10 Important On-Page SEO Tips for Your Website

Every SEO strategy is focused on ranking as high as possible on the search engines. A good strategy helps Google understand what your content is about.

On-page SEO is very simply, everything that can be done to a website to affect SEO. If as a business owner wants their website found by potential customers, they need to have good on-page SEO in place.

Here are a couple of tips to get you started:

1. Keyword in title tag: Add your target keyword in the title tag of your page. This is one of the first things that someone will see in the search results. Adding the target keyword at the start of the title tag helps your page to stand out to a potentially interested customer. Your title tag can be up to 60 characters.

2. Target keyword in first 100 words: Help visitors and search engines to understand the topic of your content. Add your target keyword into the first 100 words on your page or blog post. You can also add your target keyword a few more times naturally throughout your content. But don't overdo it! For example, in a 3,000-word article, you wouldn't want to use your target keyword more than 5-6 times.

3. SEO friendly URLs: Make sure your pages and posts use simple SEO friendly URLs. A shorter URL that includes your target keyword will tend to perform better in the search engines than a longer URL. For example, if your target keyword was "shoe repair", then your URL would be better as /shoe-repair/ rather than /learn-more-about-our-shoe-repair-services/.

4. Unique meta descriptions: Ensure every page and post on your website has a well-written and unique meta description. These will be shown in the search engine results, as the descriptive text beneath the title of each result. Meta descriptions offer a perfect opportunity to encourage a reader to click through to your page and read more content. You can use up to 160 characters here.

5. Write for humans, not search engines: Always consider your reader first. If content is written purely for search engines, it will be harder for a human to read. This may cause your reader to quickly click back in their browser and visit your competitor instead.

6. Create engaging content: The human eye can fatigue when reading large passages of text. Capture a reader’s attention and keep them on your page. Breakup the content with images, illustrations, and videos.

7. Consider search intent: Before creating content that targets a specific keyword, take a few moments to do some research. What sort of results are currently showing in Google for that keyword? If you're looking to write an article for your target keyword but none of the top 10 results in Google are blog articles, then the search intent suggests that people are not looking to read articles. Always make sure that the type of content you want to create is already ranking highly in the search engines!

8. Internal linking: Internal linking is one of the most important parts of on-page SEO is a link that takes a user to another page or blog post on your own website. It's perfect for linking readers to further useful information on a particular topic. Every page or post of your website should utilize internal linking. This can help both your readers and the search engines.

9. Scout the competition: When plan to create a new article check out the competition. Note how much content is on each of the top 10 results. If the average number of words across the top 10 results is 2500, then write at least these many words in your article. It's a simple thing to check, but it can make a big difference to the quality of your content and how the search engines choose to rank it.

10. Make sure your website loads fast! Last but by no means least make sure your website loads in under 2 seconds and ideally in under 1 second. Remember, technology advances have led to humans being fickler and more impatient and they're easily bored by slow websites.

If this is daunting, we can help. Leverage one of our experts to make sure your site is optimized for SEO.