Top 10 On-Page SEO Factors To Rank On The First Page

On-page SEO optimization is the key to any website’s success. Without search engine traffic, it’s hard to make more sales or increase your conversion rates, right? Everyone is focusing on Google to bring more traffic to their websites to increase sales and revenue.

But you need to be very careful when it comes to optimizing web pages for search engines like Google. If you overdo it, you will get penalized by Google as it has many updates like Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, etc.

In any case, I don’t suggest anyone to do keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is nothing but using the same keywords again and again in your articles to increase search traffic. Google considers keyword stuffing as a spam practice, and it penalizes the sites that are stuffing their web pages with the same keywords. 

Instead of keyword stuffing, use long tail keywords in your articles so that you can drive more traffic for many keywords.

When you browse the Internet to fulfill your thrust for various On-page SEO Factors, you will find too many On-page tips and lots of them don’t work in today’s search engine scenario. So in today’s post, I’m including top On-page SEO factors that you should give utmost importance that really works with Google latest algorithms.

Presence of Mata Keyword tag has no influence on your website rankings as far as Google is concerned. So you can simply ignore that. So you need to be sure about the tips that you are implementing on your website and whether they are compatible with the latest Google Algorithms or not.

On-page Optimization is most difficult and most fruitful part when it comes about optimizing a website so that your website ranks well on major search engines for their targeted terms.

On-page elements make use of lots of HTML tags including Title tag, Meta tags, heading tags, image tags, bold letters, italics, underline, list type tags, etc. 

We need to make sure we are using the targeted keywords in a natural way in our website contents.

1. Writing SEO Optimized Titles

Whether you agree with it or not, your headlines will determine your search engine traffic. If you are not focusing on optimizing your titles for both search engines and humans, you will never be able to drive more organic traffic to your websites.

Writing powerful headlines is not rocket science, What you have to do is, Just do Keyword Research before final Headline.

If you are asked to work on only one On-page SEO factor, this is the biggest On-page SEO factor you should pay special attention to. When writing your page titles, you should make sure you are including targeted keyword towards the beginning of your title. You should restrict your title within 65 to 70 characters only (including spaces).

You should write a Title copy that people will find interesting enough to be clicked as that will help you get CTR in search engine result pages.

If people don’t like your title content, they won’t click your website listing in search engine results even if you are rankings on top for your targeted keywords.

2. Write Engaging Meta Description

It’s very true, your meta description copy does not play any role in your website search engine rankings.

But most of the time, Google used to show up meta description data as part of your website listing description in search result pages.

So writing a good meta description copy could help you get more clicks to your website even if your website is placed below your competitor websites in search engine result pages.

3. Keyword Density

Keyword density is all about repeating the targeted keywords in your website contents.

Keyword density is calculated on the basis of the total number of times a keyword is used your web page content and divide it by the total number of words in that page content. And then multiply the result with 100 to get your keyword density percentage.

Suppose the targeted keyword On-page SEO Factors is used 8 timers in page content and the total word count in that page is 400 words. So the keyword density for On-page SEO Factors keyword in that web page will be 2%. 

Ideally, you should try to limit your keyword density to 2 percent only. Use search engine friendly plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast to check your keyword density. Never overdo it and make sure you are using relevant keywords instead of repetitive ones.

4. Image Naming Convention

ALT tags play a key role in increasing your traffic from Google or any other search engines.

If you have appealing images on your blog posts and have properly optimized keywords on their alt tags, you will tend to get massive traffic from Google image search results.

Your image names should be created keeping in your targeted keyword in mind. Apart from using your targeted keyword as part of the image, you should add alternative text with each image used on your website pages.

Again it will be beneficial if you could include your targeted keyword as part of your alternative text.

5. Linking to Trusted Domains

Outbound linking is also considered one of the major ranking factors in on-page SEO optimization. If you want to get better search results for your keywords on Google, try linking to trusted sources that are highly relevant to your content.

Google maintains TrustRank for each website, which is calculated on the bases of who you are linking to and what kind of websites are linking to you. So whenever you link to external websites, make sure you link to websites and blogs having good TrustRank in the eyes of Google.

Linking out to your own website pages will help those pages better search engine rankings and high page rank value. When linking out to external websites, you need to make sure you are linking to high authority websites only.

6. Canonical URL’s

Canonicalization is all about deciding whether we want to use www version or non-www version for your website home and internal pages. We need to be consistent with that and should go with only one version and later should be directed to the first. And when linking to our website pages, we should link using the preferred version.

Suppose if you have decided to use www version for your website pages, in this case, all non-www version should be automatically redirected to their www versions. And when getting links for our websites, we should make sure we are using www with our website URL’s not the other versions (i.e. non-www).

High-quality content should be considered as one of the most important On-page SEO factors. When writing contents for your website, you need to make sure you are delivering relevant contents and not copying all or fractions of your website contents from other popular websites and blogs on the Internet. If you are copying others contents, you are making a blunder mistake and you will also get penalized by Google for doing such plagiarism practices.

After the latest algorithmic change from Google in the form of Panda Update, Google has been very strict against the use of duplicate or low value-added contents.

In recent times, Google has lowered down the search engine rankings of lots of popular websites as they were delivering scrapped contents.

It’s not easy to write great blog posts all the time, so here are a few tips that will help you create quality content.

• Always come up with problem-solving content ideas
• Read what others are writing
• Read hot topics in your niche
• Start brainstorming blog post ideas and keep a ideas folder to never forget your content ideas

8. Use your Robots.txt file Smartly

Robots.txt file plays a vital role in getting your web pages and contents crawled by Google bots.

Robots.txt file is basically used to block certain kind of content types from our website being indexed in search engines.

We can use this file to block certain files, certain folders and specific URL patterns being crawled in search engines.

With each website, there will certainly the content type that we don’t want to show to search engines. And we fulfill that motive through the robots.txt file.

9. Adding Contents Frequently

It doesn’t matter how many SEO tactics you use, they are not going to help you get better search results unless you are updating your websites with new articles or web pages.

Updating frequently helps Google to crawl your site more frequently, thus it helps you get better search results for your desired keywords. With this, you need to make sure you update your website with fresh contents on a regular basis.

Search engines love those websites that are updated on daily or weekly (at least) basis. So if you are running a website around certain products or services, you won’t see many changes in the level of your products.

So what you can do is start writing blogs on your website around your products, services or things related to your niche that your website readers would be interested in reading about.

10. Cross Browser Compatibility

You need to make sure that your website is compatible with the most used versions of all modern browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Netscape, etc.

Optimizing your website for these browsers will send pleasing experience for your website readers in browsers of their choice.

You can check your website browser compatibility by using Browser Stack. It’s a free website helps you check your website compatibility across many browsers that are widely used worldwide.

A Caution To Remember: Stop Writing Fluff Articles

Stop producing thin content that doesn’t add any value. Google will slam your site if you have poor content.

Start updating your old blog posts, keep writing unique articles, SEO articles and build quality backlinks using evergreen techniques like infographics, video marketing, guest posting, etc.

If you want to rank for any keyword on top of Google search results, make sure to write highly relevant posts with at least 2000 words. And you will see the results in no time, Google gives top priority to detailed articles that are filled with quality content.

On-page SEO is an ongoing process and thus you should keep on making changes to the website at various levels. You cannot get top rankings in search engines without taking care of above On-page SEO factors.

So spend some time making the suggested changes on your website home and internal pages and wait for the new changes to be index in Google and other search engines.

Once your latest On-page SEO changes are indexed in the search engines database, you may notice changes in your website rankings for its targeted keywords.