What Is On-Page Optimization?- 7 Proven Techniques

Maybe you wonder what is on-page optimization or you are not sure what you need to do to achieve the desired optimization level or you wish to know the impact of optimization on your customers and ranking factors in search engines.

Welcome home! This is your post.

On-page optimization sometimes referred to as on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one activity that is supposed to be the foundation of all affiliate marketers who cares about driving traffic to their sites and the ability to rank high in search engine.

Here we shall strike a balance between the need to have your content getting ranked and ensuring you deliver high-quality and thorough information to your audience.

We need to satisfy our audience but at the same time, if our content does not appear on the first pages of a search engine, it may not reach the targeted audience however good the content is.

What Is On-page Optimization?

On-page SEO refers to all activities that are performed directly within the various stages of website design to enhance its position in search engine rankings. These are the kind of activities that you have control over your website and you can change with a different difficulty levels.

On-page SEO Factors to Consider

There is no single, unanimously accepted procedure for on-page SEO. However, optimization should be done as comprehensively as possible, to ensure that every opportunity is optimized for improving search engine rankings for your site.

We shall use the following on-page SEO factors to cover the majority of the most common features to look at when optimizing your site.

1. Choosing Great Keywords

A keyword is simply a group of words that people use to search for in search engines. A keyword is a key to opening content marketing doors, Search engine optimization, and other digital marketing.

Targeting the right keywords means all the difference between success and failure as far as generating relevant traffic with a good conversion.

Consider long-tail keyword phrases (with 5 words or more) especially if your site is new since they are easier to rank than medium-tail keywords (with up to 4 words).

Long-tail keywords don’t result in high volumes of traffic, but the traffic you get is highly specific and usually converts better than the traffic you gain from short and medium-tail keywords.

Also, consider low to medium-competition keywords depending on the domain authority of your website. Long-tail keywords tend to have lower competition and provide you with a better chance to rank higher in search engines.

Use a good keyword research tool to analyze your keyword. See some free SEO keyword tools such as Google keyword planner and others or you can also try paid versions like Jaaxy (affordable price), SemRush, and Ahref.

Learn about some recommended SEO tools, both free and affordable.

2. Title

• Memorable Title

Your title should be able to stand out and attract visitors from the rest of the content in the media. Your title should draw people to want to read it.

You can consider tips such as using a strong word or power word that often generates an emotional response, positive or negative, in the target audience, which leads to the desired outcome of attracting readers.

Words like free, new, and proven plus a ton of others do attract readers’ attention easily. You can also pose your title as a question that many readers ask themselves.

• Keyword in the Title

Target to include your main keyword as part of the title that appears in the snippet especially while retaining its power to attract readers, within the first 50 characters since Google displays around 60 characters of your title on desktops and around 50 characters on mobile.

• Add a Number

A Number added to the title does add chances of higher clicks though it’s not always possible to add a number and retain the sense in the title. for example which title would you click among these

10 ways to reduce hair loss

how to reduce hair loss

proven methods to reduce hair loss in 2020

All these titles talk about the same thing, but the number added increases attraction to clicks. The last one, for instance, creates a sense of more current methods than the second. I don’t know why the first title might be more preferred than the second but it does. Maybe you can leave a suggestion for the same in the comment area and I will appreciate it.

3. Rich Content

• Customer-first, search engine second

Your goal when writing your content is to please the reader of the article first, the search engines come second. Make sure you have valuable content for your readers and don’t compromise it with search engine optimization.

Content is king in the SEO jungle! Whichever way you look at it, ensure your article content is simple and easy to read and understand, even by a junior high school kid. Write informative and useful content that your visitors will enjoy. The length of the text is secondary.

In fact, the more comprehensive your article is the better for both you and the reader. If competitive sites have better and more detailed content on the same topic, shorter articles might put you on the shelf.

When your content is detailed and valuable you keep your audience longer on your page

Don’t forget to use the available tools to ensure correct grammar and spelling in your document as well as plagiarism test. Make your content as unique as possible to gain the trust of your visitors as well as the search engine.

• Long Posts are easy to Market

While there is no specific number of words given as standard for good posts, 1500 – 2500 words may be an ideal figure for many blogs and a minimum of 600 words depending on the type of blog and your site domain. It will be a good practice to offer mixed-length content and not the same always.

However, some top-ranked blogs that you find in search engines have over 3000 words, and that tells you the search engine perceives long posts as being quality content.

Not every page needs long text. Make priorities and write useful, sufficiently extensive texts for your most important posts and keywords.

Allow your flow to be natural don’t include non-related or repetitive content to reach the words target, remember if you gain trust in your visitors they will keep coming back to your site and Google and other engines will perceive it as helpful and quality content.

• Keywords in Your Page Content

Your content should contain your target keyword within the first 10% of the content or the first 100 words and covers the rest of the article with the entire LSI keywords variations in the best way possible.

It’s a good practice to include your keyword in a heading like H1, H2, or H3 at least once in your article.

Take care to avoid keyword stuffing within your content which is not good for search engines, just be natural since as long you are talking about your keyword you are likely to mention it all over your text and have a normal keyword density.

Unnecessary texts with little or no value might fool search engines when your post is new. But conclusions may always be drawn from user behaviour when visiting your site. If users only stay on your page for a short period or if you have a high bounce rate, this is usually the result of texts without adding value to the user and will hurt the search engine ranking.

• Magical Graphics

Complement your text with images and/or videos. Images and videos make your content look more appealing and easier to grasp. They also give the reader the necessary break from the monotonous text element, increasing the time users spend on your site.

Graphics help to increase the relevance of the content and well-optimized images can rank on their own in Google’s image search. Ensure you have named your images and especially ensure you add your keyword in the most applicable image at least once as the alt attribute text. The alt tag is used by screen readers to help those people with physical challenges in interpreting the images.

Don’t just copy-paste graphics from google some are copyrighted, ensure you get graphics from the right sources, for example, Pixabay, or Unsplash, or just create your own unique text images from Quozio. (I personally use Quozio for my featured image)

Which are your best sources of images? let me know in the comment area.

Complex graphics (e.g. using Flash) are often replaced with less complex alternatives to increase the functionality and loading speed of the page.

• Short Paragraphs Skill

Make use of short paragraphs instead of long continuous ones. Short paragraphs are easier to read and appealing to the eye and make the content look readable. You want to market your content well by ensuring the majority of visitors are retained on your site after the first visit hence reducing the bounce rate.

• TOC

Table of Contents breaks down your content into small manageable and easy-to-consume chunks of data. However, if you have a very short post it might not be prudent to add a TOC. You can use an automated TOC using a plugin or just highlight your main topics manually using hyperlinks and HTML tags. In either case, you need to break down your content to get various headings.

• Internal Linking

Internal linking is where you Link internally to other pages on your website which gives users a better experience and it is also useful to search engines. It shows search engines that you also trust content on other pages of your site and hence worth ranking.

Internal linking can be used to guide a search engine bot’s visit to your domain and also to optimize navigation for real users. You are likely to keep a user on your site for longer by internally linking to other pages and hence increase your chances of conversion which is important to your marketing.

4. URL

It’s not wise to change your URL if it’s already ranked unless you redirect it first. You can use this advice for your future URLs.

Shorter URLs have a higher chance of ranking in the SERPs than longer URLs (Read other URL best practices from Moz).

Consider having your keyword in your URL as it’s also a good idea and helps in ranking and user experience.

If you are using a WordPress website to create your page you can view and edit your URL from the permalink section at the top just below the page title as shown in the figure.

5. Meta-tags:

The meta description/SEO description is the snippet that appears just below the title on the search result page (SERP).

Meta description’s job is to give search engines a pointer of what the post is about, which helps them make ranking decisions. It also gives the users motivation to click through to your website rather than click to any other website which is ranked closely.

This area of meta-tag optimization helps to ensure that there is a close correspondence between the keywords and topics covered in the content and those used in the meta tags.

6. Canonization:

Sometimes you might end up with two similar pages optimized for the exact match keyword. This can pose confusion to the search engines since they will not know which to rank. As a result, you are likely to have the older content ranked instead of the updated one.

You can resolve this by either deleting one page and redirecting the URL of one page to the other or by applying the canonical tag.

A canonical tag is a method of informing search engines that a specific URL represents a master copy of another page.

Pages that contain any content that is not considered useful or with duplicate content should be considered to be meaningless for the Google index and should be tagged with the robots metatag “no index”, which may prevent them from appearing in the search results

7. Technical Factors – On-site optimization

• Page Load Speed Optimization:

The time the user takes to load your page might affect the user experience since if it takes too long the user might opt for another faster option. Search engines also give preferences to faster loading sites as opposed to slower ones.

Page speeds might be affected by the following factors among others;

• Improve server response time-Making sure server response time is <200ms
• Optimize images sizes and allows compression
• Too Many Widgets and Plugins.
• Minifying all JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
• Reduce URL redirects.
• Leverage browser caching for at least a
• Select the first response theme
• Ensure you have a quality hosting company

optimize page SEO on mobile devices by adapting desktop content so that it can be easily loaded and viewed on mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers. This is important considering that about 50% of internet users use mobile devices. ( according to cnbc.com)

Final thoughts on What Is On-page Optimization.

On-page optimization comprises all the activities you can perform as you write your page that’s why it’s called on-page. Customers should be considered first when writing especially content writing and ensure that they get the greatest experience to the point of bookmarking your site.

If the reader doesn’t find value in your post, they are likely to navigate away almost immediately after they start reading your content and this will be marked by the engine as a sign of either wrong or unrelated content or substandard content. Ensure your content is related to your title and targeted keyword and is wrong enough to ensure authority.

On the other hand, if you are in affiliate marketing or any other digital marketing for that matter, you use a lot of time writing reviews and other informational posts. All are for one reason, to attract traffic and make conversions.

Without traffic, there is no conversion and no income. Creating traffic requires the affiliate to go beyond what the user sees to what the search engine sees. A balance is important to ensure great success.

It’s in this light that I have highlighted several methods that you can use to ensure that you have quality pages that offer support for your visitors as well as pages that are recognized and ranked by the search engines

The good thing is that you can learn how to do most of the activities all by yourself using some SEO tools except for the technical parts which may require professional help.

It’s my sincere hope that we have answered your question “what is on-page optimization?”, and this article is helpful.

You can also check out some of the free SEO tools we have used to achieve optimization.

Feel free to leave a comment on new ways that we can achieve optimization better.