One of the crucial factors in SEO is having a well-established website. However, it is important to understand that creating and launching a website is just a first step. It requires optimization for search engines to gain visibility and draw traffic. To do so, you need to understand about on-page SEO.
On-page SEO itself involves enhancing web pages to boost a website's search engine rankings and attract organic traffic. Want to know more about on-page SEO? Read on below to get the ultimate insight into what is on-page SEO, why it’s important for your business, and how to optimize it properly!
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
On-page SEO is crucial to ensure your website demonstrates elevated expertise, authority, and credibility. On-page SEO can also help search engines understand your website and its content. They will help identify whether your content is relevant to a searcher’s query or not. Proper implementation of on-page SEO will ensure your site is tailored not only for human visitors but also for search engine crawlers.
On-page SEO is called so because the adjustments made to enhance the site are visible directly on the webpage to the visitors. This is different with off-page SEO and technical SEO components that may not always be apparent to the naked eye.
What Are the Elements of On-Page SEO?
To optimize your website on-page SEO, there are a couple of elements that you should understand. These important on-page SEO elements fall into three main categories:
Content Elements
- Keyword Research
- Visual Content
HTML Elements
- Page Titles
- Headers
- Meta Descriptions
- Image Alt-Text
- Structured Markup
Site Architecture Elements
- Page URLs
- Internal Linking
- Mobile Responsiveness
How to Optimize On-Page SEO Element?
Keyword Research
This involves identifying and analyzing the specific words and phrases users use in search engines when looking for information. By understanding this keyword, you can optimize your page and align it with what users are searching for. This can do wonders to improve content visibility and relevance.
To optimize it, you can use keyword research tools to identify relevant keywords related to your content, focusing on search volume and user intent. You should also incorporate primary and secondary keywords naturally into your content while ensuring it remains informative and engaging.
For example, for our clients who are running a cleaning business in Singapore, we discover through keyword research that people in Singapore are frequently searching for terms like "best professional cleaner in Singapore", "home cleaning Singapore" and "affordable cleaning service Singapore." Thus, our SEO agency will utilize this relevant keyword and strategically incorporate these into the website content, meta tags, and other SEO elements, to improve our client business visibility in the search engine results.
Visual Content
If a keyword is related to the text element of the content, as its name implies - visual content is related to images, videos, infographics, and other multimedia elements that you incorporate into your content.
To optimize visual elements (images, videos, infographics) you should use descriptive filenames, relevant alt-text, and captions containing targeted keywords. Do keep in mind that paying attention to visuals is important because it can help to enhance user experience and make the content more engaging, understandable, and shareable.
Page Titles
These are HTML elements that define the title of a webpage. They appear as clickable headlines in search engine results and play a significant role in both SEO and user experience to give a preview of the content of the webpage.
Craft unique, concise, and descriptive titles (within 50-60 characters) for each page. You should also incorporate primary keywords at the beginning of the title.
Headers
Headers (H1 to H6) act as a way to organize content hierarchically on a webpage. Properly structured headers improve readability and help search engines to understand the content structure. Include relevant keywords in headers to guide both users and search engines through your content.
Meta Descriptions
These are the summaries of a webpage’s content which is displayed below the title in search engine results. While they might not directly impact rankings, compelling meta-descriptions can influence click-through rates. Do keep in mind that it is best to keep the meta description under 160 characters to avoid truncation.
Image Alt-Text
Alt-text is descriptive text associated with images on a webpage. It can help search engines understand the content of the image since they can’t interpret images as humans do. Additionally, image alt-text can also help provide accessibility for visually impaired users by describing the images displayed via screen readers.
For example, to create image alt-text, you should provide descriptive alt-text for images, and utilize relevant keywords to enhance accessibility and search engine understanding of the image content.
Structured Markup
This refers to adding specific code to provide additional context and meaning to the content on a webpage. This helps search engines understand the content better, making it easier to show quick summaries called rich snippets in search results. Rich snippets provide a snapshot of information from a webpage to users, making search results more appealing and potentially increasing clicks. To get rich snippets, using a code like schema markup and following Google's guidelines is necessary, but do keep in mind - it’s not guaranteed that Google will always show them.
Page URLs
Ensuring that your URLs are concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords is important. It can help to make it easier for both users and search engines to understand and navigate your site.
Internal Linking
Internal linking practice involves linking different pages within the same website. This is a great strategy as it can help establish a hierarchy and relationship between various pages, distribute page authority across the site, enhance user navigation, and encourage search engines to crawl and index the website more effectively.
Mobile Responsiveness
As nowadays more people utilize their mobile phones to search for things online, the site owner needs to pay attention to the design and functionality of the website, ensuring it displays and can function properly across different devices and screen sizes, especially on mobile devices. On top of providing a better user experience, a mobile-responsive site is often prioritized by search engines in its rankings.
Final Thoughts
SEO is not a one-and-done deal. Ongoing review and auditing of your content are necessary to maintain its quality and relevance. Work with Cardinal Digital SEO services to ensure your site's On-Page SEO is continuously optimized to enhance better success for your business!
