What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, and it is the method used to ensure that your website ranks highly on search engines. It is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. But when it comes to optimising a website/blog post, there are two main factors involved:
- On-page optimisation
- Off-page optimisation
However, this article will focus on-page optimisation, the good on-page SEO techniques you should implement while optimising your website or blog posts.
What is On-Page SEO?
It refers to modifying frontend elements on web pages so search engine crawlers can understand what your webpage is about, making it visible to the readers or search requests. On-Page SEO may appear to be simple, but on the contrary, it is a technical process and entails hard work.
Why You Need On-Page SEO
A well-planned and properly executed on-page SEO helps search engines analyse your website and the content connected to it to identify if a searcher’s query is relevant to your site. Hence, helping your website to achieve higher search engine rankings.
Out of nearly any digital marketing strategy, On-page SEO offers the best ROI with its relatively low-cost and long-term benefits.
It can help websites grow and bring in quantity and quality traffic organically for years.
8 On-Page SEO Techniques for 2021
Have you worked through the SEO basics but still need the best On-Page SEO techniques to help you take your site’s organic traffic to the next level as we head into 2021?
Before discussing some specific On-Page SEO techniques, here are a few effective, non-technical things that you should incorporate today:
- Improve the user experience throughout your site
- Make sure your website is responsive and fast
- Create good content to ensure readers coming from search engines spend a lot of time on your site.
- Seek feedback and improve.
Never the less, search engine algorithms change frequently, and SEO techniques evolve in response to those changes. So now I’ll share with you the 8 On-Page techniques that anyone can adopt in 2021.
1. Page Titles, Meta Title & Descriptions
Page titles and meta are of great importance when it comes to SEO. This combo is the most important on-page SEO technique you don’t want to mess with. The reason for this is because the more attractive and optimised your title is, the more people will click. The best practice is to use the targeted keyword or keyword phrase toward the beginning of the title (H1) tag, but if that’s not possible, make sure it’s at least in the title.
In general, the more clicks your post gets, the greater the chances of ranking higher. However, avoid unnecessary repetition of the same keyword in the title tag. It could be detrimental to your website ranking.
Keep the title length to under 65 characters. The description should be within a maximum of 160 characters, along with enough spaces included in between. The Meta description tags must be user-friendly to improve the CTRs or Click through Rates in the search engines.
2. Post Permalink Structure
Proper display of your website, page or blog post URL is an important on-page metric. The URL of the post must consist of the targeted keyword and avoid using special characters, symbols, brackets, commas, etc., within the actual URL.
You can use dashes to differentiate the strings in your website URL structure. They are referred to as “pretty” permalinks and are supported by most web browsers. Based on experience in the SEO field, I recommend that the URL of each page is short, contains a relevant keyword and search engine friendly.
For example our web design service page url is: www.eastpointdigital.com.au/website-design/
3. Proper Heading Tags
It’s better to break your website content or blog article body into small paragraphs for easy reading. It would be best if you used heading tags for highlighting various key points, headings and sub-headings.
You can give each section a heading with tags H1, H2, and H3. Normally, the H1 tag is used for only the main page title. For the best SEO practice, do not use more than one H1 tags anywhere in the article.
For section breaks, stick to H2 and H3 tags but ensure that you do not use H2 and H3 tags a lot of times since it would be considered a negative SEO practice.
4. Image SEO
Many people tend to miss this, but in my experience, image optimisation can work wonders. Images optimisation are an important factor when it comes to on-page optimisation. The image does help a lot in driving traffic from image searches.
Try to include attractive images that are related to your website or blog post. These images can be optimised for SEO. All you need to do is save the images by incorporating relevant main words before uploading them. Make sure you give a relevant name to the image before uploading.
One more benefit of using images is the engagement it creates. And the more engaged the site visitors are, the more likely they’ll stick around, thus increasing your website’s overall ranking.
5. Total Word Count Per Post
Blog posts with scanty words typically don’t perform well on search engines. Lengthier well-researched informative posts are more search-engine friendlier than short blog posts. The greater the word count, the more SEO-friendly the post would be; creating posts with at least 1300 words is the new standard.
Posts with less word count are usually seen as being “less informative”. Try to write with the descriptions having the targeted keywords, and the blog post would possibly find a place in the top pages of search engines at a later stage.
6. Keyword Density
The keyword density means the number of times you use the targeted keywords in the post. It’s important to add relevant keywords to your content. This will help search engines find out what your content is all about. However, there is no real magic formula for this. I recommend that you use semantically related words to help the search engines understand more about your content.
Make sure you don’t repeat the keywords excessively to avoid being penalised by major search engines, especially Google. Ideally, the keyword density should be 1.5% with a mix of LSI keywords.
7. Add Schema
This is one underutilised On-Page SEO technique that you can use to outrank your competitors. Schema markup is microdata added to the website to help search engines return relevant results to searchers. By adding Schema to your website or blog, you help the search engine understand more about your content.
In simple words, schema markup is extensively used to define website content and adding it gives your website visibility on SERP and increases the site ranking.
Some of the schema markup examples:
- Rating and Reviews
- FAQ
- Products
8. Internal Linking
When you apply the internal linking technique to your blog posts, it will help your blog readers spend more time on your blog, and it will also help pass page rank to other pages of your site. Internal links relevant to the original post show search engines that you are providing extra information beyond what is being displayed in the content.
The best practice is to use a keyword as the anchor text, but be very careful not to overdo it.
For example this internal link will take you to East Point Digitals’ home page.
Hope this helped
All these 8 techniques ensure the best adoption of On-Page SEO. It doesn’t mean that you have to implement all at a time. However, you can count on East Point Digital SEO services for the proper implementation of applicable techniques. Professional SEO services may come at a cost, but it is always worth it.
