You can generate high quality leads and profitable sales if a website is well-optimized through SEO. Searchers will not find your business if you do not maintain an effective on-page SEO strategy. As a business owner, you need to know some essential on-page ranking factors directly affecting the ability of your website to rank. Find out below the valuable on-page ranking factors which must be given enough attention when you optimize a website.
Content of Page
Creating highly informative content can take your website to a favorable position in search results. After all, the content of a page is the main purpose why people visit websites. But from the perspective of SEO, any content should be worth reading, interesting, and linkable while meeting the demands of the public through a realistic solution. It is important to create good content if you want your website to raise its authoritativeness within your industry.
Your content should be able to provide the right solution to the demands of prospective customers. Whether you prefer to produce explainer videos, blog posts, or captivating photos to showcase your expertise, what’s more, important here is that your business can provide answers to many questions of customers.
Your content is also considered exceptional if people share it on various online channels. Acceptable content also attracts search engines because they rank a website based on quality links, shares, page visits, and many other relevant online activities. Keep in mind that if customers are not linking to your content, your website will not generate organic traffic, thus making it unlikely for search engines to rank it well.
Title Tag
The title tag serves as a relevancy signal for search engines. It is intended to provide an accurate description of a website’s content in just a few words. It is important to optimize the title tag with targeted keywords since search engines display the title on the results page. Ideally, place the keyword in the first part of the title to get a good ranking.
URL
It is important to optimize the URL because the web address also sends relevancy signals to search engine crawlers. From an SEO perspective, you should give more importance to the category hierarchy by reflecting it in the URL. Whenever possible, try to remember the hierarchy of information in the URL so that the search engine can quickly determine the page’s relevance to search queries. This helps search engines sort out your page correctly based on purpose, objective, and searcher demand. Search engines will not notice the relevance of your carrier if the targeted keywords are not fully optimized in the URL structure.
Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
Page speed is a critical ranking factor for search engines. Search engines want to offer an outstanding user experience to customers, thus only displaying fast-loading websites while penalizing slow-loading pages like Google. Search engine algorithm updates emphasize page speed to ensure that the website performs well and information is quickly displayed to customers. You can use the Google Mobile Testing tool or Google Search Console to acquire fresh updates on your website’s performance, including page speed.
User Experience (RankBrain)
Google uses artificial intelligence through signals called RankBrain to rank websites better. Some valuable signs that influence your search engine ranking include click-through rate, bounce rate, and usage duration or dwell time. Click-through rate refers to the percentage of customers who clicked on your website when it appeared in search results. Meanwhile, bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave immediately once they don’t find the information they are looking for. The more time customers spend on your page, the more you will attract the attention of search engine crawlers because of the value your website provides to customers.
Suppose prospective customers arrive at your site and abandon it immediately. In that case, search engines will assume that the content of your page is not relevant to the search intent of the customer. A high bounce rate indicates that your page is irrelevant, and you may find it challenging to get to the top of the search results page. This has to do with optimizing keywords in various website elements, including headers and blog posts. If your pages are not generating enough page visits and conversions, consider going back through your keyword research process and targeting other relevant key phrases.
Links
It is not surprising that link building is one of the crucial SEO ranking signals. All websites are built on links, and the quality of the links your site generates is critical to search engines in giving you a favorable position in search results. The three important links that help your business rank include inbound links, outbound links, and internal links. A descriptive anchor text usually connects the three mentioned links.
With inbound links, you need links from other authoritative domains to establish the credibility of your website. Search engines use inbound links to determine how authoritative your website is and how relevant your content is. You will receive inbound links, also referred to as backlinks, when authoritative domains link you to one of their featured content. The goal here is to get many established sites to link back to your site while minimizing links coming from low-quality domains.
For building outbound links, you need to show that you are creating informative content to address the individual concerns of your customers. This involves linking to relevant and trustworthy domains in your industry. However, to receive quality outbound links, you should strive to produce well-researched content using reliable sources only from authoritative domains. It is also important that your content matches the search intent and offers value to the customers.
The inter-connectivity of your pages to one another is also considered a valuable ranking factor. If you have any page tied up to one of your authoritative pages, you can enhance its search engine ranking while encouraging page visitors to visit other relevant pages. As you develop new content, be sure to build reliable link connectivity where your web pages may support each other. If you add anchor text, include a short description to give the visitor an idea of what the link will provide.
SEO Best Practice
SEO best practices involve a set of tasks designed to improve the search engine ranking of a business. Some typical SEO tasks include keyword research, content creation, on-page optimization, and creating reliable backlinks. SEO is a continuous marketing process requiring regular page updating, website auditing, and page testing to see the campaign results.
Online searchers visit the website primarily because of the content of the pages.
A website is expected to provide valuable information to the public, aside from being organized in terms of hierarchy and relevance to any given search query. Content should contain specific answers to any topic or concern regarding various products, services, and expertise in different industries. With the help of targeted keywords, the website’s purpose should be reflected in critical areas such as title tag, meta description, page content, and URL and image alt text.
However, you should also not ignore the physical attributes of your website. Customers prefer an intuitive web interface, clean design, minimal color contrast, and more mobile responsiveness. Whenever creating content, consider making the page content unique, offering valuable bits of information to encourage target viewers or readers to follow your website or acquire your services. This will make your page worthwhile for search engines to rank it well.
Search engines will not find a website credible if you only use marketing language and focus the content only on promotion. Of course, searchers want the content to be helpful in their immediate concern, whether they are looking for the nearest business establishment or just searching for direct information. It is more important that customers understand the message you want to convey through your expertise.
Ideally Optimized Web Page
An ideal web page should be hyper relevant to a particular topic, product, or service. Your main subject should be reflected in the title tag, URL, image alt text, and some site elements that are critical to search engines. Consider providing unique content regarding your subject and try to specify it in different parts of the text, but avoid making it appear saturated. Whenever possible, link back to your category and sub-category pages to avoid generating broken links and a high bounce rate.
Your subsequent pages should be linked to the homepage via an image link that displays your website logo. Position targeted keywords at strategic points of the website that are valuable to page ranking, such as headers, meta descriptions, meta tags, text content, and other areas. Add your primary keyword to all pages, preferably at the top of the page, because search engines put weight on terms placed in the title tag. But you should avoid making duplicate content because search engines appreciate the individuality of the pages more, thus allowing your pages to receive an inclining page ranking.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is on-page SEO?
Focusing on the URL overall structure, on-page SEO is the marketing practice of optimizing multiple web pages using specific keywords in your niche to improve your website’s online presence. It has to do with different activities you do within your websites, such as updating individual pages, modifying your search marketing, and optimizing keywords in the title tag, meta tags, headers, image alt text, and text content.
What is on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
While on-page SEO focuses on-website page elements, off-page SEO has to do with the activities you undertake outside of your website. Off-page SEO involves external link-building efforts where you acquire exposure from other reputable domains. Aside from inbound links, off-page SEO tasks also include developing social media, PR, and brand awareness strategies.
Why is on-page SEO important?
If you want to be rewarded with a consistent page ranking by search engines, you have to take your on-page SEO plan seriously. Since search engine algorithms and consumer behavior continue to evolve, you should not ignore the importance of on-page factors that focus on user intent. If you can execute this properly, on-page SEO enables search engine crawlers to carefully discern your website’s genuine purpose and nature to rank the most relevant URLs that will be beneficial to consumers. Users will appreciate the directness and organization of your pages when you optimize them.
How long does it take for Google to rank your page?
Google can rank your website in hours, days, or even months, depending on the level of effort you put into your SEO campaign. The measurable results of your campaign will likely depend on several ranking factors such as search query popularity, level of competitiveness, geographical target, demographic coverage, and many other factors. When you create new content, many good SEO techniques can rank your page quickly without getting penalized by Google.
Owner at Be Visible Media
Dale Basilla is a content writer for various niches, SEO (Off-page & On-Page), and lives in a location where there are lots of beaches in the Philippines. He loves to watch anime, TV series (mystery and solving crimes), and movies. In his spare time, he plays chess, plays the guitar, and spend time with his ever busy girlfriend.