Welcome to INCOMENIGERIA, Are you interested in articles about Best Practices to Rank Your Blog in 2018?, this post contains all the necessary details on On-Page SEO Best Practices.
SEO has long time ago gone beyond link building. There are basically two things that gets into one’s mind when the word SEO is heard, On-page seo and Off-page seo. These are the two practices every blog or website on that first page you want to be on do.
People make huge traffic from search engines than you can ever imagine. Do you wonder how they do it? Well, some of these people hire individuals or firms that are good in search engine marketing to help them with some SEO services, while some of those whom have mastered search engine optimization, use some seo tools to work on their websites and put themselves on the first page on search engines.
Like I said, every website you see up there on the first page of search engines practice on-page seo and off-page seo, this has made the both practices very significant as one won’t be able to do without them if you want to rank. As the saying goes, “charity begins at home” so in this post, we will try to fix our websites before checking other external factors that can hinder us from ranking. I will give concentration to on-page seo here and I will show you how you can help search engines notice your blog and place you on first page.
What is On-page SEO?
Moz say’s:
“On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.”
Here is my own on-page seo definition. It is an ideal practice of setting up a website structure that search engines will definitely fall in love with, and have no option than to favour it in terms of ranking. It covers both your keywords, titles, permalink, H1 tags and even much more little things which you overlook while writing blog posts on your blog.
Reading this article will give you a pure insight of what on-page seo is. I will show you the most important on-page seo factors and give you the best on-page seo techniques to practice that will boost your blogs ranking in no time, even before you will notice.
Do You Really Need On-Page Optimization?
Except you do not give consideration to SEO even up till now, and you do not want to place your website out there for people to read, then you do not need on-page seo. But if not, then, every website needs to consider some factors on their webpages to help them rank on search enigines. Search engines rank sites according to relevance, the truth is, “if you try to trick Google without fixing these things, you will probably go down in no time.”
I made mention of off-page seo, and yes, this applies to other factors like social media signals (shares, likes, tweets, follows, and more), domain authority, backlinks and some more measuring metrics. But this won’t yield any result if your on-page seo is not in good health.
What we do in on-page optimization is simply “helping search engines notice our websites”. We will be doing it in a natural way, so as to keep our hands clean, you have no idea how search engines love your blog clean. But this time it’s in a smarter way, to ease the work load for us.
In the past few years, things have changed so much that most seo then practices can now hurt your website and make search engines like Google give you a middle finger. That’s why here I have come with an update on how you can do your on-page optimization without a stained hand.
The golden rule hasn’t changed, it’s been there for ages, except maybe later in future which I can’t in any way see that coming.
What’s the golden rule? “Content is king“. If content is indeed king, then SEO is queen. It is there for necessary to know the techniques to write a blog post that will keep readers coming.
On-Page Optimization Techniques for Better Ranking in 2017
This is a well detailed article on on-page seo, that will surely boost your organic traffic. It is kind of lengthy, so just grab a cup of coffee let’s go ahead as you sip. ?
Site Speed
No person wants to wait their whole time off by just opening a webpage. It has been found in recent research by aykira that about 47% of your audience wants a website that will load as fast as two seconds, and a lot of people click the [x] button whenever a website takes like forever to load.
It doesn’t have to shock you that search engines also encourage website load speed. It will interest you to see this article on Google Webmasters Central Blog where emphasis was been laid on site speed.
h! Now you know how important this is, and you want to check your website speed? There are a thousands of tools out there that can help you do this, I will be naming just one, and I think it will do you fine. Check out Pingdom’s tool for speed test, it will help you check the load time of your website. Being more professional, you should be considerate about what your load time is compared to your competitors, here I recommend a tool that will help you compare your website’s load time with your competitors. Check out WhichLoadsFaster.info.
All you have to do is type the two websites which you want to compare their speed, then hit the GO button
Don’t be worried if your blog doesn’t not beat your competitor or any site you try to compare with your sites load time or if your website is slow to load, there are ways to increase load time of a website and here Kathryn Aragon gave a complete guide to increase your websites load time.
Blog Post Title
It doesn’t end at your webpage just being fast to load. Post title is one important thing to consider in on-page seo. You know that the more attractive your post title is, determines how people will click on it, and trust me, more clicks on your post will tell search engines that your blog post is relevant enough.
Ensure you use your targeted keyword somewhere in the title, preferably at the beginning of your title, this will ease up the whole thing and tell search engines to pick you. One bad practice some newbies do is repeating the same keyword more than once in their titles, the truth is, it won’t take you anywhere, and it will only affect your ranking negatively.
In case you forget the power of long tail keywords, this is very relevant and can draw jaw-dropping traffic to your blog, therefore, I advise you use modifiers like “best”, “guide”, “2017”, and “review” this can in return help you for long tail versions of your targeted keyword. Please do not overdo this, make sure you keep the title length to under 65 characters.
Permalink Structure and Meta Description
Using nice permalink structure is one healthy on-page optimization practice that must be observed. In an Interview with Matt Cutts he made it clear that Google gives more importance to the first 3-5 words in a URL.
This means that, if you are adding your targeted keyword to the forefront of your URL, then you’re in luck because it will definitely tell Google “Hey! I want to rank for this keyword”. Try as much as you can to avoid stuffing your URL with symbols which are almost all the time not relevant to your ranking
Example of bad permalink structure:
- Ugly URLs:com/p=246
- long URLs:com/1/2/2017/cat=SEO/this-is-the-best-on-page-seo-guide-for-every-blogger-to-read-if-you-wann-rank-your-blog
Example of a good permalink struture:
- https://www. larryfranky.com/on-page-seo
Search engines use your meta description to know what your content is all about, so it should be as descriptive as possible. Note that this is only a 160 characters space description, so it is not advisable for you to stuff keywords in it, so better use latent semantic indexing (LSI) or synonyms of your main keyword, this will make it look more natural.
For instance, if your targeted keyword is “on-page seo”, you can quickly search your keyword on Google, scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see related keyword. See screenshot below:
I’m not saying that you can’t add your main keyword to your meta description, sure it will help you rank. But you want to stay clean don’t you?
If you use WordPress, then I think the All-in-One SEO Pack, is recommended for you as you will not have to use the default Post Title, permalink and meta description, all this will be added manually by you.
Heading Tags and Keyword Density
Header tags are important while writing your blog post, It is advised by many seo experts not to use more than just one H1 tags and only a few of H2 or H3 on a webpage or blog post. If you use WordPress, do not add H1 tags anywhere in your post, as your title carries the H1 tag by default, all you have to do is, use H2 and H3 for sub-headings.
I had to confirm that but source coding this post to see it, and same is applicable to every WordPress site.
A bad SEO practice that should be avoided as much as possible is, using H2 or H3 for your keywords, it will affect your ranking as Google raises an eye when you do that.
Instead of this <h2>On-page SEO</h2> which is your primary keyword.
Do this <h2>The Secrete Those Seo Experts Won’t Tell You – On-page SEO Unveiled.
The latter is quite natural and doesn’t send wrong signal to Google. Remember we must keep our hands as clean as we can.
Try to keep your keyword density to about 1.5% where you will also mix synonyms and latent semantic indexing (LSI)
Sprinkle Multimedia
I wouldn’t dispute the fact that enough text in your blog post will help your rank, but multimedia helps you keep your reader on your blog for a longer time. Remember, when users visit your blog and click [x] button, it tells Google that your blog post is of no relevance and they sure won’t rank you, oh, you forget that your bounce rate increases as well, and this will indeed hurt your ranking.
Since people watching pictures, here’s the catch, use multimedia to keep them on your blog for a longer time. You grab? Use interesting pictures on your post and let them stay longer on your blog, telling Google “Hey! This article is relevant, why don’t you put it up there for other to read”.
Now you know the importance of multimedia, let me quickly tell you how you can optimize your images for better ranking. Do you know that, using your keywords in the “image title” and “alt” helps Google to know what your blog post is all about. Let me give you an example:
If you have three images on your blog post, and the first one has an alt text that displays “SEO Techniques”, the second “On-page SEO” and the third “Off-page SEO”, this obviously tells search engines that this article is all about SEO therefore it should be put on the list when users search for the keyword.
Try using your keyword in the alt text of at least one of your images.
Word Count per Post
Research has proven that blogs on the first page of search engines for specific keywords usually have lot of words. This means that blog posts with longer or more contents obviously rank better than those with short posts.
Why is it so? Google and other search engines tend to favour posts with longer contents because they believe it is more informative and has more relevance than shorter posts.
For blogs that write plenty of articles on daily bases, it’s advisable you make your articles minimum of 500 words, that’s pretty cool deal with search engines.
See below screen short of word count of this post:
Tips: Make research from about five blogs with your keyword, get ideas from all then write on your blog, this will make your own blog post lengthier, and turn to be a win-win for your ranking. The more the word, the better your chance of ranking
Linking
Adding links in your blog post is important. There are basically two types of linking, which are “internal linking” and “external linking”.
For internal linking, you will have to link to other pages in your blog or website, this will help you in keep readers on your blog, and also help pass link juice to other pages of your blog.
How can you do that? Simply add related posts in your blog post, you can also use the related post plugin.
In other words, you can use keywords as anchor texts, try not to overdo it because we do not want Google to penalize us, we are keeping our hands clean. So interlink to relevant pages, and it will tell Google that you are only trying to provide more information. Remember, make it relevant by linking to a necessary webpage.
For external Linking, you will have to link to other webpages. It is best to do this only when the information in the other webpage is of relevance to that on your post, and can add value.
The below screenshot shows a link to another page out from my blog, this is a typical example of external linking.
You might get penalized if you pass link juice to potentially bad sites, so it is advisable you give dofollow links only when you trust the site you are linking to. For sites you do not trust, use the nofollow attribute to avoid passing link juice to them, which might in turn hurt you.
Crawlability Optimization
Google or any search engine do not want to crawl you website and meet a dead page or an end.
What is Crawlability?
According to Jacob Stoops:
“Crawlability is the ability for search engines to crawl through an entire text content of your website, easily navigating to every one of your web page, without encountering any dead end”
Search spider are dumb than you can think of. These are programs and not human beings, so you do not expect them to start looking for another link or the correct link to the dead links found on your blog, they are programmed to stop whenever they find a dead link. And trust me, you won’t believe how this will hurt your ranking.
Responsive Design
In 2015 Google laid emphasis on mobile friendliness of website, so if up till now your blog isn’t responsive, you are losing a lot and you have to act very fast concerning this, it hurts so badly.
LightningRank says that mobile search drives valuable outcome for businesses.
In 2015 many big sites lost traffic and some also gained immense growth in traffic due to the new algorithm by Google. It’s no more news that every website needs a responsive design because the priority given to mobile users by Google will increase in future because almost every person today has a smartphone, and a very large percent of internet users access the internet with smartphones, so why then won’t priority be given to mobile on the internet?
Conclusion
It’s important you note that your on-page SEO alone won’t rank you for your keywords, you need to also work on some external factors, and this is where off-page SEO comes to play. Still have it in mind that if your on-page optimization is bad, no amount of link building can make you rank for competitive keywords.
Definitely things to put into consideration. Learned a lot. Thank you for sharing.
This post is really very nice thanks for sharing with us.