Over the years, we have set our attention to off-page and technical aspects of SEO without realising that this move lacks a crucial factor – on-page.
Website owners and SEO agency love the idea of building links to increase traffic potential and rank in search engine result pages. However, this activity will only be successful if you integrate on-page elements as well.
What is On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is one of the pillars of Search Engine Optimisation.
On-site SEO refers to SEO implementation that you can control and include on your website.
With this said, your goal is to ensure your website serves its purpose to your clients or customers – provide valuable and usable content. Such actions can lead to improving your search engine rankings or search results visibility.
Implementing On-page SEO will take time, resources, and effort from you and your team.
If you enter an agreement with an SEO agency to do this for you, it matters that you know the on-page optimisation factors to monitor or assess:
- Page Loading Speed
- Keywords
- Content
- URLs
- Internal Linking
- Meta Description
- Title Tag
- Heading Tags
- Alt Tags
- Images
- Mobile-friendliness
Here are some strategies you can do to optimise these factors:
- Write in-depth, quality blogs, articles, or e-books
- Clean -up your website’s code
- Ensure that speeds up your website.
- Streamline your site’s navigation
- Don’t forget to include unique title tags and meta descriptions
On-page has three main categories: Content elements, HTML elements, and Site architecture elements.
Content Elements
Content elements refer to the copy and content found on your website. This helps you focus mostly on crafting high-quality, engaging, and valuable content that will benefit both your visitors and your page.
You must ensure to maintain the integrity of your content as it will send a message to Google that your site provides valuable information and sticks to its content guidelines.
HTML Elements
HTML elements talk about the elements in your website’s source code.
How to access the source code?
- Click VIEW
- DEVELOPER
- In the top menu, choose VIEW SOURCE
Site Architecture Elements
This last of the three categories is site architecture elements, this refers to the site pages and other elements that make up your website.
Ensure that you structure your website in a way that it would be easier for search engines to crawl every page that mattered to you.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO tells Google what your website is all about. It helps you optimise your website for humans and search engine bots.
You have to understand that there is more to SEO than simply creating and publishing content. You need to ensure that your content reaches your prospect audiences and attracts new traffic.
Simply put it this way, we call it on-page because whatever your produce to your site, your visitors can see them on your page.
Title Tag
A title tag is an HTML element that indicates the title of a web page.
You will see your website’s page title displayed on the search engine results page (SERP) as a search snippet.
It looks like a link that you can click to access its content or the page itself. The title tag of the page is the unique, accurate, concise, description of its overall content.
Why are Title Tags Important?
Title tags are essential to your on-page SEO performance. Though you may say that it doesn’t affect your site’s ranking, for search engine optimisation, every small detail counts.
Your title carries the target keywords you desired to rank for, and if your title tags don’t match people’s search queries, then it’s considered a lost opportunity for Google to include you in their search results.
Ensure to deliver clear HTML title tags for search engine crawlers and users for them to understand your content better. They won’t click something unless it answers their question.
Publishing relevant, valuable title tags, means building a solid brand’s reputation.
Title Tag Optimisation
Title tags are significant to your on-page SEO campaign as it signals Google’s algorithm of your content’s purpose and relevance.
Title tags hold a bigger pressure when you come to think of them because it carries the main idea of your content. If you fail to communicate your title tag to your audience, it can do more harm than good to your site.
Imagine losing the opportunity of ranking ahead of your competitors and gaining a good amount of traffic because of a poorly structured title tag – that lacks strong keywords, has no emphasis, and is dull.
Here are some things to consider when crafting your title tag.
- Be Original. Be unique.
If you want your brand to be the centre of attention on the world wide web, ensure to stand out by crafting original and unique title tags.
You are offering an experience through your business. It matters that you communicate it well to your target market. As a web owner, you want to ensure that they won’t see your company as a copycat of others in the industry.
As much as possible, avoid default titles such as “Home” or “New Page.” Google might think that you are duplicating some content of your page or other websites.
- Focus on Target Keywords
Another important thing to remember is to put significant keywords first.
If you want to optimise the title page, adding target keywords to your title page creates an impact on your website.
Of course not all keywords that you want to rank for must be added to it, you have to perform keyword research to check which terms work best for your title tags.
- Catchy titles are attractive.
We dont think that you would want to check out the content that looks spammy and dull to read, right?
Catchy means an attention-grabbing type of title. One that sparks interest and can somehow intrigue users about why Google had your content on the first page.
- Push for your Brand
Whatever you write, dont forget to use your brand’s voice.
You can engage authentically with your customers if you do so. Establish who you are through an excellent title for your pages. Spread awareness by ensuring you craft statements that convert to trust and loyalty to your prospective customers.
- Write for people
We will never get tired of telling you this, write for people and not for bots.
Yes, we want search engines to notice us, but search engines’ crawlers depend on searchers and queries.
If you have people in mind while writing your content, you are on the right track. People will consume your content and will decide is it worth their time or not relevant enough to gain traction.
A better experience equates to favourable click-through rates, traffic, and conversions.
What are the reasons Google rewrite your Title Tags?
Yes. Google rewrites title tags.
They are not doing this for fun. Google is run by teams that know the complexity of algorithms and searchers’ behaviours. They have reasons why they replace your title tags with the one that is perfectly suitable for your brand’s content.
Here are some issues that push Google to improve your title tags:
- Mismatch of title and the content
- Lack value and is too generic.
- Possible Keyword stuffing.
- The use of irrelevant keywords to represent your content.
- It doesn’t match users’ search queries.
Meta Description
Another vital element of an on-page SEO is the meta description.
A meta description is an HTML tag that provides a brief description of your overall content.
This description provides users with what your blog posts are all about and the central idea that exists in your webpage.
It includes keywords that answer the searcher’s query and helps search engines understand your page.
Meta Description Optimisation
Just like the title tag, meta description needs optimisation efforts, too.
As a crucial part of your webpage’s content, ensure that you are conscious of the following:
- Length
An ideal meta description fits the 155-160 character limit.
It can be challenging to keep your meta description short because you can leave out essential statements to properly layout your content, but it’s one of the best practices out there.
We can’t fully control what Google shows in search results, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Observe that some websites maintain a 120-156 character limit to their meta description to ensure that they go by the rules and have it displayed on search results.
- Duplicates
Avoid duplicating meta descriptions. It can affect your SEO optimisation campaign as Google algorithms might treat it as spam or irrelevant content.
If you can’t craft your meta descriptions now, it would be wise to leave them blank that resort to duplicating your existing ones.
- Content
Ensure your meta descriptions connect to your page’s content.
Misleading your audiences to earn clicks and traffics can ruin your reputation. They will no longer trust your website’s offering as you have a negative persona online already.
Craft well-thought-out content that echoes your brand’s voice and leads the untapped segment of the market to discover your business.
- Keywords
Never forget that meta description can be a good place to start your keyword campaign.
You may incorporate your target keywords in your meta tags, aside from the call to action statements, as Google will highlight those in search results. This strategy of adding your focus keywords can be inviting and may increase your clicks and conversions.
Why is Meta Description Important for SEO?
You may argue that meta description doesn’t hold much search ranking position power to your website, but do you know it can affect your on-page SEO performance?
A powerful meta description can affect your website’s organic search results’ click-through rate (CTR), regardless of your ranking
A meta description is integral in making your content into a sought-after source of reliable information. You can strategically place the keywords you want to rank for in this section of your page.
Things to Avoid When Writing Meta Description
- Lengthy Meta Descriptions
- An Inconsistent Meta Description with Page Content
- Duplicate Meta Descriptions
- Lack of Relevant Keywords & CTA
- Not Writing your Meta Description at all
Meta descriptions matter in your content. Ensure you never forget to create and include them in your content.
Image Alt Text
After title tags and meta descriptions, another essential factor for your on-page SEO campaign is your Image Alt Text. This can increase your rank on Google Image Search and improve search visibility.
Alt text or alternative text is another HTML code to illustrate the appearance and function of an image on your webpage. once your site’s image failed to load or takes too long to show its content. It helps your users and screen-reading tools to explain to your visually impaired readers the images on your site.
Image Alt Text Optimisation
Here are some of the best practices to adopt if you want to optimise your Image Alt Texts.
- Be specific.
You are describing the image found in your content, be specific and detailed as possible.
Crawlers will appreciate your content more if you provide an on-point description of your image as it also gives context to your overall webpage.
- Relevancy matters
Another crucial point to remember is that your alt texts must serve relevancy, especially if the image is too generic and not familiar to others.
Aside from being specific, ensure that you provide relevancy to your topic or subject of the page it belongs.
- Uniqueness is a must
Unique alt texts don’t mean you place your target keywords in them.
Writing a unique alt text means not repeating nor duplicating your previous entries. Not all content is the same; thus, creating a unique alt text is a brownie point to your on-page SEO performance.
Why is Image Alt Text Important
Small details can greatly impact your quest for successful SEO performance and image alt text is another factor you must consider optimising.
Accessibility
Web Content Accessibility guidelines 1.0 clearly explain to make the content as accessible as possible for users with disabilities. The main goal of these guidelines is to provide a space for everyone to learn and enjoy regardless of their physical inability.
Better user experience
Image alt text is for all. Provide overall wellness to your website, regardless of who will visit.
Image traffic
Optimising your image alt text can increase your content as well.
Conclusion
On-page SEO is essential to your brand’s website. It increases your site’s visibility factor in the search results leading you to gain traction and possible ranking, traffic, and conversions.
Never underestimate what performing an on-page SEO strategy can do to your business. Our SEO services at Roots Digital will cover all your on-page SEO needs.
You will no longer have to worry as our SEO team perform with integrity, backed with passion, and driven with professionalism.
We don’t operate solely for profit and gains. We perform to deliver quality SEO services that will make you feel you are part of our team.
If you want to know how we do things, book your appointment with us today.
