ON PAGE SEO

On-Page Ranking Factors

The way your page is optimized can have a huge impact on its ability to rank.

What are On-Page Ranking Factors?

On-page ranking factors can have a big impact on your page's ability to rank if optimized properly. The biggest on-page factors that affect search engine rankings are:

Content of Page

The content of a page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. As such, it is important to create good content. So what is good content? From an SEO perspective, all good content has two attributes. Good content must supply a demand and must be linkable.

Good content supplies a demand:

Just like the world’s markets, information is affected by supply and demand. The best content is that which does the best job of supplying the largest demand. It might take the form of an XKCD comic that is supplying nerd jokes to a large group of technologists or it might be a Wikipedia article that explains to the world the definition of Web 2.0. It can be a video, an image, a sound, or text, but it must supply a demand in order to be considered good content.

Good content is linkable:

From an SEO perspective, there is no difference between the best and worst content on the Internet if it is not linkable. If people can’t link to it, search engines will be very unlikely to rank it, and as a result the content won’t drive traffic to the given website. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than one might think. A few examples of this include: AJAX-powered image slide shows, content only accessible after logging in, and content that can't be reproduced or shared. Content that doesn't supply a demand or is not linkable is bad in the eyes of the search engines—and most likely some people, too.

From: A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting & On-Page SEO

Title Tag

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO, after content. You can read more information about title tags here.

URL

Along with smart internal linking, SEOs should make sure that the category hierarchy of the given website is reflected in URLs.

The following is a good example of URL structure:

• http://www.BRIJESHRUDANI.ML/games/video-game-history

This URL clearly shows the hierarchy of the information on the page (history as it pertains to video games in the context of games in general). This information is used to determine the relevancy of a given web page by the search engines. Due to the hierarchy, the engines can deduce that the page likely doesn’t pertain to history in general but rather to that of the history of video games. This makes it an ideal candidate for search results related to video game history. All of this information can be speculated on without even needing to process the content on the page.

The following is a bad example of URL structure:

• http://www.BRIJESHRUDANI.ML/title/tt0468569

Unlike the first example, this URL does not reflect the information hierarchy of the website. Search engines can see that the given page relates to titles (/title/) and is on the IMDB domain but cannot determine what the page is about. The reference to “tt0468569” does not directly infer anything that a web surfer is likely to search for. This means that the information provided by the URL is of very little value to search engines.

URL structure is important because it helps the search engines to understand relative importance and adds a helpful relevancy metric to the given page. It is also helpful from an anchor text perspective because people are more likely to link with the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL.

SEO Best Practice

Content pages are the meat of websites and are almost always the reason visitors come to a site. Ideal content pages should be very specific to a given topic—usually a product or an object—and be hyper-relevant.

The purpose of the given web page should be directly stated in all of the following areas:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content of page
• Image alt text

Here is an example of a well-laid-out and search engine–friendly web page. All of its on-page factors are optimized.

The content page in this figure is considered good for several reasons. First, the content itself is unique on the Internet (which makes it worthwhile for search engines to rank well) and covers a specific bit of information in a lot of depth. If a searcher had question about Super Mario World, there is a good chance, that this page would answer their query.

Aside from content, this page is laid out well. The topic of the page is stated in the title tag (Super Mario World – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World), the page's content (the page heading, "Super Mario World"), and within the alt text of every image on the page.

The following example is of a poorly optimized web page. Notice how it differs from the first example.

This figure shows a less search engine–friendly example of a content page targeting the term "Super Mario World." While the subject of the page is present in some of the important elements of the web page (title tag and images), the content is less robust than the Wikipedia example, and the relevant copy on the page is less helpful to a reader.

Notice that the description of the game is suspiciously similar to copy written by a marketing department. “Mario’s off on his biggest adventure ever, and this time he has brought a friend.” That is not the language that searchers write queries in, and it is not the type of message that is likely to answer a searcher's query. Compare this to the first sentence of the Wikipedia example: “Super Mario World is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo as a pack–in launch title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.”. In the poorly optimized example, all that is established by the first sentence is that someone or something called Mario is on an adventure that is bigger than his or her previous adventure (how do you quantify that?) and he or she is accompanied by an unnamed friend.

The Wikipedia example tells the reader that Super Mario World is a game developed and published by Nintendo for the gaming system Super Nintendo Entertainment System–the other example does not. Search results in both Bing and Google show the better optimized page ranking higher.

An Ideally Optimized Web Page

An ideal web page should do all of the following:

• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
• Include subject in title tag

• Include subject in URL

• Include subject in image alt text

• Specify subject several times throughout text content

• Provide unique content about a given subject
• Link back to its category page
• Link back to its subcategory page (If applicable)
• Link back to its homepage (normally accomplished with an image link showing the website logo on the top left of a page)

8 Great On-Page SEO Techniques

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolatey cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure
Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

As you can see for this page, the URL is http://onlineincometeacher.com/traffic/on-page-seo-techniques/ I have included the keywords that are relevant for this post.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)
When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

6. Keyword Density
Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.


7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

8. Internal Linking
People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly, internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google PageRank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example, this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘ useful. Perhaps other people are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.

Summary

These 8 techniques are just some of the ways that you can improve your on-page SEO. Any one used independently of the others won’t make much difference to your site ranking, however when used together, they can help to improve your site traffic.

They will help to get your pages working better, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.


So, it pays to spend some time implementing these to improve your site! Please leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.