking to other authoritative websites is also a good idea.
However, it’s essential to link to high-quality websites. If you link to a random blog with a terrible ranking, this may affect yours as well.
Use a Short URL With Your Keyword
By default, your page’s URL will be yourwebsite.com/your-article-title.
However, if your article title is long, you’ll want to cut it down.
If it doesn’t make sense, you can also only add your target keyword to your URL and make it like this instead:
yourwebsite.com/target-keyword
Optimize Your Images
Having at least one image is a must.
And not only that, but you also have to optimize the images on your page as well.
Optimizing images includes making sure your photo isn’t too large, putting your keyword in the image title, and adding alt text (for when the picture doesn’t load).
Use Good Tags and Categories
If you’ve built your website on WordPress, adding tags and categories to your page will be very simple. Most other website builders make it easy to do this as well.
This is a simple way to improve your on-page SEO and help Google understand your page.
Optimize Your Meta Title and Description
Last but not least, you should optimize your meta title and description.
These are the things that’ll show up when people see your website in the SERPs:
As always, your meta title and description should include your target keyword.
Also, make sure your title doesn’t exceed 60 characters and your description 160.
On-page SEO deals with elements that are visible on your page. Technical SEO deals with invisible elements to the human eye (but are glaring for search engines).
Working on your on-page SEO means working on your content, images, meta tags, and more.
Meanwhile, technical SEO is about working on things like your robots.txt file, your javascript, schema, and others.
Anyone can optimize your on-page SEO. However, you’ll need a web developer to deal with technical SEO errors.
Want to learn more about technical SEO?
Check out our next lesson.
On-page SEO is one of the easiest branches of SEO to deal with.
However, working on this can be very time-consuming.
And even though anyone can do it, that doesn’t mean everyone can do it well.
An expert who knows the best practices can always squeeze out more value from on-page SEO than someone who is just learning the ropes.
Plus, an expert SEO can also do so much more to take your website to the next level and gain you traffic, leads, and sales.
