ON-PAGE SEO
On-page SEO consists of enhancing the contents of the webpage to increase the website’s rank in search engine’s results. On-page SEO refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. On-page SEO depends on on-page factors which consists of quality of website’s code, user experience of your website, your website’s friendliness. This can be achieved by including the following things in your webpage’s content:
1. Title tag: This is one of the important aspect of on-page SEO as it is displayed in the search engine results. By simply looking at the the title of the webpage in the search results, a user decides whether to click that link or not. So, make sure to use a proper title for your website or webpage. The Title tag of your webpage must start with a keyword. This will help in faster indexing by search engine. The title of your website must not be too long. A good title consists of about 60 characters. If the length of the title is long, then the search engine might not be able to display the title of the webpage properly. Hence, choose a suitable title for your webpage. A title for your website must include your brand’s name and description of the company / brand in short. Website’s title with repetition of SEO keywords creates a bad impression of website.
2. Meta tag: Meta tags are used to provide information to the search engine about your webpage. Building custom meta tags may increase user influence or click-through-rate, search engine rankings.
3. Meta description: The meta description is the description of your website which is displayed by the search engine just below the title of website in the results to give the user an idea of what is the content of the website.
4. Heading tags: The landing page of your website should include multiple heading tags starting from <h1> to <h6>. Text enclosed between the <h1> and </h1> tags is given more importance by the search engines as it indicates more important text of your website or webpage. Rest of the heading tags like from <h2> onwards are used as sub-headings. Heading would be useful to represent different sections of the webpage which would impact, both the on-page SEO and usability of your website.
5. URLs: The URL of your website should display the hierarchy of the webpages of your website. The hierarchy of webpages in the URL makes it easier for the user to navigate through your website as well as make the URL descriptive. Make the URLs of the webpages of your website descriptive so as to increase the indexing of them by search engines. Non-descriptive URLs are often not indexed by the search engines. URLs is an integral part of on-page SEO and it should include the subject or purpose of the webpage. If your website is categorized in to different categories, then displaying the categories of the webpages in the URL will make navigation in your website more easy.
6. Inclusion of Media: Media such as images, videos must be included in your webpages to make the content more attractive, informative, less boring. Most of the users like to visualize the content of websites through images and videos. So, adding image(s) / video(s) to your website would increase the quality of your webpage’s content.
7. Technical Excellence: The quality of your website’s code should be high. The client-side JavaScripts should be well written so as to prevent breaking of your webpages during loading. The design of the website should be flexible and responsible so that it can be displayed beautifully on any device, be it desktop, laptop or a smartphone.
8. User Experience: User should be able to easily understand your website means that which link redirects to which webpage, which webpage would be useful for them, proper navigation, etc.
9. Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks or simply links carry most of the weight of the on-page SEO. Outbound links which redirect to external websites and are supportive to your website’s content are helpful both in the terms of on-page SEO and website. Whereas internal links redirect to the sections of the website thereby increasing the navigation between the contents of your website.
10. Optimizing Images: The most used SEO keyword should be used as an alternate text for the images in the <img> tag. This not only helps in SEO but is also descriptive to the user if an image of your website fails to load. If the size of an image is too large, it may affect the performance of website as images hold up to 50-60% of the weight of the website. Using compression techniques to compress images to reduce their sizes will help in increasing the performance of the website as user prefer website loading time to be fast.
11. Content size: Search Engines generally rank the websites with content less than 500 words at much lower position. So, to gain higher ranking at search engine results, the content of the website should be written in depth consisting of about 2000 words or more. More content engages user to browse through the website.
12. User-driven content: The content of your website should be interesting for the user to read. Generally in-depth and well-written website content will help to increase the ranking of website in search results. The content of the website should be aimed at solving the problems of the user.
13. Canonization of links: Canonization is the process of avoiding duplicate content by including the appropriate use of existing canonical tags. A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. Practically speaking, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results. Modern content management systems (CMS) and dynamic, code-driven websites exacerbate the problem even more.
On-page SEO
External Links:
1. On-Page SEO Cheat Sheet: https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-on-page-seo-cheat-sheet/
2. On-page SEO Glossary: https://www.searchmetrics.com/glossary/on-page-optimization/