14 Best On-Page SEO techniques with checklist 2019
Hardik Goswami
Sep 25, 2019
Let’s begin with 14 best On-page SEO techniques of 2019. The 14 best tested and proven SEO activities that will boost your SEO ranking within 30 days with best practice.
On-page SEO techniques are the most important process that you can use not just for achieving higher rankings in the search engines but also for booming SEO campaigns. A good detailed on-page SEO can help your website ranking in many ways.
But before explaining Onpage SEO. Let’s begin with some basic SEO terms so you could have a better idea.
What is SEO? And how it works?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a process of getting traffic or increase the visibility of your website on search engines. SEO is a recipe for techniques, strategies, and tactics which one can be used for improving the traffic or publicity of your website.
SEO is the process of getting traffic from organic or natural search results from different search engines.
What is On-Page SEO Techniques?
On-page Optimization also known as on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing every single page(that includes content, images, title, description, and URL to name a few) to get a higher rank on SERP (Search Engine Page Results).
In simple words, we can say on-page SEO is the process where you need to work directly on the website pages. You need to make required or I would say certain changes to achieve the desired ranking in SEPR.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Neil Patel: Off-Page SEO refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines.
It can also be referred to as a collection of activities that you do for ranking without making any changes in your website to increase your website ranking. In other words, website promotions.
The main job of off-page SEO is to increase inbound links, brand awareness, and brand marketing, link building, etc. Off-page SEO can also help to increase website ranking in SERP.
These all 3 processes Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-page SEO have to work together for potential outcomes for any website. The main use of on-site SEO is to optimize the site structure, content, title and description of a particular page.
14 On-Page SEO techniques (Checklist) for higher ranking in SERP
Here is the list of all the topics that we’re going to cover in our article today.
Keyword Research
Schema Implementation
Meta Title & Meta Descriptions
Content Quality
Headings (H1 – H2) and Content formatting
Image optimizations
Page Loading Speed And Mobile Friendliness
URL optimizations
Inbound Links (Internal Linking)
Outbound Links (External Linking)
Use Social sharing buttons
Boost Dwell Time
Sprinkle LSI Keywords
Comments and on Page SEO
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process when you search or try to get a popular search keyword according to your niche keywords.
Keyword research helps you to create new keyword-oriented SEO friendly content or optimize existing content for higher ranking in the search engine result page (SERP).
Tips: Niche keywords – specify your primary keywords based on search volume and popularity.
Drop your primary keywords in title and description and the first 100 words.
Schema implementation
What is a schema in SEO? Why the schema is important?
Schema.org or Schema tag provides schemas for structured data on the internet, on web pages, email messages, and more. A structure data which the search engine can read easily and understand.
Schema Tag (Microdata Tag ) that you can add in your webpage HTML and by that search engine can read and understand your webpage batter for search engine results.
Schema is important in SEO because schema markup increases your page visibility over the search engine. It also shows your webpage more informative and attractive in SERP.
Meta title and description are very important in On-page SEO. Title and description play a crucial role in your SERP.
Meta Title: It displays the page title in search engine results as clickable links. This title gives an idea about what this webpage is about.
As per best practice, the length should be between 50-60 Characters. best practice suggests that you should keep your title below 60 characters to display your title properly in SERP.
Add your primary keywords in title tags it helps in Ranking.
What is a meta description in SEO?
Meta Description: The meta description summarises the page content in a few words. The meta description is 3rd most important thing in On-page SEO it also helps in search engine page results.
It is recommended that the meta description length stays between 120 to 160 characters.
Meta keywords need to target search keywords otherwise Google will use site content as descriptions.
Use an online snippet checker for a better understanding of how your search result will show up in search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Content Quality:
SEO best practices say that “Content is king”. Best quality content can get you a good ranking, better clicks, and immense traffic to your website.
Quality and length of content play a decent role in website ranking over search engines. Good content can give you better user engagement, less bounce rate, and it also helps you to increase your Click Through Rate (CTR).
Why content quality is important?
Google uses different algorithms for ranking factor and each algorithm has specific rules. But Google’s latest update Rankbrain algorithm. It’s based on artificial intelligence and it can read your content.Rankbarin doesn’t look for keyword relevancy in your content, it sees the topic relevance and that’s why content becomes the main ranking factor for any website.
Content could be anything Image, text, infographics, video, presentation PPT, any form of information that can be considerate as content.
Tips for content
Never copy anything. Always write unique content.
Write descriptive and informative content. As per my knowledge, good content should be between 1200 to 2000 words.
Drop your primary keywords in the first 100 words.
Do some basic text formatting. Use bold, Italics and underline whenever necessary.
Headings (H1 – H2) and content formatting.
Your page should be formatted for better user experience. Think about any document or any report where a content required headings and subheadings.
What is the H1 tag?
H1 tag is a heading tag. You can use a single h1 tag per page. You can use it as a title or as a heading of your page. Meta title and h1 tag both are different and they both can have different titles as well.
Note: Search Engines will always show the title tag, not the H1 tag. So, it’s up to you, it can be the same or different either way you like.
The standard technique of using the heading tag is first using the H1 tag for the page title, then h2 for subheadings and h3, h4, etc.
You can also use subheadings for mentioning your secondary keywords and related keywords.
Use interesting headings for better user engagement.
Content formatting
Content formatting is very important because boring content can increase your site’s bounce rate which is not good for your website ranking.
Font sizes matter the most (keep it between 14-16 px ).
Make good use of bold, italics and underline.
Maintain keyword density between 2-3%.
Paragraph spacing is also very important as per the reader’s point of view. Spacing can highlight sections, easy to read and understand.
Image optimizations
“An image is worth a thousand words ”
For presentation purposes, images are very important for any website or blog content, images are interesting and easy to understand.
Smaller images are better – optimize your images before using it on your content. Smaller size images load faster thus improve your site’s overall performance.
Use the “alt” attribute to provide a small description of your image. That can help search engines to understand images better. This can also help if your image fails to load, at that time this description is shown instead of the image that was supposed to be rendered.
Use descriptive image names, don’t use names like “img1.jpg” or “header.jpg”, use descriptive image names such as “app-development-process.jpg”.
You can use CDN services for speeding up your image loading speed. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, where you can upload your images on servers and then you can you use it on your website, it improves your site loading speed.
Page loading speed and mobile-friendliness
Page loading speed
After Google’s core update and RankBrain update, these 2 factors matter the most for ranking in SERP.
Let’s start with page loading speed.
Nowadays, no one wants to wait or visit a site that takes more than 5 seconds to load.
As per Google recommendations having a faster loading speed is not just an advantage for SEO but it is also good for user engagement and a decent conversation rate. So as a webmaster your job is to make sure your site load as fast as it can be.
Make sure that your site loads within 4-6 seconds. Because 70% of users don’t revisit the site which takes more time to load.
Nowadays, we all are using smartphones and a survey suggests that 62% of searches in Google are coming from mobile phones.
Google mobile-friendly algorithm – on April 25, 2015. Google introduced its new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm which gives a boost to web pages that are mobile-friendly in mobile search results.
In short, you need to have a responsive website. You need to make your website mobile-first.
https://www.thinkwik.com/mobile-app-listing_p?165 or
https://www.thinkwik.com/mobileappdevelopment/ or
https://www.thinkwik.com/2235/publish/356.html
Inbound Links (Internal Linking)
Internal links or inbound links are also an important part of SEO.
Inbound links are those links that you have within your website. For example – the main page, about us, contact us, services, work, product, this page links and how they link to each other that inbound links. It is also known as internal links.
In other words, we can say that internal links are those links that refer to the same domain or subdomain.
Internal linking helps search engines to index your other pages as well. Because when a crawler crawls your page it also crawls the page links which mention within the page.
Internal linking is a technique that you can use to point out your important pages for search engine indexing by just sending more internal links.
Internal linking is the best technique that you can use to increase user sessions and reduce your site bounce rate.
Wikipedia is the best example of internal linking.
Tips: Do not use more than 15 backlinks for a single page.
Try to use internal linking within the body part of the page rather then footer.
Outbound Links (External Links)
Outbound links or external links are those links that point out to other domains.
External Linking is a great white hat SEO technique that can help you boost your ranking in SERP.
Due to Google’s algorithm updates such as Google Panda and Penguin external links quality does matter for ranking of your site. Spammy external links or low-quality links can penalize your site in Google too.
Google penalties are the main reason why many webmasters afraid to link their domain to other sites.
Outbound links help Google to check the relativity of your content to provide the best results on related searches.
Tips: Use 2-4 outbound links per 1000 words.
Always use a High authoritative domain for external linking.
Use Social sharing buttons
Social media sharing may not affect your site ranking but it does play an important part in content sharing.
A survey suggests that using sharing buttons on a website can boost your content sharing up to 700%.
Nowadays people are very active on social media and they do share informative content every second. So, that’s why using social sharing buttons on your website can benefit you in many ways.
Social sharing might not help in your site ranking but sharing content on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, orReddit can boost your content in seconds, which helps you to rank up higher. And that’s the main reason why everyone should use social media sharing buttons on their website.
Boost Dwell Time
What is Dwell Time?
Dwell time is when someone clicks on your link from Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) and after landing on a page immediately clicks on the back button and returns to SERP, that time is known as Dwell time.
People sometimes get confused between Dwell time and Bounce rate. So, let’s dig into that.
What is the Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who leaves after viewing a single page Or we can say a percentage of single-page sessions.
How to Boost Dwell time?
Good quality, descriptive and engaging content is the key to increase your average Dwell Time.
There is no official statement from Google that Dwell time is a ranking factor but it does affect your ranking. It may not boost your ranking but higher Dwell time or bounce rate can drop your ranking in SERP.
Sprinkle LSI Keywords:
LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. It’s a bit technical term to understand, let’s not go there, let me explain it in simple words what is LSI keywords, so, LSI means keyword phrases which are closely related to your primary keyword. It can be used as postfix or prefix.
For example – Apple, Airpods, iTunes all can be considerate as LSI keywords.
The best way to find LSI keywords is by using Google SERP footer where they give keyword suggestions.
Where you can use LSI keywords?
Title
Description
URL
H1 tag
You can use it in content as well, for example, you can use it in the first line of your first paragraph or the first line of the last paragraph, it’s up to you.
Tips: Don’t overuse it 🙂
14.Comments and on Page SEO
Many SEO experts say that due to revolution in social media the blog comments are no longer part of SEO. But in reply to a tweet, Google’s Gary Illyes retweeted that by saying that people who like your content and interacting with a page or give their opinion on that page in a comment that helps you in boosting your ranking.
Blog commenting or comment on blogs works in 2 ways.
1st those who visit your site for the first time will read the existing comments, which means comments can be your website’s visiting card.
2nd thing is when a user will read comments of your site he will spend more time on your website and that also in your favor.
Tips: Always read the comment before publishing.
Encourage readers to leave a comment.
Don’t publish comments which are not related to your core topic.
On-Page SEO checklist
Firstly understand the basic difference between On-page and off-page SEO.
Use quality content (never copy). The authenticity of the content does matter in SEO.
Use primary keywords in the title and try to use Long tail keywords.
Write a unique meta description using your primary keywords for every single page on your website.
Use long-tail keywords in your content.
Use only one h1 tag per page.
Use bold, italics and underline in content to make it more appealing.
Optimize your multimedia content (images with alt tags).
Create a user-friendly URL.
Do internal linking, use at least 3 internal links per page.
Use high-quality authoritative sites for external links.
Improve your site loading speed (make sure site loads in less than 4 seconds).
Use responsive web design. “Develop Your Site Mobile first” ~Google.
These are the main tactics that you should keep in mind while doing On-page SEO for a website.
Apart from this, there are few other things which you should also keep in mind.
Sitemap.xml
Robots.txt
.htaccess file
303 Redirects
Conclusion: Many people ask me this question that which SEO technique is more important On-page or Off-page?
Answer: To achieve the desired ranking in SEO you need to work on both (On-page and Off-page) SEO techniques. Your site ranking will be based on the combined effort of you and these SEO techniques.
Please write to us if you have any questions regarding on-page or off-page SEO. We shall try our best to resolve your concerns and queries.
Please share your valuable feedback in the form of comments & suggestions.
