On-Page SEO: Tips with Best Practices ǀ Humayun Atif 

On-Page SEO: Tips with Best Practices

On-page SEO are the techniques used to optimize your website and its content to improve its search rankings. On-page SEO factors are all the things that you have direct control over on your website.

Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through the act of getting links and other marketing techniques to bring traffic to your site so we brand our product through external links, social media marketing, guest posting and other marketing techniques.

On-Page SEO Tips

Here you will learn about On-Page SEO and will discuss one by one tips with Practical Examples. The Content creation is the foundation of on-page SEO and that’s why we really put emphasis on it. Based on my practical experience as a blogger, on-page SEO also concerns optimizing pages for specific keywords to improve search visibility. SEO starts from on page so this is the primary step to rank your blog and we have many techniques and we will discuss them in detail.

Content is King

The phrase “Content is king” is often credited to Bill Gates, who used it in a 1996 essay titled “Content is King” where he discussed how content would become the important driver of the internet’s future success.

Make sure to write quality content which adds value and it must be unique and engaging and original and useful to your readers. High quality content should be considered as one of the most important on-page SEO techniques.

Tips for Content Writing

• Never copying others contents as it will not bring any added value and also get penalized by Google for such activities.
• Never use duplicate or low-quality content as it will lower down your ranking.
• Blog writing is a skill and it’s not easy to write great blog all the time but try your best to deliver quality material and try to come up with problem solving content ideas.

• Gather material first from reliable sources and then brainstorm to add value.
• Always put your personal input and experience.
• It is recommended to add a concluding note to sum up all vital points.
• Aim for at least 600 to 1000 words of text, but longer content like 1000+ words often perform better in search results.
• Use lists, paragraphs, sub headings and images to make content easy to read.
• Update and refresh old content to maintain its relevance.
• Always use catchy fonts for your posts like Calibri, Arial etc. and use font size 12 to 14.

Publish Regularly

Google search engine ranks you if you add new blogs to your website regularly. Always add new blogs to your web site with fresh and current topics to rank and also update your published blogs to make them fresh with new updates.

Always Choose Keywords Thoughtfully

Take advantage of the long-tail keywords as they are less competitive and bring higher traffic. Put the keyword in the headline, the URL, the meta description of the article, headers, and in the body of your text.

There are many Key Word Search Tools are there including Ahrefs , Google trends, Keyword.io, Semrush, Moz.

• It is advised to use your primary keyword once in first 100 words and then once in last 100 words of your content.

• Try to limit your keyword density to 2% to 3% only. Suppose the targeted keyword is used 10 times in page content and the total word count in that page is 500 words which means the keyword density is 2%.

Title Tags

Your titles must be catchy and attractive and depicts your subject line clearly to attract readers and keep them within 60 characters in length.

• Keep the title tag length between 50-60 characters (including spaces).
• Always include the primary keywords.
• Make it engaging and avoid duplicate title tags on the site.

Meta Description

Meta description is a brief summary that shows up in the search engine so

• keep them attractive and simple.
• should not exceed 150 characters.
• include the primary keyword naturally.

Headers Management

Always make a presentable text formatting for readers and use small paragraphs and headings and sub headings must be formatted into H1, H2, H3 and so on. Use headings in your blog to make your articles scannable for the SEO machines.

• Use only one H1 tag per blog and make sure it contains the primary keyword.
• H2 and H3 tags can be used more than once in a blog to organize content logically.
• Ensure the headings are relevant to the content and provide a clear structure.
• Always use the tags in numerical order H2, followed by H3, H4 and don’t skip a level.
• Ensure that your keyword is included in H2.

Always Add Internal Links

If your website has many blogs then always try to add links to your others blogs as this gives an extra SEO boost to the particular pages you’re referring to.

Internal links are crucial to increase the traffic on your web site as linking between your other blogs will engage readers so always create links to your other blogs which are relevant to blog and in this way, users interested in knowing more can visit your other blogs and traffic will increase.

Multiple links are fine on same blog but must be relevant to your topic. WordPress has made linking very easy and brings attraction for readers but always avoid over-linking as 2 to 3 internal links per page is typically a good practice as links are very important for On-Page SEO.

Create Smart & Short URLs

A uniform resource locator (URL) is the unique address of a specific webpage on the internet. A good URL is important for both search engines and users. Page URL plays a big role when it comes to on-page SEO. If the URL page is not added, the result page won’t appear on Google.

• URLs must be simple, smart and short.
• Use dashes to separate the words like (https://accountingblogger.com/wordpress-plugins/).
• Avoid digits or other special characters and focus should be on key word.
• It should be in lower case always.

Example of a good URL: https://accountingblogger.com/wordpress-plugins/

10 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers | H. Atif

Images – Alt Text (alternative text)

Images makes your blog post attractive and catches the attention of readers so do add proper images and use proper names for all images as they provide alternative information to your images and taken into consideration by the SEO machines when they try to understand what your pictures are all about.

• ALT tag plays a key role in increasing your traffic from Google or any other search engines.
• Don’t use images with copyright issues and use your own images or from free websites which allows to use them.
• Many sites offer free images for your blogs such as Freepik.
• Optimize all of your images using meaningful text, Alt tag, and caption.

• Avoid uploading large images and resize them so Image size must not be more than norms and preferably keep them within 100kb to avoid loading issues. https://www.resizepixel.com/

Mobile Friendly Website

It is estimated that almost 57% traffic comes from mobile users so always make your website mobile friendly as Google has already lowering down the rankings of websites that are not mobile responsive and speed in very important for On-Page SEO.

You can check the mobile friendliness of your website home or any of the pages from Page Speed Insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev/).

Link to Other Trusted Domains

When you are writing a content then it’s a good practice to linking your blog post to other trusted websites which are related to that topic as it is considered as one of the ranking factors in on-page optimization.

Google XML Sitemap

After published your post first thing to do is indexing on Google Console either manually or through a plugin. An XML sitemap contains all the pages of your site and gives an easy access to the search engine crawlers to easily crawl your site. It is helpful in finding your newly published content on search engine.

User Experience (UX)

User Experience (UX) is all about optimizing a website as user-friendly, engaging, efficient and adding value to readers both in terms of content and usability.

Overall, On-Page SEO is all about User Experience (UX) on your site and simply it refers to make your site and content entertaining, adding value to readers and leading to a positive experience for users. UX increase conversion rates on your site which is vital for ranking.

UX consists of layout of your site but not limited to and includes speed on mobile, design and user-friendly interface. It also includes adding alt text to images for screen readers, and making sure the site is navigable via keyboard for users.

Final Thoughts

We use On-page SEO, Off-page and Technical SEO to grow traffic to our sites and blogs we have published. I am sure that after following the above stated on-page SEO tips and techniques your most of the on-page essentials are completed for SEO. Having said that we must also optimize and complete Off-page and Technical SEO to complete the process of optimizing blogs for Google search engine. We know that On-page SEO refers to efforts made directly to the page whereas, Off-page SEO refers to efforts made on other pages of your site, or with other sites and includes marketing and branding and using social media and other platforms and approaching other websites to get more backlinking and social promotion. Technical SEO refers to efforts involving the site’s source code, sitemap, speed, security and structured data. First part in all the above three techniques is On-Page SEO as if your content and presentation is of high quality and original then things will go in your way so always implement On-page SEO techniques carefully but never overlook other two SEO techniques.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Humayun Atif | CMA, CPA, CA (FIN), MS-IT, CA Articles from Big 4, Certified Forensic Accountant (USA), Six Sigma, Microsoft & Oracle Certified.

Atif is passionate about Business, Tech, and the written word. He is the author of the book ‘IFRS Made Easy’. He is a Tech, Tax and IFRS coach and the founder of accountingblogger.com