On Page SEO

Everyone wants more traffic, leads, customers, and revenue, but it’s not always clear what on page SEO techniques can help your SEO strategy succeed. While there is no magic combination of tactics that can guarantee you rankings, there are some tips to keep in mind to help you improve your chances of ranking, getting shares and traffic through social media, and building your brand’s reputation.

What Is On Page SEO?

Even if you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), you might not be entirely clear about on page SEO. Essentially, this is everything a web designer can do on the site (or individual page itself) to improve search engine visibility and rankings.

Search engines analyze these factors (in tandem with off page SEO) to determine site rankings.

The Tactics

It used to be the case that on page SEO was all about keyword placement, but search engine algorithms have become massively more complex since those early days. With the increased importance of how actual users interact with your site and individual pages, think less about placement and more about:

Content

The content on your site should always aim to accomplish these goals:

1. Provide real value and information to the user. Don’t just release thinly masked promotional material.
2. Be accurate, well researched, engaging, and otherwise high quality. This promotes interest and sharing via social networks.
3. Embrace positive user experience (UX). Pages should load quickly, be visually scannable, and provide quality images and aesthetic layout.

Keywords

Image courtesy of CodeNutz.com.

1. Be focused. Keep each piece of content to one main idea centered around relevant keywords.
2. Primary keywords are used at or near the beginning of the title, in the URL, and several times in the body of the post.

Search Engine Accessibility

To be maximally visible to the search engines, ensure:

1. Static URLs. You don’t want dynamic parameters (anything changing in the URL itself).
2. Your host service doesn’t block search engines crawlers.
3. You limit character length on certain elements: Title under 60 characters, Meta Description under 160 characters and URL under 90 characters.

 

What to Avoid

Image courtesy of OppMax.com.

Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do. In an attempt to boost traffic or rankings, some people turn to black hat SEO. This is to be avoided at all costs! Search engines are smarter and smarter about these practices and could easily take punitive action against your site if detected.

Conclusion

Everyone wants a simple answer for how to rank, but, of course, it’s never that simple. It’s more about learning the right approach to SEO and then being diligent about applying those concepts. While there are some tricks to ensure maximum visibility, at the end of the day, successful marketing efforts are largely about smart keyword research, genuinely engaging content and Off Page SEO tactics to compliment your SEO Strategy..