For ages we have been hearing that On-page SEO is all about keyword density and meta tags. People always focus on optimizing the titles, descriptions and other metas with their primary and LSI keywords, when it comes to On-Page SEO. But we all know this is not enough.
To all those who are looking for some practical approaches, we have brought an On-Page SEO checklist that will help generating more traffic from your every single content:
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Make the URLs SEO-Friendly: Google has admitted that the first 3-5 words of a URL are given more importance and so is with the short URLs. So it is wise to keep the URL short and don’t forget to include the target keyword in the URL. Make sure that URL is not ambiguous, such as;
www.hitaishin.com/p=789
Or long, such as;
www.hitaishin.com/5/6/18/service_cat=web/upcoming-website-development-trends-to-follow - Begin the Title with your Keyword: The most important on-page SEO factor is the title tag. The chances of getting your target keyword noticed by search engines are higher if it is put close to the beginning.
- Optimize the Title with Modifiers: Make use of the modifiers in your title. These are the words that work quite well for the long tail keywords. Some common examples of modifiers are “best”, “checklist”, “guide”, “2018” or similar words.
- Cover your Post title in H1 tag: The “headline tag” is more commonly known as H1 tag. There are some CMS like WordPress which by default code your blog post or page title under the H1 tag. Nothing to worry in that case. But make sure that your target keyword is there in the H1 tag.
- Impress with Multimedia: Interesting text is important but some compelling diagrams, images and videos decrease the bounce rate and increase the dwell time on your site which are the two crucial ranking factors related to user interaction. Multimedia adds to the value of the content and raises the chances that people will link to it.
- Choose H2 tags for Subheadings: Make sure that you add the target keyword not only in the URLs, title tag and headline but also in subheadings, at least once. Also, the subheadings must be in H2 tags.
- Introduce the Keyword in first 100 words: Your keyword must be found in the first hundred words of the content. However, this practice is very common but there are people who go very far with the intro and drop the keyword somewhere at the end. On the contrary, putting the keyword in beginning helps Google understand, what the page is about.
- Responsive design is one of the Keys: If you are an SEO then you should know that Google has been penalizing mobile unfriendly sites since 2015 and it is going to be way more severe in the coming days. The best and most common way to prevent this is Responsive Website Design. And you know what? Google recommends it.
- Outbound Links play an important role: Many of the SEOs are unaware of the usability of outbound links. They are a very simple white hat strategy to boost the traffic. Linking to high quality pages with similar content not just helps Google interpret the topic of your page, but it also tells Google that your content is rich in quality.
- Link to the Internal Pages: The best example of this can be Wikipedia. They never forget to add quality internal links in all of their posts. If not like them, you must at least add 3-5 internal links to your pages to ensure the flow of link juice through the website.
- Improve your Website Speed: As per Google’s statement, loading speed of your site is one of the crucial ranking factors. The standard time that a site should take to load is less than 4 seconds. People are more unlikely to re-visit a site that takes more than 4 seconds to load. To achieve this, you may choose structured data, compressed images or a faster hosting service.
- Spread LSI Keywords all over: Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords the synonyms that help search engine understand the page’s relevancy. Never forget to scatter them in your content.