Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that involves using different techniques and strategies to improve the ranking of a website in the search engine results pages. This is done by modifying both Off-Page and On-Page SEO factors. The On-Page factors are those that are contained within your site itself. They include the title tag, meta description, header tags, internal links and external links, keyword density, image optimization, etc.
Title tag
The title tag is the most important of the On-Page SEO factors, and it appears in search results. The acceptable title tag will be descriptive and unique to each page of your website. It also must not be more than 60 characters long.
Take the keyword you want to rank for, then use it at the beginning of your title tags. If you have multiple keywords you want to rank for, then use them as well!
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the snippets of text that appear underneath a search result in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The meta description should be 160 characters or less and describe what the page is about.
It’s important to note that the meta description is not visible when you are on a webpage. It only appears as part of the SERP snippet.
The following guidelines can help you create great meta descriptions:
- Be relevant – A good rule of thumb is that your meta description should be relevant to what users see when they click on your search result.
This means that if someone searches for “pizza restaurants near me” but your website sells pizza ovens, don’t include “cheap pizza ovens” in your description!
If someone searches for “best pizza delivery near me,” don’t include information about how much dough costs per pound because it doesn’t matter yet (and besides, who cares how much dough costs?).
In short, make sure your meta description reflects what content users will actually see once they arrive on the page.
Header tag (h1, h2, h3)
- H1 tags are the most important but use h2 and h3 tags too.
Use H1 tags for the main title of each page. It should be relevant to the content on that page, but not necessarily an exact description of it (e.g., “SEO for Dummies” would be a bad choice for a post about how to use SEO).
- H2 tags are used for subheadings or secondary titles within your text; they’re helpful when you want to break up long blocks of text or have more than one thing on a single page that needs its heading (e.g., “Essential On-Page SEO factors” could be broken down into “The Evolution from Keywords To Content Marketing” and “On-Page Optimization Tips For Beginners”)
- H3 tags are used for subtitles—they’re smaller than headings, so use them sparingly!
Internal links and external links
The next factor to consider is internal links and external links. Internal links are the links that point to other pages on your site, and external links are the ones that lead somewhere else (like to another website).
Internal links are more powerful than external ones, so you should use them as much as possible.
When linking internally, keep in mind that a good rule of thumb is to link between two pages if they have similar topics or if they relate directly to one another in some way.
For example, let’s say you have an article about toothpaste and how it’s made: you could include an internal link at the end of your article that leads back up to it since many people will be interested in reading more about toothpaste after learning how it’s made!
Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase is used concerning the total number of words on a page.
For example, if you have a landing page for your website and you’re writing it as an SEO experiment, you would want to use keywords throughout the text and in each title tag, meta description, and heading tag.
You don’t want too much repetition because that will look unnatural; instead, focus on using them naturally by creating sentences that include related terms without sounding like an algorithm wrote them (for example, “SEO”).
Keyword density can be tricky when finding a balance between keyword stuffing and not using enough keywords. If there are too many instances where one specific word appears multiple times within proximity on your page—like every other sentence containing “keyword 1″—then Google may penalize your site because they think it looks spammy!
On the other hand, if there aren’t enough instances of your keywords, then Google won’t pick up on them when crawling through all those pages (which means no visits!).
This is where tools like Yoast SEO come into play. They help guide writers towards writing more natural content while also making sure their pages rank higher than others in search results after being published online!
Image optimization
- Ensure the alt text for your images is descriptive, unique, and matches the title tag.
- Screen readers use the alt attribute of an image to describe an image to visually impaired users. The alt tags should match the title tags if you want them to be acceptable. If you have 20 images on your page with a single title tag, then use 20 different images that have related but unique alt text descriptions.
- You must keep in mind the character limit for text when creating or editing a website. Google will only show 200 characters in their search results (and some other search engines). Your content needs to be concise and readable as well, so don’t forget this!
URL structure
The URL is the address of your web page. It should be descriptive and unique, easy to read, easy to remember, and easy to share.
Conclusion
In this article, we explored the key On-Page SEO factors that will help your site rank well. We looked at what they are, why they’re important, and how to implement them into your site. Although the number of on-page ranking factors is well known, new ones are being discovered all the time.
More importantly, website owners often overlook or underestimate some of these factors, thinking that they won’t matter much for their search engine rankings. If you want to show up high in the results pages, take advantage of all of these factors.
