How to do On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is one of the essential aspects of SEO exercise that website owners do to rank on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. This involves keyword research, SEO-friendly article writing, and some other aspects too.

We have already covered topics of keyword research, and SEO-friendly article writing in separate articles. In this article, we are going to cover several miscellaneous on-page SEO points that you should keep in mind before publishing your article.

Let’s begin.

What should I keep in mind before publishing my article?

So, you have done your keyword research and wrote an awesome article targeting one or two keywords. So far so good. However, do not be in a hurry to publish it. There are a few more things that you need to do.

Post Permalink

Use properly formatted Post permalinks (i.e. URLs). They should be clean and understandable. For this you should use:

• Lower case characters
• Dashes/Hyphens to separate the words (rather than underscore, space, etc.)
• Meaningful words

Also, make sure that you use keyword rich URLs/permalinks.

Short URLs rank better in Google. However, it is not necessary to drop stop words from permalink. ‘Stop Words’ are words like the, a, is, with, etc. which some people omit because they think it makes their URLs shorter and cleaner (including Niel Patel). But that’s not always the case. Removing stop words can actually hurt your SEO.

Warning

Avoid changing your permalinks. It is the address of your article on the web. It will impact your SEO efforts drastically. So, double check the permalink twice before publishing the article.

Though you may change the main heading (title, h1) of your article a few times if it’s not ranking well. Avoid doing this with the permalink though.

If you have to, then use 301 redirect from old URL to new one, as suggested by Yoast plugin too.

Meta description

Meta description is for users only and not Google bots. So, you may or may not use your keywords here. Rather focus more on enhancing your click through rate (CTR).

Google may or may not show your meta description - it reserves the right to do so. It may rather grab some text from your article, say the first paragraph and show it in SERPs.

Also, if google recognizes your root keyword in meta description then it may show it in bold in the meta description in SERPs.

In my Yoast plugin I am using Excerpt for meta description, so it automatically fills in the meta description for me. I do not manually fill-in the meta description to save some time. Though in some cases you may also do this manually.

Some SEO experts don’t even bother to fill meta description, as Google stopped reading it years ago. In such a case, Google uses our post heading as post title and first para as meta decription. So, just focus on writing an awesome heading of the article and a fetching introduction. In both of these areas, your focus should be more on improving your CTR, rather than stuffing keywords (in other words, focus more on end users than search engine spiders).

Author and Website Information

For search engines author information is another signal that may enhance the overall trust of a web page. More trust amounts to more boost from the search engines, which will eventually lead to more visitors on your website.

Also, do provide a detailed ‘About us’ page that explains the purpose of the website, your policies, etc., along with a Privacy policy and Disclaimer page.

It would be prudent to add a ‘Contact us’ page too.

Alt Text of Images

Do ensure that you add alt text in your images (including your keyword), decribing the content of the image. Search engine spiders often read these alt-texts to understand the content of the post/page.

Images get ranked faster, as in image tab of google search hundreds of images are shown all at once.

Links

Do provide relevant internal and external links in your article.

Anchor text is not relevant anymore, make it natural, i.e. don’t stuff it. On submitting your page on search console, crawler will not only read your text but also go inside any anchor text/hyperlink and read that linked page.

If you are putting many anchor links in your article, each should link to different webpages and not the same webpage - just like in Wikipedia each anchor text is linked to a different webpage.

Make sure no article in the site should be more than two clicks away from the home page. A good idea is to have your blog feed showcasing the posts in reverse chronological order (i.e. recent posts section) in the home page, or atleast give a link to the blog feed in the home page somewhere - in footer, menu, etc.

Use external links to authority sites liberally. Make sure that age of external domain is more than 6 months in case you select dofollow option, just to ensure that it has some authority. Google wants to see content that references other content of a similar standard.

No follow

This is used in case you wish that the crawlers do not go inside your hyperlinks. By default every link on a page and post is ‘dofollow’ in Yoast plugin. So, you will have change it to ‘nofollow’ yourself.

It is also a good practice to make your website easily navigable, especially if there are sections and sub-sections on your website. For this purpose, you may provide multiple menus or breadcrumb menu in your website, along with well-categorized categories and tags.

Social Media Buttons

Add social sharing buttons either at the end or floating on the side of your post. There are two major types of social media buttons:

• Social media buttons that allow the readers to follow, subscribe, or like your social media account by just clicking the button on your website.
• Social media buttons that allow the readers to share your post/page by taking them to their corresponding social media account.

You may use a decent mix of them as per your priorities and internet marketing strategy.

Ads - Number and Placement

Putting in too many ads may repel some readers.

Especially, there should not be too many ads above the fold (i.e. the area that is visible to users without having to scroll vertically), otherwise your post/page will not rank high in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Do not use content blocking pop ups. They are really bad for SEO and are irritating for many visitors.

Some more miscellaneous On-page SEO points

Apart from the above points, you should also keep in mind a few other things.

• Responsiveness of posts/pages: Work on mobile and tablet versions of the page/post too, and not just the desktop version. For this, you may use an online tool, such as websiteresponsivetest.com, or just use the Developer Tools in Chrome or Mozilla web browser.
• Blog Comments: They should have the nofollow tag to keep spammers away. We should reply to each comment, and block spam.
• Delete underperforming pages, as they may have bad impact on SEO. However, different experts have varied views on this.

Winding Up

So, once you have:

• Done your keyword research,
• Wrote an awesome article keeping in mind the SEO aspects, and
• Done other on-page SEO stuff mentioned in this article,

you are now ready to publish your article. Best of luck!

Though keep in mind that apart from on-page SEO, off-page SEO is as important, e.g. link building, Social Media Marketing (SMM), E-mail marketing, etc.

To graduate a niche site into authority site, make sure of the following:

• Regular content, be it posts or YouTube videos, etc.
• Build an email list.
• Cultivate a community of people - will be very handy when you launch an info product down the line, or decide to hire and train writers later on.
• Put a page or a form in the website itself wherein you may ask visitors if they are interested in writing on that particular niche. This way you will get awesome writers who really are interested in that niche or have some knowledge about it.
• Do not engage too much on social trademills like FB, Twitter, Instagram etc. - You will keep on posting and it will be gone in a day or too (FB is viable for paid ads though). Rather use YouTube - any content you upload here will last for years, and it’s a searchable kind of platform.

If you can create a community of readers then it will send very good signals to search engines. So, complement your on-page SEO (website) with off-page SEO (YouTube channels, email lists, social media pages/groups, etc.) too.

We will discuss about off-page SEO in much more detail in a separate article.