How to Improve On-Page SEO
“How long will it take to enhance search engine ranking?” – this million-dollar question chases every business owner. But, unfortunately, there’s no magic button to press that can rank your site in the topmost position.
However, we cannot undermine the concern of the business owners to increase their web ranking. According to a survey by Infront Webworks, the very first SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of Google receives about 95% of the web traffic.
Now, this may instantly remind you of PPC (Pay-Per-Click). Several site owners spend lots of resources on PPC to quickly occupy the top ranks. While this can definitely draw greater visibility to your site in a short span of time, the advanced users often tend to avoid the advertisement sites and prefer to check the organic results.
An interesting observation by New Media Campaigns reveals that organic SEO results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than the paid search results. Despite that, 87% of search engine dollars (about $10 billion) are spent on PPC and only 11% (about $1 billion) is reserved for SEO efforts. This means, the strategy that is over 5x more effective, SEO, is receiving only 1/8 of the resources spent in the market!
While PPC can boost ranking instantly, SEO helps to maintain the rank and that too, at a lower cost. This is why we strongly believe PPC has not affected the relevance of SEO.
Though we have already mentioned that there’s no magic, there are surely a few strategies that you may adopt to boost your organic ranking. One of them is to improve your on-page SEO.
# How to Improve On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing web pages in order to improve the website’s search engine ranking and thereby drive organic traffic. But sometimes, SEO best practices suggested by random practitioners can be misleading. No worry. We got you covered. Our extensive guide will walk you through a few on-page SEO tricks recommended and practised by the experts at any top SEO agency that you must follow should you seek to improve your site’s visibility on Google.
1. Generate High Quality Content
Content is the heart of an on-page SEO. Google always prioritizes high-quality content. Informative and user-friendly content automatically drives more audience and thereby obtains a higher rank.
The first step to creating quality content is to choose relevant topic and keywords. The below-mentioned tips will help you to generate great content:
Keyword Optimization
With a plethora of complex algorithm, Google is consistently improving in understanding the searchers’ intent. No longer does it rely solely on popular keywords but deliver quality content that can address the users’ requirement. One of the primary objectives of Google is to enhance user experience. Old-school SEO strategies like keyword stuffing are penalized by Google’s Penguin algorithm. This is why it’s crucial to learn the ideal keyword density before writing a content.
Further, Panda algorithm evaluates a website based on the content quality and pages with high-quality content are generally rewarded with higher ranks.
Our suggestion is to conduct keyword research and incorporate long-tail keywords. These keywords are more specific and bear close proximity to the search queries. Also, ensure that the keywords occur naturally or organically into the content and don’t appear to be forced.
Add Relevant, Engaging, and High-Quality Visual Content
Visuals register more effectively in human brains. Our brain can process visuals over 60,000X times faster than a text. Further, a study by Venngage reveals that visuals can increase the desire to read a content by a whopping 80%.
While uploading any visual content, make sure to optimize them properly. For instance, compress the image without affecting its quality and ensure that it doesn’t take a long time to get loaded. While JPGs are used for high-quality images, PNGs are ideal alternatives for logos, icons, etc.
Also, use Alt tags (alternative text) so that the search engine spiders get a clue on what the picture is about. Below we will discuss in detail about images Alt-text. So keep reading.
Include convincing CTAs
Include Call to Actions (CTAs) to lead traffic to the products and offers pages. This can effectively help in driving more conversion and thereby boost ROI (Return on Investment).
Page content is central to all the on-page SEO processes. Other on-page SEO elements stem from the page content, so invest enough resources and time to develop and optimize it.
2. Site Architectural Elements
Site architectural elements indicate the constituents of your website and individual pages. How you structure the website helps Google to crawl the pages and the content.
Page URL
The page URLs should be easily comprehensible by the readers and search engine. These are also important in maintaining the site hierarchy as you create subpages, blog posts, and other types of internal pages.
https://moz.com/blog
In this URL, the blog is the sub-domain and “moz.com” is the domain. Check out the following tips to write SEO-friendly URLs:
Remove unnecessary or extra word
Use “https” if possible since Google uses it as a positive ranking factor.
Internal Links
Internal linking refers to the process of hyperlinking to other pages on your website. This is important for on-page SEO as internal links send traffic to other webpages on your site and intimate Google that your site is helpful and valuable. However, make sure that the links correspond to the topic of the content because stuffing irrelevant internal links will affect user experience.
As we already mentioned, enhancing user experience is a crucial concern for Google and so should be yours. Therefore, link only those pages that can truly help the readers to know more about a particular niche. Only then can you expect to drive higher traffic to those pages. If the users find the linked pages to be irrelevant, they will leave the page increasing the bounce rate. Also, it will produce a negative impact about your brand.