12 Essential On-Page SEO Factors You Need to Know

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO (also referred to as “on-site” SEO) is that the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your program rankings. Where your website appears in program results pages is decided by a variety of ranking factors including site accessibility, page speed, optimized content, keywords, title tags, etc. It’s stuff that you simply have control over and may change on your website. 

On-Page SEO Checklist:

1). Title Tags

Put your targeted keywords within the title tag of every page on your site. Many best practices enter writing an efficient title tag.

Limit your title tags to 55-60 characters (including spaces)

Push the keyword closer to the start of the title (ONLY if it sounds natural)

Don’t stuff your keywords

Include brand at the top of the title tag, separated by a pipe bar (|)

 Example: “India SEO | Digital knowledge”

2). Headings (H1)

Headings are usually the most important words on the page, and for that reason, search engines give them a touch more weight than your other page copy. it's an honest idea to figure your target keywords into the headings of every website but confirm you accurately reflect your page’s great content.

Make sure your H1s limited to at least one per page, all other headers are H2 or H3

3). URL structure

Put keywords into your URLs if possible. However, don't go changing all of your current URLs with great care they need keywords in them. You shouldn’t change old URLs unless you propose redirecting your old ones to your new ones. Consult knowledgeable before doing this.

Label your directories and folders in a way that creates sense for users

Don’t repeat keywords in your URL quite once. Keywords are

helpful, but overdoing it affects user experience.

Example: /best-socks-comparison-best-socks-best-socks?

Keep URLs as short as possible

4). Alt text for images

Any content management system should allow you to feature something called “alt text” to all or any images on your website. This text isn’t visible to the typical visitor–alt text employed by screen reader software to assist blind internet users in understanding your images' content. Search engines similarly crawl images, so inserting some relevant keywords while accurately describing the image will help search engines understand your page’s content.

Writing an alt attribute for every image keeps your website in compliance with WCAG (Web Content

Accessibility Guidelines). Keep the subsequent things in mind when writing alt text:

Thoroughly describe the image in 8-10 words

Include your targeted keyword where it sounds most natural

Include, if relevant, a geo-locator (e.g., Chicago)

5). Fast-loading pages, or page load speed

Google wants to assist its users to find what they’re trying to find as quickly as possible to supply the simplest user experience. Therefore, optimizing your pages to load faster helps your site rank higher within the search results.

Google features a tool called PageSpeed Insights which will analyze your site on both mobile and desktop. then suggest tips to optimize page speed. There also are several quick fixes to eliminate whatever is bogging your site down and slowing your page load time. Key site speed factors to consider:

• Minimizing HTTP requests
• Making sure server reaction time is
• Setting browser caching to a minimum of every week or longer
• Enabling Gzip compression
• Having image sizes under 100kb (.jpg, .png, .gif)
• Placing all CSS in an external sheet 
• Minifying all JS, CSS and HTML
• Prioritizing above the fold content loading

6). Mobile Friendly

In recent years, Google has prioritized mobile page loading speed as a key ranking metric. 

How does one know if your website is mobile-friendly? you'll connect the site’s URL into this test, and

Google will tell you ways friendly the web site is predicated on its current algorithm. 

Beyond mobile page load, website design must think about the mobile user experience. a method to see and optimize website layout for mobile is to get a Mobile Usability Report which identifies any issues your website may have. 

7). Page Content

The content on your pages must be useful to people. If they look for something too specific to seek out your page, they have to be ready to find what they’re trying to find similarly crawl images. It must be easy to read and supply value to the top user. Google has various ways to measure if your content is beneficial.

• Aim for a minimum of 500 words of copy. Although there's no exact formula for a way many words a page should have, Google seems to prefer when a page features a lot of great content surrounding your targeted keywords
• Copy must be unique to every page, not duplicated from other pages on your site, and will directly address your visitors’ search queries
• Push the keyword closer to the start of the title, but as long as it sounds natural

8). Schema Markup

Adding structured data helps Google better understand the content of a page. Google also uses certain sorts of structured data to display “rich results” in SERPs like a recipe with start ratings or step-by-step instructions with a picture carousel. These rich results often appear at or near the highest of SERPs and usually have higher click-through rates than normal organic listings.

Google prefers structured data to use schema.org vocabulary and recommends using JSON-LD format. They also provide a handy Rich Results Test tool to see your code. While there is a spread of the way to feature structured data to your website (plugins, Google Tag Manager, etc.), it’s always best to urge knowledgeable involved if you’re not comfortable writing code.

Check out Google’s guide on structured data and rich results here.

9). Social Tags

Having your content shared on social tells Google that folks find your content relevant, helpful and reputable. Not every page on your site is share-worthy, but you'll optimize the pages that are with these tips:

• Make sure you've got Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards installed
• Make it easy with “tweet this quote” links, or social share buttons for every post

10). Core Web Vitals

User experience is vital to a website’s long-term success. In spring 2020, Google unveiled Core Web Vitals, a standard set of signals that they deem “critical” to all or any users’ web experiences.

The purpose of those signals is to quantify the user experience with an internet site, from page visual stability and cargo time to interactive experiences. 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures perceived page loading speed and marks the purpose at which the bulk of the page content has downloaded.

First Input Delay – quantifies user experience of a user’s initial engagement with a page. 

Cumulative Layout Shift – quantifies the quantity of layout shift on visible page content and measures the visual stability of a page. It’s usually caused by images without dimensions, dynamically injected content, web fonts causing FOIT/FOUT, and other embeds added without dimensions. 

To check your LCP score, access your Google PageSpeed Insights and confirm your page hits LCP within 2.5 seconds. To accomplish this, remove unnecessary third-party scripts that will be running, upgrading your web host, activating “lazy loading” so page elements load only as users scroll down the page, and take away any large page elements by slowing it down.

One of the only ways to optimize cumulative layout shift is to feature height and width dimensions to every new site element. Also, avoid adding new content above existing content on a page (unless responding to user interaction).

11). Page Experience

Google is functioning on a replacement ranking signal (likely to return call at 2021) that prioritizes websites with positive user experiences.

The ‘page experience signal’ will contains Core Web Vitals, plus mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. 

According to Google, “optimizing for these factors makes the online more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this may contribute to business success online as users grow more engaged and may transact with less friction.”

12). Internal Linking

Linking internally to other pages on your website is beneficial to visitors and it's also useful to look at engines.

When adding internal links, confirm to possess relevant anchor text. Anchor text is that the clickable text during a hyperlink (usually indicated by blue font colour and underline). To optimize your anchor text, confirm the chosen word or phrase has relevancy to the page you’re linking to. 

On-page SEO ensures that your site is often read by both potential customers and program robots. With good on-page SEO, search engines can easily index your sites, understand what your site is about, and simply navigate the structure and content of your website, thus ranking your site accordingly. As a best practice, confirm your page content includes 1-3 relevant internal links.

More Resources

• What Is SEO?
• 15 Ways to Increase your website traffic 
• 15 Things are not page ranking factors