On Page Seo Tips
How to Improve On page SEO
On-page seo simply means the part of search engine optimization that you carry out in your own website/webpage. For example, everything that you do to make your content and website attractive and useful as well as for a superior user experience counts as on page SEO. Offpage SEO is just the opposite of it and is carried out outside the website. Onpage seo optimizations play a critical role in helping you content rank and are crucial to making your overall SEO strategy successful.
Search engine optimization has changed a lot over the previous five years and one page SEO has become very critical to helping your website rank. For example, your navigation, page speed, title tags, heading tags, meta description and the content quality, all are very important to help your website rank higher in searches. Without these things a good backlink profile would not be very effective at driving your website higher in search results.
Here are some on page SEO tips to help you rank your content higher in searches.
Install a good SEO Plugin:
First of all, if you are using Wordpress, you need to have a good SEO plugin. A good SEO plugin goes a long way to help you create good quality content and take care of the technical aspects of SEO as well as optimize pages for ranking higher and overcome any issues that might affect your website SEO negatively.
There are quite a few good SEO plugins that you can use on your Wordpress website:
Yoast SEO: The leader among the SEO plugins. Most used and most popular. Free versions includes most features you need and there are additional content optimization features included with the pro version.
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Rank Math SEO: Packs a lot of power in its free version. Includes features some of which are not included even in Yoast.
AIOSEO: Another popular wordpress SEO plugin. Highly effective and feature rich Wordpress SEO plugin.
SEO Framework: Simple and lightweight SEO plugin, easy to use and includes all the essential SEO features.
There are more SEO plugins in the repository including Squirrly and others and you can use the one you consider most suitable for your needs. To install any of these plugins on your website, just go to the plugin repository, search for the plugin, install it and activate it.
An SEO plugin makes a lot of tasks easy for you. For example, schema generation, automatic meta descriptions, title tag generation, sitemaps and several more features are included in the SEO plugins. You can also optimize your robots.txt file using the SEO plugin and plugins like Yoast or Rank Math can provide AI based suggestions to help you optimize your content to rank it higher. An SEO plugin is a must for Wordpress users expecting to get their content to rank higher in searches.
Optimize Title tags:
Title tags of your posts also play a critical role in terms of SEO and will affect your search rankings as well as click through rates. The search engines such as Google use these title tags to understand what a page is about. Including the focus keyword in the title tag is therefore recommended. However, being creative with the title tag is even more important since creative titles get clicked more.
It is important to optimize the length of the title tag since the length that can be shown in search results is fixed. If you do not include the central focus on your page in the tidal, you might find it difficult to rank for the specific keyword. However, rather than just stuffing keywords in the title you should try to write creative titles. If you are using Yoast SEO plugin, you can edit the titles and change them according to your need.
Write Good Meta Descriptions:
You can add meta descriptions automatically to your web pages using a seo plugin. However, that’s not a best practice since plugins mostly depend on excerpts for meta descriptions or they will show the first few lines as meta descriptions. It is recommended to write your own descriptive meta descriptions for each page.
Adding optimized meta descriptions to your pages offers some important benefits. They help you create a better impression on users and drive higher click through rate. Users will take a look at the search results and the snippet under the title. A snippet that is well written and contains some of the content they are searching for is more likely to get clicked. So, write balanced and descriptive meta descriptions for search engines.
Optimize your headings
Headings are used to organize content and provide users a better experience. It also helps your content rank higher. Google checks out the headings (h1,h2,h3,h4 etc) to learn what your content is about. However, rather than using headings only to insert or stuff keywords, it is important to properly use them to convey the central idea of a paragraph or paragraphs that follow. It helps both the search engines and users understand the relevance of your content. Adding headings in Wordpress is very easy as you can use the headings Gutenberg block to insert any heading wherever you need inside the wordpress posts.
Write Long form content
Generate comprehensive long form of content like long guides to rank higher. While content length does not have a direct relationship with ranking, useful long form content can still drive your rankings higher and also help you establish your authority over certain topics.
Long form of content also offers another critical benefit. Apart from your focus keywords, you can also likely rank for several long tail keywords. On several well known websites, you will commonly come across such long form content. When writing long form content, it is critical to ensure that you are writing good quality and useful content and not just stretching the topic or stuffing the post with lots of keywords only. This strategy can be particularly useful when you are writing tutorials or explanatory posts. However, it will not work in all cases since a news website would need to focus on the news and not on the length of the content.
Other Optimizations:
Make sure your pages load faster:
Speed is now a critical ranking factor and unless your pages load really fast, chances of ranking on the first page of Google search for specific keywords will reduce. You must optimize your website to load faster. While good quality content is important for ranking higher, it is also critical to provide a good user experience. Slow loading websites provide a poor user experience and that can lead to higher bounce rate. Use fewer plugins on your website since some plugins can slow down your website.
Use a good caching plugin like WP Rocket or W3TC, optimize your images by compressing them and use modern formats like Webp which load faster. Use a good hosting provider since the quality of your hosting can have a strong impact on speed and search results. Some of the most recommended hosting providers for Wordpress include Cloudways, Hostwinds, Kinsta and WP Engine. Apart from that, use a lightweight theme. You must also use object caching for faster load times.
Interlink content:
Internal linking of pages is a very good practice in terms of SEO and helps you content get discovered faster. It also helps increase page value and the pages that are linked more often internally are more likely to rank higher in searches.
Interlinking content also helps engage users and higher user engagement is critical in terms of SEO. Internally linked pages often offer extra content on a topic and reduce bounce rate. So, wherever relevant, you must link to your internal pages. There is also a good plugin called Link Whisper to help you internlink content wherever fit.
Use nofollow and sponsored attributes for external links:
You should not dofollow all the external links on your pages. It is good to link to external content wherever relevant or essential. If you are referencing content from an external page, you must link to it and you must not be afraid of linking to external content from your website. However, if you are not certain about a particular link, then you should add a no follow attribute to it which will ensure that Google does not relate your website with the external page. Similarly, you can use sponsored content attribute for links in sponsored articles or articles written by guest authors.
Fix broken links:
Another critical thing to do is to fix the broken links on your website. Use an online tool like borkenlink checker or a plugin to check out the broken links and remove or fix them. Broken links can lead to a surge in the number of 404s on your website.
Fixing them will lead to a superior user experience and also lead to reduced bounce rate. Broken links can have a negative impact in terms of SEO. Sometimes when we remove old content, we forget to remove the links from other pages and Google keeps crawling them causing 404 errors. Cleaning the broken links will prevent Google from crawling these urls and help you manage your crawl budget.
Conclusion:
SEO has transformed a lot over the previous three to five years and grown a lot complicated. It is difficult to find a sure fire way to manage to rank higher for each keyword in the searches. There are still a few things that bloggers need to be cautious about to maintain their rankings and grow them.
Wordpress SEO requires the use of a good seo plugin because there are several SEO related basic tasks that cannot be made possible without the use of a plugin. Fixing your title tags and headings and internal linking can have a solid positive impact in terms of SEO. Long form content also works in a large number of cases.
However, it is also important to make sure that your site is fast and provides a good user experience. Regular clean up is also essential such as removing old content, fixing broken links, checking out 404 errors, removing duplicate content etc is also important for maintaining your rankings.
Make sure that there are no sitewide quality issues. Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to conduct an SEO audit and fix any issues that might hurt websites SEO.
At last, you must focus on creating high quality and useful content and not just stuff keywords into the articles. High quality content is still at the center of the SEO and forms the most important pillar of onpage SEO.
Suggested Reading
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