On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher within search engine results – the higher your web page appears in search engine results – the more relevant traffic your website will get – leading to more sales for you.
On-page SEO optimisation refers to the content (what can be seen on the web page) and the HTML source code (the coding behind the web page that is not normally seen to visitors).
On page SEO Ranking Factors Relating To The Content Of The Page.
Content of the page – written words and images
- The page should target a single keyword
- The keyword should be used in the H1 title
- The keyword should appear in the first paragraph of the content
- The content of your page should be valuable to your visitor – not just self-promoting – it should be worthy of sharing with others or linking to. EAT – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
- It should have unique, quality content that sets you above the crowd and makes you look like the expert.
- Most pages should have a least 1 original (not stock photo) good image on them that relates to the written content on the page – that uses the keyword in the alt text
- The content should be easy to read – use short sentences, use language suitable for your audience so that it is easily understood by your users.
- Make sure it is easy to navigate around the page and to other pages on your website.
- Ensure the layout makes the page easy to scan and important content elements are obvious – users rarely read everything on a page – they read what they are interested in – make that easy to find for them.
- Make sure the page loads quickly – this is especially important for mobile users – make sure you do not use huge image files that take ages to load.
- The page should be mobile responsive – changes to suit users on computers, tablets and mobiles – check it yourself on different devices just to make sure – make sure you can easily read the text on a mobile and easily click the buttons with your thumb.
- The content should be ‘sprinkled’ throughout the content.
- Secondary keywords are used in headline / body / title
- The content should contain related terms and phrases to the main keyword
- The keyword should be highlighted with bold / italics / font size
- Include sharing buttons so the users can share your webpage on social media sites etc
- Keyword descriptive anchors text is used on other pages to point to this page
- The content should link out to other pages on the website to relevant content
- The content should link out to other authoritative, trustworthy site (use nofollow tag)
On Page SEO Ranking Factors Relating To The HTML Code
- The keyword should be used in Alt tag to an image on the page
- The keyword should be used in the webpage URL, which should be short and descriptive – no longer than 90 characters
- The keyword should appear in the first words of the page title.
- Ensure that open graph tags are used for sharing to Facebook, Twitter etc
- The URL should be static – ie contains no dynamic parameters
- The page no more than 4 clicks away from any page on the site
- The page should not be redirected
- The page URL should be in the sites RSS feed
- The page should have a canonical URL specified and this should work
- The meta robots tag should allow crawling and indexing
- The robots.txt file should not block crawler access
- The page title tag should contain the keyword and be less than 75 characters long and more than 10 characters including spaces
- The meta description should contain the keyword and be less than 160 characters long – can be up to 300 characters long
- The meta description should inspire interest in SERPs and social to encourage clicks
- The URL should be in the site’s XML sitemap
- The page has a publisher tag
- The page should have schema markup
- The meta keywords tag should not be used
- The language tag should be set
- Headings should use tags H1 to H3 at least
- The page should not use Flash elements
- Think about using an AMP version of the website
- The viewpoint meta should be set
- The doctype should be set
- Character coding used should be set
- Google analytics should monitor the page
- A favicon should be used (this is site-wide)
- The page should be classified using an appropriate category
- The page should link back to home page
Information about search engine optimisation
On-Page SEO changes over time, so it is important to keep up with the latest changes.
This page will be updated regularly to keep you up to date and the individual items will be explained and expanded upon in our latest news section.
All articles relating to SEO on the website can be found here: https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/category/seo/
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