Welcome to Day 6 of the the How To Drive SEO Traffic To Your Website Challenge!
On Page SEO includes anything you do on your website or blog that improves the ability for search engines to choose your site based on customer searches as one of the potential sites that your audience should look at for information.
Basic On-Page SEO
Check out this list of elements and factors that will help improve your SEO.
Title Tags
If you have a title for a page or a blog post it is tagged with the H1 header tag. This tag signifies that this is an important word that is a title and the title is usually a search term
Headings & Subheadings
Within any one blog post you may also have H2, H3, H4 and so on tags for other headings and subheadings. For epic or long form content you may have other H1 tags besides the title of the post too. The use of these tags can make a lot of difference to the search engines.
URLs
Optimize your URLs to include keywords and be short and pretty. The entire title doesn’t have to be the URL. Instead, the first three keywords that you use should comprise your URL for that page or post.
Optimized Images
Images that have the right file names, the alt description information filled in, and so forth can also help tremendously with on-page SEO because naming the images right will make them show up in the search.
Body Text
Understand that body text is also important because your keyword should show up within the first 100 characters of body text after any heading is used. This helps confirm the topic that the post is about matches the title.
Responsive Design
If your site doesn’t work on all types of browsers it’s not responsive. Don’t have separate sites, ensure that your site, emails, and everything you send to your audience works on any divide.
Outbound Links
Using high-quality outbound links also signals to the search engines (and your audience) that your information is quality information that is accurate. If you use fishy links that have been shown to be false it can downgrade your search efforts.
Internal Linking
If you want the search engine bots to crawl more of your site include relevant posts in an internal linking program or create links to resources within your blog posts.
Site Speed
Make sure your site moves fast. If it doesn’t load fast find someone who can help figure out why. There is a lot of technical information about fast loading sites that is difficult to understand that has to do with compressing images, how many images you add, the types of images and so forth.
Keyword Synonyms
Remember to use keyword synonyms within your content too so that you don’t overuse one keyword. Even if you want a page to rank for a specific keyword, that’s in your title, headings, subheadings, and in the body text but you don’t want that one keyword phrase to comprise more than 2 percent of the overall content.
Social Sharing
Ensure that you make it easy for your audience to share what they love. Sharing is part of SEO too because it gives you external links to your content but the fact that the social sharing app is on your page makes it on-page SEO.
Long Form Content
Include long form (or epic) content that can behave as cornerstone content for your audience. When you do that it’s also important to use more H1 tags than just the title since the content is so long.
When you understand how on-page SEO works you can quickly understand how it also helps your audience outside of search engines. It makes your content easier to read, understand, and browse. It makes it easier to tell others about it and makes it overall more user-friendly than if you didn’t use any type of SEO at all.
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