On-Page SEO Techniques

Below are the tips for crafting a good title for your web page:

• The title should be attractive enough to draw visitors attention and pursue visitors to click on the link in SERP.
• The length of the title should not exceed 70 characters including the spaces. If it exceeds Google will truncate it to display the title in one line.
• The important keywords of your post should be included at the beginning of the title as most of the users tend to pay attention to the initial words placed in the title. Also, it should be formed in such a way that it looks a naturally formed sentence or phrase.
• Do not overstuff your title with the keywords and only include the most important keywords in your title. The overstuffed title may create a negative impression and may not rank well in SERP.

7. Selecting highly-effective keywords

Keywords are the terms or phrases used by the users to find particular information or a web page by using search engines. It is very significant to plan correct keywords for your blog post in order to drive the correct audience to your blog and get better visibility in the search engines.

A free tool Google Keyword Planner helps you to target the correct keywords for your blog post.  Also, you could use the search related phrases that appear at the bottom of the Google page results.

An important point to note that as Google announces that they are no longer using a meta keyword tag from a long period to decide a ranking factor of a web page. Due to excessive use of the irrelevant keywords in a web page by users, Google discontinued referring to keywords mentioned in the meta keywords tag as the new policy tends to give more quality results in the SERP. Hence adding meta keywords is not going to make any difference.

• Use keyword planner tool to decide keywords to be used in a blog post
• Use long tailed keywords to drive more traffic to your blog. The commonly used or shorter one has more competition and are not easy to get higher rank in SERP. Long-tailed keywords have less competition and are easy to target to search engines and users.
• For better results place the keywords in the ideal places. The most important keywords should be placed in the title, URL of a web page, meta description tag and in the first paragraph of your blog post.
• All secondary keywords can be distributed and placed in more natural formed sentences throughout the blog post.
• Using keywords in the tag, bold words and alt text of the images also helps a web page optimized for search engines.
• In order to stay in the competition, you will have to update the keywords on a periodical basis to meet the new requirements and changing trends.

8. Writing functional meta description

The aim of the meta tag is to provide information about your web page to search engines. In this context meta description is the small paragraph written for the purpose to describe the inner content of your web page to the search engines and your potential visitors.

There is no limit on setting how your meta description should be long but generally, Google truncates the end part if it is exceeding 160 characters. Google does not use it for ranking your web page but a well-written description could help your web page get better Click Through Rate (CTR).

SEO Best Practices:

• Include important keywords in the meta description text. The search engines highlight these words by displaying them in bold text when someone makes a query into the search engine.
• Meta description text should be simple to understand by all users yet compelling to drive users attention and make him click on your link.
• It is a fact that search engines do not always use meta description text in SERP. Instead, they use the most relevant text from your web page for the query entered by the user. Hence you should always focus more on writing a qualitative blog post than meta description.
• Each page on your site should have a unique meta description.

9. H1 to H6 heading tags

Heading tags are very useful to draw visitors attention to the important sections of your blog post. It also helps you organize the content in a more reader-friendly manner.

Form search engine perspective, Google crawl through your web page to understand important sections of your web page.

Do not get confused between header ( <head> ) tag and heading ( <h1> to <h6> ) tag. The header tag is used to define web page header and information of the web page. Whereas heading tags are used to define a section of the web pages and treated as heading to the various web page sections.

• H1 to H6 let you define heading for your web page. Though it is advisable not to use all of these heading tags to create a better impact on the users and search engines.
• Use the H1 tag only for once throughout the web page. Use it so wisely that creates a good understanding of information inside it to the user and search engine. Generally, it is used to write the title of the blog post at the beginning of the blog post.
• Use H2 for all other subsequent headings to structure the entire blog post.

10. Optimizing images

Using images in a blog post is a good practice to enhance the appeal of the overall blog post. However, if these images are not optimized for search engines, you are losing a good chance of having visibility to more visitors.

The main difficulty arises when search engine bots are not able to understand the images as they cannot look through images as humans do. They need a text associated with images to understand the content of the images and how it is related to the rest of the content on a blog page.

• Give a readable file name to each image before you upload it for your blog post. Avoid using spaces in the file name as it renders "%20" character in URL of the image which makes it difficult to read. Also, do not use an underscore ( _ ) in the file name to separate two words as the whole string is considered as a single word which makes search engines difficult to understand it. Use a hyphen ( - ) to separate words in a filename which search engine can easily understand. "my-image-for-a-blog-post" is a good example of a filename optimized to meet search engine expectations.
• Use .jpeg format if possible rather than using other formats as jpeg images come in lesser file size.
• Do not include high-resolution images as it is. Instead, resize and compress them and use them in web preferences format.
• Include alt text in images for search engines to understand the content of the images.
• Optimized images have a better experience, faster load time and eventually reduces the bounce rate of the web page.

11. Internal Links

The internal link is the link that redirects a user to a different web page of the same website. So basically it is the link of another web page from your website.

Having internal links in your blog post is essential because it helps a search engine understand the architecture or the structure of your website. Adding internal links to your blog post helps visitors stay on your website and increase user engagement.

SEO Best Practices:

• Add internal links at meaningful places in your blog post. It helps Google understand the structure of your website and have better visibility to other posts.
• Internal links reduce bounce rate and increase your rank in search engines for particular keywords.
• Internal links create a better user experience through important links placed inside the article.
• Ensures to develop a page authority across the site for various blog posts.

12. Anchor text

Anchor text is nothing but the text on which hyperlink is applied. The anchor text sends a signal to search engines as some important keywords of the blog post and hence needs a little attention to as which text needs to be used as a hyperlink.

The links placed inside the article by using a proper anchor text helps search engines determine what is your web page about. While adding hyperlinks make sure to use keywords or descriptive text for the anchor text.

SEO Best Practices:

• Keywords used in anchor text helps the search engine determine what is your web page about. Hence use descriptive phrases for hyperlinking than more generic text like "click here".
• Do not add links to websites which don't have a good reputation over the internet. Adding links to such site may have a negative impression on your website.

13. Writing SEO friendly URL

The purpose of having a URL address was to display a text that a human could read instead of displaying numbers (IP address). A URL doesn't drive your ranking immediately but influences the CTR.

Hence it is necessary to write a perfect URL for your blog. A URL slug (Slug is the descriptive text in the URL added after the domain name) should clearly state the what is your page about.

SEO Best Practices: Consider below tips for writing an SEO friendly URL.

• An URL should consist of important keywords from your blog post. It should match the title text of your blog post. So it doesn't create confusion in the mind of visitors of being these two things different.
• Keep the URL text simple, easily readable but compelling enough to draw visitors attention.
• Keep them short as Google truncates the long URL.
• Google completely ignores the stop words like(a, and, but, or, of, the, etc.) has no value in SEO, but adding them increases better readability. So adding them to very important places where it serves the purpose has no harm.
• Do not include spaces or underscores to separate the words in URL. Google encourages to use hyphens instead of underscores.

Conclusion:

Finally, if you optimize your web pages as per the described points, there is nothing which can stop you from getting better results from the search engines.

Any paid on-page SEO techniques or any plugin you use for the betterment of SEO will encourage you to use these tips to get better results from the search engines. Hence follow these tips wisely and ensure your blog is optimized in the best way for the search engine.

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In a coming post, I'll share tips on how we can go for off-page SEO techniques. So stay tuned and follow my blog, follow me on social media and share the love! Thank you for your time.