1. January 21,
2020
On-Page SEO Techniques to Increase Organic Traffic in 2020
stanventures.com/blog/on-page-seo/
There was a time when on-page techniques meant keyword stuffing. With Google’s Panda
update, the websites that relied on this tactic were thrown out from the first page!
In SEO, strategies that work today may not work after a few years. This is why I always
recommend budding SEO marketers to keep a tab on what’s happening in the industry.
In the post-Panda era, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) listing is replaced by pages
that provide value to the users.
If you’re looking to rank a page on Google, your priority must be to add value to the already
existing content that is ranking on the #1 position.
As you already know, the two critical factors that Google considers while ranking websites
are on-page and off-page factors (link building).
In this blog, you’ll get a glimpse into the basic to advanced on-page SEO steps that you can
use for your page.
What you’re about to read is not another guide that boasts about never-tried-before
techniques.
I’ve used the same on-page optimization strategies that you’re about to learn to rank my
blog in the #0 position for the most competitive SEO keyword “Google algorithm update.”
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2. So to begin with, let’s delve into the basics of on-page. If you’re looking for advanced
strategies, please use the table of contents section to navigate and start reading.
What is On-page Optimization?
On-Page SEO is a website optimization technique to rank pages within the site on search
engines.
Proper on-page optimization of a page will ensure that it ranks higher on search engines for
relevant keywords and drive targeted traffic.
On-page SEO techniques include optimization of web content, URL, metadata, images, and
page speed.
As the name itself suggests, on-page SEO is about optimizing the internal elements within
your website to achieve search engine friendliness.
Many times, websites that fail to do on-page optimization don’t show up on the first page of
search results.
The reason for this is that the Google Algorithm considers a handful of on-page factors
while ranking pages on the first page.
One of the most critical factors that determine the position of a page on SERP is relevance. If
the content on your page is not relevant to the query entered, you won’t rank on Google
99% of the time.
During each stage of on-page optimization, you have to ensure that the page stays relevant
to the target audience.
If your page is not relevant to the users, it will end up with a high bounce rate and
eventually, your page will lose its position on the Google results.
Is On-Page SEO a Ranking Factor?
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3. The success of search engines relies on the relevance of the results provided to the users.
Since Google provides the best results to the users, thanks to its advanced algorithms, it’s
currently omnipotent in the search landscape.
On-page optimization becomes all the more important due to this reason.
The whole purpose of doing on-page SEO is to ensure that the users and the search engine
understands what is offered on a page.
This also creates an opportunity as proper on-page optimization paves the way for you to
find the target audience and send across the message effectively.
All the factors that you’re about to learn through this post are critical as they give important
signals to the search engine about your website.
Skipping any on-page SEO step may end with your competitor taking up your position on
the SERP, which is exactly what you don’t want.
Basic Questions Answered About On-page SEO Techniques
for Beginners
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4. On-page SEO activites, as you may be already aware, is one of the biggest SEO ranking
factors and it has the ability to make or break your website.
Here are a few basic On-page SEO factors that can impact the search engine rankings of a
page on search engines.
How does the perfect SEO content page look like?
You may have come across the SEO proverb, Content is King. As I told you in the beginning,
the SEO industry is so volatile that things change over time.
Content is still a deciding factor, but defining the quality of the content depends on varying
factors.
You may have come across scenarios wherein your high quality content fails to make it to
the first page of the Google Search list.
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5. The major reason for this is that the content has been written without much audience
research.
If you create long-form content on a topic that is not in the interest of the target audience,
chances are you won’t get organic traffic despite the best optimization efforts.
What you as an SEO must do is identify the most searched queries of the targets and try to
give them the answers through your content.
Proper keyword research will help you find the most searched query string, and you can use
them within the content to rank high on search engines.
Check out our in-depth article on how to do keyword research to learn the various ways of
finding keywords that get you to the No.1 position on Google Search.
In addition to this, the best strategy would be to identify the kind of content that is working
for your competitors and emulate it on your website.
However, emulating doesn’t mean copying or scrapping the content.
Google hates websites that do this and things can go awry if you indulge in such practices.
The best way to do this is to identify the content from the competitors and put it down in
your perspective by adding more input, data, and research.
What is the best URL structure?
URL is something that SEOs give the least importance. However, considering that URL is the
basic building block of a website, you cannot ignore it.
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6. In addition to that, all the important discussions about internal links, site architecture, and
link juice, which we’ll talk about in a later part of this blog, have URL as its core.
You may have come across URL structures like this:
By the sheer look of it, you will understand that it’s a real mess.
The problem with these kinds of URLs is that neither the users nor the search engines can
understand what is within the link.
A URL is supposed to provide a gist of what the page is about to the users and search
engines.
This is one reason why I have always recommended to make the URLs as short as possible
while using the target keyword.
An ideal search engine and user-friendly URL would be:
Do a simple Google search for “iPhone 11 Pro.”
You can see that the top 10 results showcase clean URLs.
If you’re using WordPress, Joomla, or any other CMS for that reason, they automatically
create SEO-friendly URLs using the title tag.
However, if the title is lengthy, the URLs tend to be longer. The best practice would be to use
the target keyword at the beginning of the URL and remove the rest.
If you find the target keyword already used for another page, take the secondary or LSI
keywords to generate the URL.
How to Use Meta Tags in On-Page SEO?
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7. Optimizing the meta title and description of a page is critical for improving the search
engine rankings and the click-through rate of the website.
How Important is a Good Meta Description
Google has confirmed that meta description is not an SEO ranking factor, but ignoring it can
lose you valuable click-through rates.
The best way to optimize the meta description of a website is by providing the users with
reasons why they should visit the page.
The text that goes into the meta description is most likely what Google will display on SERP
(unless it decides not to and picks up some random description from the content).
Since you’re competing with at least 10 other competitors, it’s important to make the
description as click-worthy as possible.
Making the description click-worthy doesn’t imply that you have to stuff it with keywords.
Use the keywords and the LSI as naturally as possible if you think it adds more value.
However, this may not help in improving the SERP position on Google.
If you want to learn further on how to optimize the meta description so that it doesn’t
truncate, read our blog on Meta Description best practices.
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8. How to Optimize Meta Title Text
Even after all these years, the meta title still remains an important SEO ranking factor.
Optimizing the meta tags both for the users and the search engine is important.
The best meta title optimization trick is to ensure that your target keyword is placed at the
beginning of the title.
Example: Here is how I optimized the meta title of my top ranking post-Google Algorithm
Update.
My Target Keyword is “Google Algorithm Update” and I have strategically placed it in the
very beginning of the title followed by a semicolon.
As and when a new update happens, I update the title, description, and the content.
However, the first part of the meta title remains the same.
This strategy really works for long-form content and also for content that you plan to keep
evergreen.
One of the most common mistakes that SEOs make while optimizing the meta title is to
place the target keyword towards the end of the title.
This strategy can backfire as Google might truncate the keyword when displaying it on SERP.
It reduces the possibility of the page appearing and being clicked.
If you want to learn more about optimizing the meta title without getting it truncated, read
our in-depth blog on meta title optimization.
What is Importance of Heading Tags?
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9. The heading tags within a page give both search engines and its users a fair idea of the topic
that they are reading.
When it comes to crawlers, especially Google’s, the H1 tag comes off as an important
ranking element.
Placing the target keyword within the H1, which usually is the page title, carries the same
ranking weight as optimizing the Meta Title.
In the majority of cases, Google will consider the H1 tag of a page if there is no predefined
Meta title.
There is a lot of misconception about using multiple H1 tags. However, Google’s John
Mueller has categorically stated that multiple H1’s won’t affect the search engine rankings of
a page.
He also added that Google’s algorithms are fine with multiple H1s if the users are happy
with the way the content has been structured.
That said, using the different variations of the heading tag will definitely provide Google with
ample information about the main topics and the following subtopics.
This can add more value since featured snippets are picked up based on the sub-topics
listed under each article.
How Important are Optimized Images for SEO on Google?
Nowadays, web users are extremely distracted by the content that you have written and
published.
The attention span of people has reduced considerably, and monotonous text is one of the
factors why they tend to shift their attention.
Images are one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing and communication as it’s
consumed on-the-go, unlike other resources such as video or audio.
In addition to this, there is a high chance that you can garner more organic traffic through
Google Image Search.
However, for SEO professionals, optimizing images for search engines is one of the core
strategies that will help boost the organic presence of websites.
Importance of Optimizing Images for Search Engines
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10. One of the biggest mistakes done by webmasters not optimizing images for search
engines.
While most SEOs optimize the other aspects of on-page, including title, description, etc.,
optimizing images is still considered technical on-page SEO and they leave it for the
designer or the developer to implement.
Images should not be ignored if you’re aiming to top the Google SERP. Just think of a website
that has high-quality content and good quality backlinks.
The pages within the site have all reasons to rank, but if it has an image that doesn’t follow
the image optimization guidelines, it will negatively affect the overall ranking of the website,
resulting in wasted optimization efforts.
If you’re someone who used to think that fixing the Alt text of the images alone can help in
ranking on the Google SERP, then this guide is going to be a revelation for you.
After reading through the tips that we are about to provide, you will be amazed to know the
different ways of optimizing images and finding solutions to some of the pressing issues
that are pulling your website down in rankings.
About <img> Tag
<img> tags are self closing tags within HTML. This tag, unlike the other HTML tags such as
<a> tag, doesn’t have to be closed separately as it closes itself.
Example for Open & Close Tag:
<a href=”” title=””> </a>
Example for Self-closing Tag:
<img src=”” alt=”” title=”” />
How to Select Images
Depending on the content that you’re providing on the website, try to use images that are
closely related to the theme. For example, real people, objects, products, etc. are some of
the most commonly used images.
What is the Recommended Image Size
Image resolution size is mostly based on the platform/CMS that you’re using for your
website. For example, if you’re using WordPress, 1024×580 is the most suggested dimension
for an image. If you’re following BoostStrap rules, the default width is 1024 px. However, the
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11. height may vary depending on the various other requirements.
Coming to the image file size, it’s strongly recommended to have images that are less than
50 KB in size. As per the Google LightHouse tool suggestion, 30KB is the ideal size of an
image. One of the reasons for recommending JPG images is because of the smaller file size.
Other image types, such as ClipArt (PNG), Vector (SVG), and GIF, usually have bigger file
sizes.
Usually, a website has predefined image sizes. Nonetheless, the users may add higher
resolution images, which eats up the speed again. Ideally, the images have to be created
after consulting the developer regarding the actual size that’s required.
For example:
If the website requires only a 90×90 pixel image, give the exact file size rather than giving
90×120 or any other size for that matter. This will force the developer to use additional CSS
to adjust the image, which can, in turn, slows the webpage.
How to Optimize Your Alt Text?
The image alt text is an important On-page SEO factor that website owners leave
unattended. The alt text is usually a description of an image added to a website. This comes
handy for web browsers when the image fails to load on a page. In such cases, the text used
within the alt description will fill the image space and provide users with context. Apart from
this, a written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load
on a user’s screen.
Apart from this, Alt text plays an important role in On-page optimization as search engines
value it for helping the visually impaired understand the content. However, SEOs nowadays
try to sprinkle keywords within the alt text, which doesn’t fulfil the purpose.
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12. The best practice here would be to provide a descriptive alt text that features the LSI
keywords so that the user gets an idea of what the image conveys.
Example:
How to Optimize Image File Name for SEO?
Christening an image is an important aspect of optimization. The image name should be in
relation to the overall theme conveyed on the page.
This is one of the easiest ways to give Google an indication that the image is highly relevant
to the content.
Additionally, this can also be used as an opportunity to feature your secondary or LSI
keywords.
While optimizing the image file name, ensure that the space between each word is replaced
with a hyphen.
This will avoid WordPress or the CMS platforms, creating file names with the %20 instead of
the space.
Example:
Wrong: https://www.example.com/img/on%20page%20optimization.jpg
Correct: https://www.example.com/img/on-page-optimization.jpg
Some webmasters fail to change the file name after taking a screenshot or downloading the
image from sources such as ShutterStock or Pixabay.
This is not the best practice as the file name doesn’t match the content within the page.
It’s also advised not to use special characters and symbols within the file name as it
becomes hard for Google to decipher the idea and rank your image.
How to Optimize Image Title for SEO?
Optimizing title tags of images is something that SEOs and website owners skip. However,
the title tags play an important part in helping the visitors identify the image name.
Usually, the title tags are displayed when the users hover above an image.
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13. Most webmasters skip giving title attributes to images as the tooltip hover effect may affect
usability.
Title tags are not supposed to be stuffed with keywords. They are the representation of the
image and have to be in a format that Search Engine Bots understand.
How to Optimize the Image Caption for SEO?
The Caption attribute is the third and most ignored image attribute. However, the caption
pays an important role in helping users get a brief about the image that it represents.
News websites use captions most appropriately.
If you have an image that represents an action, event, or emotion, captions help in giving
further information to the users.
Usually, website owners use the caption also to feature the copyright information or to
attribute the image to the original source.
Adding a descriptive caption is a highly-recommended on-page SEO strategy as the search
engine bots read captions as content within the page.
Questions on Advanced On-page SEO Techniques
What are Internal Links and Why are They Important for SEO?
As a website owner, you should assign a hierarchy for each section of your website. This will
provide users and search engines with the option to navigate and fetch relevant information
easily.
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14. Internal links are hyperlinks from one page to another page within the website. The link can
be placed using resources such as text, images, videos, or documents.
A proper internal linking structure will determine the importance of pages within a website.
Understanding the importance of each page is vital as Google passes the link juice. The
concept of link juice is also valid for internal links as only a properly interlinked website can
pass link juice generated for one page to the other.
Here are some of the advanced internal linking factors to consider:
Crawl Depth
Crawl Depth is an important internal linking factor to consider when setting up a website.
Crawl depth refers to the internal linking architecture of a website that determines how
easily a search engine can find and index pages.
Generally, a crawl depth of three is the maximum as any deeper pages may fail to get the
initial crawler attention.
Important money page (service, product pages) must be strategically placed within the crawl
depth range of 0-2 for better crawlability.
Page Hierarchy
Internal linking is one way to establish the hierarchy of pages within a website. The more
internal link value you give to a page, the more important Google considers it.
Link Relevancy
Though the links are within your website, it doesn’t mean any page can be linked with each
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15. other.
Ensure that only relevant pages are interlinked because Google dislikes websites that try to
trick its algorithm.
Try to provide internal links to contextually relevant pages using highly relevant anchor
text.
Contextual Links
Adding too many links within a page is considered as a bad SEO practice.
Providing 100 internal links from a 1000-word content will make the page look spammy, and
Google may never show it on the first page.
Even though there is no definite number for internal links, ensuring that it remains natural is
important.
Anchor Text
Anchor Texts are important for hyperlinking within one page to another.
It’s the anchor text that gives contextual signals to Google Crawlers about the relationship
between the pages.
It’s recommended to use long-tailed anchors for internal linking as it provides more context
to the users and Google crawlers.
If you want to learn more about internal links and how to use it effectively, read our in-
depth article on everything that you need to know about internal linking.
Why Should You Avoid Intrusive Interstitial Properties?
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16. Think of a website that opens up to a full-screen video ad, and when closed, redirects you to
another page with multiple pop-ups.
I would close the whole tab instead of closing the pop-up and go to some other less
complicated page to fulfill my search intent.
This is a common mistake that websites make, which is pulling down their organic reach.
Giving users a seamless web experience is critical to ensure you maintain top positions on
the Google search.
Google has been cracking down on websites that indulge in placing too many interstitial
properties within the page.
In 2016, Google announced that any website that tries to force intrusive interstitial ads will
be penalized.
What is the Importance of Keyword Density in On-Page SEO?
Keyword density is considered as one of the most basic On-page SEO factors. However,
those days of stuffing keywords will not bring you to the first position today.
Google’s Algorithms are now trained to find websites that stuff keywords and penalize
them.
In these changed circumstances, keyword density has evolved, and it’s more to do with
advanced on-page SEO techniques such as LSI and TF/IDF.
Repeating the same keywords multiple times will only hurt your SEO strategy.
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17. The future lies in making Google understand that the words used within your content are
contextual and relevant to the overall topic.
In 2020, if you use the target keyword only three to four times in the content, your content
can still rank, provided you have used LSI and TF/IDF technique.
What are LSI keywords? How to use LSI keywords?
Using LSI Keywords, AKA Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords is a technique used by Google
to understand the relation of words used within a page to the topic discussed.
LSI Keywords are contextually relevant words that appear within a topic. Google uses its
algorithm to find and understand the common terms that appear on different websites for
the same topic to analyze the quality of the content.
With LSI keywords in place, Google is now able to determine the quality of the content
despite the fewer number of times the keyword appears.
The best way to find LSI keywords is by checking the “Related Search” section on Google
search and also by using certain free LSI tools.
TF-IDF: Can It Really Help Your SEO?
TFIDF is the short form for Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency.
Google’s John Mueller was the first to confirm that the search engine giant uses the TFIDF
technique to retrieve information from the web.
TFIDF is an information retrieval method that tries to understand the relevance of a
combination of words that appear on a page in relation to the overall index of all the
content on the web.
Google has many other techniques for information retrieval and TFIDF is just one of the
metrics it uses.
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18. In addition to this, it’s difficult to optimize a web page based on the TFIDF metric because it’s
based on an aggregate of all the content currently indexed by Google.
However, you can use certain tools such as SEMRush Writing Assistant or TFIDF Tool to
check whether your content qualifies under the basic TFIDF metric.
How is Schema Markup Useful for SEO?
Google SERP Features are now turning out to be important Click Through Rate drivers. Most
of these SERP features are the direct result of websites implementing Structured Data or
Schema Markup.
Structured Data is additional information that websites provide to the search engine to
better understand the content.
Structured Data ensures that search engines provide valuable information/clues even
before a user enters a web page.
The best example of Structured Data helping users is the reviews that you see on the search
results for Movies, Events, and Products.
Google has categorically stated that Structured Data is not a SEO ranking factor. However,
missing out on Structured Data may cause you to lose out on the click-through rates.
Since the additional information is missing, your target audience may choose your
competitors instead.
Going back to the history of Structured Data, it was an initiative started by the giants of the
search engine market – Google, Bing, and Yahoo in 2011 to make the process of
understanding the intent of each page easier.
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19. The worldwide web is loaded with information that has not been categorized or organized.
The search giants wanted to streamline the web content, so they introduced a coding
standard to help their algorithms pick up information easily and in an organized manner.
Enabling the structured data on a website or on individual pages ensures that the search
engines crawl websites and display them with rich information or rich snippets.
What are the Structured Data Formats?
JSON-LD
This is the Google recommended Structured Data format that uses the JavaScript notations
or markups within a page to help search engines understand the page type.
Example: Local Address JSON-LD
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20. { “@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “LocalBusiness”,
“address”:
{ “@type”: “PostalAddress”,
“addressLocality”: “Midtown Manhattan”,
“addressRegion”: “NY”,
“streetAddress”: “721 Fifth Avenue”
},
“description”: “Trump Tower is a 58-floor, 664-foot-tall (202 m) mixed-use skyscraper at
721–725 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets.”, “name”: “Trump Tower”,
“telephone”: “000-000-0000”
}
</script>
Microdata
Microdata is another format used to specify the structured data. Even though this is a
Google approved Structured Data Format, it’s prone to messing up the code as it’s directly
injected into the HTML.
It’s a time-consuming process as it styles the actual elements within the page using inline
codes, resulting in reduced page speed.
Example: Local Address Microdata
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21. <div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Trump Tower</span><br>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>721 Fifth Avenue</span><br>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Midtown Manhattan</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>NY</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>20500</span><br>
<span itemprop=”addressCountry”>United States</span>
</div>
RDFa
RDFa is another Structured Data Format used by websites. Even though it’s Google
approved, the number of websites using this format is less compared to the other two.
RDFa (or Resource Description Framework in Attributes) adds a set of attribute-level
extensions to HTML for embedding structured data.
Example: Local Address RDFa
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22. <div vocab=”http://schema.org/” typeof=”LocalBusiness”>
<h1><span property=”name”>Trump Tower</span></h1>
<span property=”description”> Trump Tower is a 58-floor, 664-foot-tall (202 m) mixed-use
skyscraper at 721–725 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets.</span>
<div property=”address” typeof=”PostalAddress”>
<span property=”streetAddress”>721 Fifth Avenue</span>
<span property=”addressLocality”>Midtown Manhattan</span>,
<span property=”addressRegion”>NY</span>
</div>
Phone: <span property=”telephone”>000-000-0000</span>
</div>
Is Sitemap Important for On-Page SEO?
Search Engine crawlers are busy indexing millions of pages out there on the web. The time
they spent on each website depends on many factors, such as the number of pages, site
load speed, and the HTTP status codes.
All that said, you can help them crawl the pages within your site faster by enabling a
sitemap. A sitemap is an XML file placed within site to help search engines navigate through
different pages
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23. Sitemaps are easy to generate, and there are a handful of tools like the free Sitemap
Generator Tool that can help you with the process.
However, if you’re managing a CMS-based website, the process becomes much easier as
most of the time, sitemaps come as an innate feature.
To ensure Google indexes pages within the sitemap, you have to add it within the Google
Search Console.
One of the key advantages of a sitemap is that it provides Google crawlers with a clue about
the importance of each page.
Since a sitemap is generated based on page hierarchy, the crawler gets to know which page
is more important.
A sitemap also provides information regarding the freshness of the content, which also
helps the crawler to reindex pages.
How Critical is Robots.txt File for SEOs?
Robot.txt is as important as a sitemap. Usually, all websites have a predefined robots.txt file
to ensure that a few pages are not indexed by the search engines.
Not having a robot.txt file will not hurt SEO efforts. However, they may take away the crawl
budget assigned to your site as search engine bots may take time to crawl and index pages
that are not relevant to your users.
To check if you have implemented Robot.txt on your website, search for
http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt on your site.
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24. Does Page Speed Insight Impact SEO
From the time Google announced that the load speed of a website is one of the
determinants for organic ranking, there has been a lot of discussion about the page of a
website. Google Page Speed Insights is a handy tool for SEOs to check the load speed of a
page.
There are a lot of factors that determine the site speed on the Page Speed Insights tool, and
this begins with the web hosting provider that you have chosen.
Modern-day users are less patient and with the plethora of options provided to them. They
prefer to browse through sites that open in a blink.
So, what is the most preferred page load time? We have covered this in a comprehensive
blog post titled Google Recommended Page Load Time.
The best way to reduce the page load time is by reducing the size of a few on-page
elements, such as JavaScript, CSS and image.
A chunk of the page load time is eaten up by these elements and proper optimization of
these can result in bringing down the page load speed of your website.
In addition to this, adapting to modern frameworks such as Angular JS and React can boost
the speed of your website.
Google always boosts sites that provide users with seamless user experience. Ensuring that
your website is free of technical on-page SEO issues will help in improving the organic
rankings.
What is E-A-T and How it Images On-Site SEO?
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25. Google has been quite vocal about pulling down the rankings of websites that lack
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness; E-A-T. The term E-A-T has its origin in the
Google Quality Rater Guidelines.
Even though the initial versions of the quality rater guidelines talked very little about E-A-T,
the newer ones have a whole section dedicated to the concept.
There are a lot of factors that Google collates before deciding the fate of a page on its
results page, and E-A-T is now one of the critical factors, especially if you’re dealing with a
YMYL Site.
YMYL sites are the ones that can impact the life and security of the end-users. Google has
been careful lately about how website content can affect the livelihood of its users.
Thus, it introduced E-A-T, which determines whether the information present on the site is
authentic and valid.
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26. This is especially true when it comes to Health, Banking, Finance and Wellness websites,
which all come under the ambit of YMYL.
There are a lot of factors that determine the E-A-T score of a website, and this includes
factors such as the Niche (alternate medicine sites have a hard time to rank on Google),
Author Bio, About Us, Security Features, Policies, etc.
I’ve written an in-depth guide explaining how to optimize each of the above mentioned E.A.T
factors for your website to rank higher than your competitors.
What are Some On-Page SEO Mistakes?
Are you writing great content, but it’s not ranking? In this post, eight onsite SEO mistakes
are given that you should avoid.
If you want to rank your web pages in the top results of Google search engine, it’s essential
for you to have basic knowledge about the on-page optimization.
Many people don’t have enough knowledge of SEO, and because of this, they often struggle
a lot with technical on-page SEO.
The landscape of Digital Marketing has significantly evolved over the past two decades.
Google changes its algorithm regularly that makes due to which websites can lose SEO
practices and strategies of content marketing as well.
Being Digital Marketers, you all put in your efforts into deciding the strategies and practices
that’ll work best for your business.
However, sometimes, you know there could be mistakes that are unknowingly making your
website rank fall. Let’s learn what these mistakes are, below.
1. Duplicate Content
If you have duplicate content on your pages, it’s one of the common onsite SEO mistakes
you’re doing. Since there are a number of similar businesses like yours, each one of them is
trying to produce unique content that will help them develop authority in a particular niche.
If you have to stand out from the crowd, you too need to create unique and high-quality
content regularly.
One common duplicate content mistake happens when applying filters for a category or
product listings. So, you can avoid this mistake by using the “canonical tag.” This eliminates
the changes of Google detecting duplicate pages and prevents one of the biggest on-page
SEO mistakes
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27. 2. Forgetting the Importance of Keyword Research in On-Page SEO
Without doing a proper keyword research, you can’t learn about your target audience.
Keywords work as the bridge between the intent of the user, and the content. So, make sure
that your content should be optimized with the keywords.
If your content a broad topic but failed to optimize for the keywords that your target
audience search on the internet, your content will never rank on search engines.
This is because proper optimization of the pages with highly relevant keywords help in
getting your web pages rank higher on the search engines’. In addition to this, it would
enable your blog to generate leads.
When it comes to blogs, you should focus mainly on the long-tail keywords, or the keyword
phrases providing relevant information, usually known as informational keywords.
Some bloggers do not optimize the headers, meta tags, and the content with the keyword
phrases users are searching, while on the other hand, few bloggers are over-optimize their
content. Both are not good on-page SEO activities.
Over-optimization of content by doing the keyword stuffing could make your content look
spam to Google. For this reason, make sure that you add targeted keywords naturally within
your content to make it rank higher on Google SERPs.
3. No Sitemap
What exactly is a sitemap? A sitemap is an XML file. XML stands for eXtensible Markup
Language which is designed to store the data, as well as to transport it.
Sitemap feeds the important data to the search engines about the most important pages of
a website including the date when the webpage was last updated.
Karl Kangur, founder of Business Media adds: “The emphasis here is on most important
pages. If you need a sitemap just to get Google to crawl your site fully, you’ve got major
structural issues. You’ll want to ensure that your sitemap (and the Google index) only
contains pages that are adding value to your site. Do a “site:mydomain.com” search for your
website in Google, go through all of the results and ask yourself – is this something
someone would want to Google to land on? If the answer is no, you should be noindexing
these pages and removing them from your sitemap. Leave the authority for your best
pages.”
This allows the spider to crawl through the site intelligently. It’s true that creating a sitemap
can’t ensure the success of a search engine, but it makes crawling easier for the bots.
Higher crawl rate can help in better rankings indirectly.
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28. 4. No Header Tags
Header tags usually give a structure to the content. These tags also help the search engines’
to understand which parts of the page is more important.
Header tags are used to prioritize the content of the page. However, when you misuse it, it
might become confusing.
To avoid this onsite SEO mistake, you’ve to make sure that the main header tag is unique
and inserted all the relevant keywords on the page. You can also use those keywords in
suitable subheadings.
5. No Image Description and Alt Tags
There’s the fact that search engines’ can’t understand the images. For this reason, it’s
mandatory to attach the relevant Alt text as the description of the image.
Such a text would make it easy for search engines to understand the image. Adding the
vague description in the images is also one of the onsite SEO mistakes you might be
making. Try to avoid it to get better results.
6. Poor Meta Tags
Meta Descriptions displays the gist of what is their within your website even before they
visit. However, a good meta description is important to improve the organic Click Through
Rate.
It’s true that Meta description doesn’t work as an SEO ranking factor.
It’s been recorded from some past research that around 30 percent of the websites are
adding the duplicate meta description, while approximately 25 percent of the websites are
not even adding the meta description.
Ensure that you are adding unique meta descriptions to the pages within your site.
7. Broken Links
If your site has broken links, it could be one of the more significant onsite SEO mistakes!
With the growth in your site, you need to update the resources. Having one or two broken
links isn’t a big issue. You can quickly solve it by setting up the 404 page in a proper way or
by redirecting the uses to a relevant page within your website using 301 redirect.
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29. However, if there are a number of broken links, it could be dangerous. There are several
possible reasons for this, such as the visitor sees the 404 page instead of required
information. It leads to massive drop in organic traffic. Also, your site would be considered
to be of low quality.
Now, you must be wondering how can you identify the broken links? Well, to identify the
broken links, you can use various Site Audit tools such as SEMrush or you can add plugins
to check the links in your content.
8. Slow Load Times
Google included the loading times of a website in its algorithm announced in 2018. If your
websites take much time to load in desktops, as well as mobile phones, it’s can drop the
ranking of your website.
Using the PageSpeed Insight tool from Google, you can easily analyze the loading speed of
your website. Not only this, but it also gives you the reasons for slow load times, and also
how you can resolve it.
Well, some of the standard solutions include the elimination of the render-blocking
JavaScript, enabling the compression and minifying CSS, HTML. In this, the additional spaces
get removed and automatically increase the loading speed.
Final Thoughts
I hope I have provided enough arsenal to take down those who propagate the idea that on-
page SEO is just about adding a few more keywords on pages. This post will be updated as
and when I figure out new On-page SEO practices to rank websites better on search engines.
If you think I missed a critical on-page SEO factor in this guide, please feel free to let me
know in the comments section.
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