Search engine optimization is an important part of any website. I would like to share some on page SEO tips and tricks with you today to help you improve your website’s visibility and performance in search engines.
Performing search engine optimization on your website includes a vast variety of tasks, and can be broken up into two different parts. The first is on page SEO, and the second is off page SEO. I am focusing on page SEO here since on page SEO is the first part of your search engine optimization strategy that should be dealt with. The on page SEO tips and tricks I am sharing with you today includes a variety of objectives and tasks you can use to better optimize your website, and increase your website’s search engine rankings.
Google has made quite a number of updates to its crawling algorithm over the past few years. This is why it’s so important to always ensure your website and all your web pages comply with the latest updates like Hummingbird, Panda, and Penguin. The on page SEO tips and tricks I’m sharing here will all help you to stay away from an update attack, and will help you to keep your rankings steady.
1. Optimize the speed of your website
The very first thing that you should do when performing on page SEO on your website is to optimize the speed of your website. If your website takes too long to load, it will affect your website’s search engine ranking in a negative way.
Start by checking the current speed of your website, and comparing your speed to the speed of your competitor’s website. The faster your website loads, the better. If you find that your website takes longer to load than your competitor’s website, then you should do some optimization to speed up the loading time of your website.
If your website is a custom HTML or PHP based website, you should start with your CSS and JS files. Use a script to minify them. This can reduce their size, which in return will make your website load faster. You also need to optimize the images on your website – try to compress them as much as possible without losing too much quality. Images are usually the largest parts of a website, and can affect the loading time of a website by a couple of seconds. Compressing your images will allow your website to load faster.
Websites based on a CMS system like WordPress is also quite easy to speed up. Simply install a cache plugin that will serve your website as static files. This will help you to increase the speed of your website, and decrease the loading time.
2. Include meta tags on your website
Even though meta tags are considered to be depreciated by some, it is still useful to use them on your web pages. The most important meta tag would be the title tag of your website – this is the text that shows up at the top of the browser bar when your website is accessed.
You should also include meta tags for keywords and a description on each of your web pages. This will give search engines an idea of what keywords you are targeted, and will allow Google and other search engines to display a relevant description for your website in search results.
3. Use tags on your web pages
When building a website, whether it’s a custom HTML or PHP based website, or powered by a CMS such as WordPress, you should always ensure you use the right tags on your web pages.
By using the right tags, search engines like Google will be able to index your pages easier, and your rankings can also increase. This is a big plus for on page SEO.
Start by using header tags where appropriate. Header tags include h1, which is the header 1 tag. This tag is used for main titles. Thereafter you need to use h2, h3, etc on your sub-header tags. This also helps you to break up content into different parts.
Images should also contain appropriate tags, such as title and alt. This will also allow your images to be indexed by search engines based on certain keywords.
4. Keyword-optimize your content
To rank in search engines, you have to target keywords. Think of keywords as search phrases – terms people will enter into search engines to find results.
Before publishing or writing any content for your website, start with keyword research. Decide on a topic, then search for relevant keywords and choose a keyword that will best suit your content. Be sure the keyword doesn’t have too much competition, and make sure there’s a large enough search volume for the keyword you choose.
Choosing long-tail keywords for some of your content pages is also a good idea.
You should include your target keyword in your pages. Include your target keyword in the title of your page, in the first header of your page and also in your content. Include your target keyword in the first sentence / paragraph of your content, a couple of times in the body, and once or twice in the ending / conclusion paragraph.
Conclusion
While building high authority backlinks to your website is an important part of search engine optimization, doing proper on page SEO is just as important. Without the proper on page SEO, you won’t be able to take advantage of all the benefits of search engine optimization. Take a moment and use these on page SEO tips and tricks I shared with you to check and ensure your website’s on page SEO is relevant and effective.
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