When we consider on-page SEO, the developers and designers may have heard a lot about meta tags, keyword density, and naming conventions, etc. However, it is important for the website makers to gain some practical strategies for using SEO elements of your website effectively.

The below guide is designed with emphasize on on-page SEO elements to be considered for preparing top performing websites in 2019. As we know already, it is not about trading value for better and also not to deceive the users and search engines to increase traffic. Your efforts and quality get paid overtime, and you stay on top as long as you don’t break the SEO’s golden rules.

Offer value

Unlike old time where we used to a lot of things like keyword stuffing and link building etc. to grab SEO benefits, now the foremost rule is to offer pure value. In order to better rank on search engines, you need to provide them with clear signals of why your pages are better over your competitors.

There are many strategies used by the SEO specialist who practices the best tactics to achieve better ranking for their clients and consistently stays on top. The primary concept to keep in mind while working on SEO is that the search engines tend to rank the most important pages among the most relevant websites on top. For a typical search query, search engines will first pick the most relevant pages and then display in an order according to their notoriety and importance.

Workflow of on-page optimization

On-page search engine optimization is about creating relevant signals for a web page against the most relevant search queries or keywords. With a bit of experience, we can deduce the rules which are essential for better performance and prioritize our work to increase our chances.

Keyword research

Before you develop content for your website, even the meta description, title, or image naming, one should be aware of which problem you have to address. You should know what people are looking for and they are longing to plan this well. Do thorough research to see which expressions related to your content have most search volume.

You may next analyze the competition by Googling these top keywords and identify the titles, URLs, meta description, and the headlines which yield the top results. As New Jersey SEO specialists suggest is essential to have good URLs, descriptions, and titles as these make the snippet of search results.

Using keywords

A search engine optimization specialist knows the importance of weaving a web page around a group of relevant keywords.

  • A super-keyword

The primary focus of optimization should be around one super keyword and various connected keywords as synonyms and variations of super-keyword.

  • Good amount of text

The page you wish to optimize for the search queries needs to have a decent volume of text, which is relevant and coverts the topic informatively.

  • Keyword family

You should include relevancy signals in terms of keywords in the targeted family in order to avoid competition among your own different pages. This is also called keyword cannibalization.

  • Keyword variations

As over optimization can be penalized, it is a good idea to use keywords variation. This will help the developers to cover semantic field more effectively with the help of long-tail keywords. It is also found that longer terms are better to short terms in terms of SEO. So, prioritize the keyword based on estimated search volumes and use meaningful keywords variations.

URL

URL must describe the context of the web page as closely as possible. The users, as well as the search engine crawlers, need to understand what a page is all about by looking at the URL. Suffix part of the URL can be a short summary of the web page. The prefix of URL address should also provide content. When planning for URLs, follow the below requirements.

  • Ideal URL length is below 100 characters
  • Try to include a super-keyword if possible
  • Separate the works in URL with dashes (-).
  • Be as descriptive and as meaningful in terms of URL.
  • Make the URLs also memorable to the users
  • Avoid keyword stuffing
  • Avoid any dynamic parameters like sessionID, sortBy, etc.
  • Avoid using words without any search potential.
  • Avoid any special characters than dashes.
  • Prepare shareable URLs.

Page title

The page title of your webs page appears on top of the browser and also as the headline of the search engine result page. Now, social networking sites also use it to represent the post when someone shares it. For all these reasons, it is essential to prepare excellent page titles to increase the “clickability” rate. Try to find a perfect balance between SEO as well as user-friendliness while preparing page title. Some essential tips are:

  • Try to put the keywords closer to the beginning part of the title
  • Ideal character length is 50 to 60
  • Make each title unique
  • Prepare compelling and appealing titles
  • Include brand name at the end portion if possible.
  • Avoid any words with no search potential
  • Avoid stuffing of keywords
  • Avoid any special characters

Title tag

Next to page title, the title tag is the next summary of the page. The tags contain document definition which spreads across the internet, including the web browser tab. Title tag elements tell the search engines and users about what the particular page is all about. Make the title tag most specific and concise by reflecting the actual content of the page.

Headings

Heading are usually implemented at HTML as H1, H2, H3… H6 etc., but nowadays the search engine algorithms are better CSS and JavaScript. In this case, headings can be just implemented as anything else with SEO value. However, headings is a classic scenario as far as its size matters.

Search engine spiders tend to pay good attention to the terms used in headings, so these should always be made accurate and perfect. The H1 tag is the biggest headline which appears on the top-center of a web page. It should be made a “synonym” of the title tag. There is no limitation in terms of character count on this but never make it too long.

Apart from the above aspects, some other key aspects to consider for SEO are to avoid keyword stuffing, meta descriptions, image titles, image alt texts, avoidance of flash content, etc. The golden rule is to make a website the most user-friendly in order to get better SEO value too.