On-page SEO is one of the crucial processes for optimizing your website for search engines and ranking high in search results. It's something that we all need to get right, but it can be tricky if you're not familiar with it.
This involves writing content that includes the keywords you want to rank for and then implementing changes on your website so that Google knows what's important about each page, which helps it decide where to place your site in the search results when someone searches for those keywords.
A successful SEO strategy is a result of careful planning and implementing a sequence of steps.
Today, I'm going to share with you my ultimate on-page SEO checklist. This checklist will help you boost your site's rankings by optimizing your content and user experience.
The title of your web page is one of the most important factors for SEO. It should be descriptive and unique.
The very first thing you should do is to make sure that your page title tag uses the keyword or a variation of it.
Use keywords in the title but not more than twice, and make sure that it makes sense with what you're writing about because Google can sometimes penalize sites for having too many keywords if those words aren't relevant enough for that particular content.
Keep it below 70 characters, adding too many words can be distracting to readers.
Also, make sure each page has a different title tag for its respective content so Google knows which one is about what topic.
The meta description is a snippet of text that appears in search results for your website.
It is used to summarize the content of your web page and is a great way to increase click-through rate, especially if you have a compelling description that encourages people to click on your result and visit your site.
Meta descriptions should be unique for each page and should be relevant to the content on that page. Try to keep it between 150 and 160 characters long.
It is also used by Google to generate snippets for featured snippets, highlighted results, knowledge panels, and voice searches.
Because of their importance, you must take care when writing them. Use your keyword in your Meta description, preferably as close to the start of it as possible.
Make sure it's unique and compelling - there should be no duplicates across any website or page on a site. If there is one then it could affect your rankings negatively.
Meta keywords are a way to give Google a hint about what your page is about in its language.
They're one of the most underused on-page SEO elements, but they can help your pages rank if you know how to use them correctly.
Meta keywords don't have any direct impact on rankings, but they do signal intent and search intent in Google's algorithm.
By now, you've probably heard about how important it is to use your targeted keyword in a URL.
Why? Google loves to rank sites that have targeted keywords in their URLs. This also applies to the domain name, page title, and meta description.
It's also important to keep your URLs short so that users can easily share them on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
In past, Google used to rank websites high based on how many times a keyword appeared in the URL. Now, this is not true anymore.
But still, use it as a part of your SEO strategy because an important factor to get better rankings and traffic.
Canonicalization is a process that allows you to tell search engines which version of your page is the original.
If for example, you have two versions of a page with different URLs, but they're essentially the same, canonicalization tells Google which one it should index and display in its results.
The most common scenario for this type of issue is duplicate content, where multiple URLs are pointing to the same piece of content on your site.
For example, if you have an e-commerce website with a product page that links out to several different sizes or colors.
In this case, it's important to use canonicalization tags on all those pages to ensure that search engines know which page is original and avoid getting panelized for duplicate content.
Headings are an important part of on-page SEO, and they can be broken down into six different categories. The most important heading tag is the H1 tag, followed by the H2 tag, etc.
Use targeted keywords in H1 tags and H2 tags and other heading tags throughout your content.
The H1 tag is the most important on-page SEO element, which means that you should always use it to highlight the most important point of your content.
The secondary importance of H2 tags lies in their ability to break up long blocks of text into smaller chunks but they can also help improve rankings by highlighting particular points within a page (e.g., "This section will show you how to…").
The more relevant a heading is to your target keyword, the more likely it will help you rank for that keyword as well!
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and refers to the practice of using related keywords in your content.
LSI allows Google, Bing, and other search engines to understand what it is you're trying to say about a topic. If a search engine can't understand what you're saying, it won't rank your website as high or worse could rank it for a completely different topic.
Many SEOs forget this but try as much as possible to use variations of a keyword when writing content, this is extremely important if you want your pages to rank higher.
Images and other non-text content are important for SEO.
For images, the alt text should be descriptive and unique for each image.
It should also be 150 characters or less, readable by screen readers, and semantically relevant to the page content.
Semantic relevance is important because it tells search engines what your images are about, so they can rank them appropriately in search results pages.
For example, if you have an article about ‘how to make one-pot pasta’ and you have an image of a pot with pasta inside it, then you’d want your alt text to include something like: “One Pot Pasta Recipe”
The size of your images can also affect their rankings in Google's index, the larger the file size, the slower it will load.
Make sure that all of your images have been optimized according to Google's recommendation, generally no larger than 200kb per file is good unless necessary, for example, if this is an image with lots of details.
Using compression tools like TinyPNG and JPEGmini can help reduce file sizes without losing quality too much.
Finally, remember that each page needs its own set of unique filenames with descriptive keywords within them.
Video SEO is the process of optimizing your videos for search engines.
It’s important because Google and other search engines can display rich snippets in SERPs when they know about your video content.
The first step in video SEO is adding a sitemap for your videos, you can do this using Yoast SEO or Google Search Console.
This tells Google about the individual URLs for each of your videos, which allows them to index them correctly and show them in searches.
The second step is making sure that each video has unique metadata e.g., title, and description.
A good rule of thumb here is to use schema markup on every page with a video embedded on it – this will help ensure that Google understands what type of content you’re providing and how you want to be represented in their SERPs
Internal links are the key to a successful website. They can help you drive traffic from one page to another, and if those pages have your target keywords on them, it will greatly help with your SEO ranking as well.
So how do you build an internal linking strategy?
First, think about what topics your website covers.
Next, make sure each page contains a few links back to other related pages on your site, and don't forget external links!
Linking to other pages on your website is one of the easiest and most effective ways you can increase your rankings in Google.
This also helps users navigate the site more easily and provides a good user experience.
For example, if you are writing on email marketing, then linking it to another article on “how to create welcome email series” or “types of email that can be sent to your email list” or “best email marketing tools” can greatly help readers to navigate to other topics that they might be interested in.
Google announced in 2018 that it would be switching from its traditional web index to one based on mobile usage.
This means that even if you have a responsive site - one where content can be viewed across different devices - your site may not rank as well as it could if you don't cater specifically to mobile users too.
This includes making sure your navigation options are simple and easily accessible on smaller screens, which often leaves out dropdown menus.
Ensuring there aren't any large images that might affect load times.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a framework that allows you to create a mobile-optimized version of your website. It is a free tool that you can use on your website, and there are many benefits to using AMP for both mobile and desktop.
Improved user experience as it loads quickly
Easier for search engines to crawl and rank content
And better user engagement due to faster loading times
Page speed is a ranking factor for Google.
Page speed has a direct impact on your bounce rate and conversion rate. A slow page will have higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates, which hurts your site’s ranking in search results.
You can improve the performance of your website by optimizing images, reducing file sizes, and compressing content.
To optimize images you should use plugins like WP Smush Pro or EWWW Image Optimizer that compress image files without affecting their quality too much.
You should also check if you are using WordPress caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache which improves page load time by caching static files like CSS stylesheets and JavaScript scripts so they don’t need to be loaded every time a visitor visits your website
Longer content is one of the best things you can do to boost your rankings.
Studies have shown that longer pieces of content are more likely to be shared on social media, which means they'll spread around the web like wildfire.
Additionally, Google wants websites with useful and engaging information at their fingertips; so when you create a piece of content that's longer than your average blog post length, which is usually between 600-1,000 words, you're increasing your chances of being ranked higher in search engines.
Plus, longer pieces of content tend to go viral because people love reading them especially if you add in some great takeaway points at the end or some unique resources or ideas related to what they just read.
If you want to get more clicks from Google, rich snippets and schema markup are two tools you should consider using.
A rich snippet is a tool that allows search engines to display information about your site in the SERPs.
For example, if your business sells shoes, a rich snippet can be used to display information like price range and size options.
Schema markup is another type of tool that allows you to specify what kind of content you have on-page (like reviews or product descriptions).
Schema markup helps people find relevant pages on Google when they search for products or services related to yours—and it’s also great for SEO!
It’s important to note that not all of these tips will be relevant for every site; there are plenty of other factors involved in ranking well.
But if you follow this checklist and have already implemented other strategies as well, surely your site will rank higher than ever before