On Page SEO Tips to Rank Higher on Search Engines

Search Engine Traffic is the best for most websites. It brings in more targeted traffic and new visitors to most blogs or websites but most website owners are not ranking high on Search engines to have a steady flow of traffic from search engines. This is only because they have not been doing proper SEO work on their posts or websites. When it comes to optimizing your website or blog posts, there are two factors that will play a big role these includes On page SEO optimization and Offpage SEO optimization.

But today's article would be explaining how to go about On page SEO optimization for more traffic.

When we talk about On-page SEO, this simply means optimizing our content for our target keywords. This includes the use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality, and many other factors which I would discuss here. This On-page optimization would help to write more search engine optimized articles and you would really engine the steady flow of traffic to your blogs or websites.

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Doing SEO optimization of the post simply means following a certain set of proven methods to rank higher in search engines. But ranking in Google and other search engines isn't only considered with the On-page SEO score, but by also putting factors like Social media votes, backlinks, domain authority, and many other off-page factors into consideration.

Today here, the main goal is to teach how to optimize our article in a natural but smart way, so that search engines can easily pick the target keyword (Focus keyword), and thus, instead of ranking for an irrelevant long-tail keyword, we will get more targeted visitors.

To rank any post higher on Search Engines, we need to put keyword research into consideration, so you need to find a keyword for your next post, which is going to be a perfect example of an onpage SEO optimized post. You can use the Adword Keyword Research Tool or the Google Insight tool for keyword research.

1. Blog Post Title Settings On-Page SEO

Yes, Blog Post Title is the number one factor for on-page SEO, the title tag must contain targeted keywords or phrases towards the beginning. The title shouldn't be too long which can be done by keeping the length of 65 – 70 Characters only with spaces. Also, make sure you use simple words that can be easily interpreted not the one the visitors would be looking for a dictionary to get the meaning. Once this is done your post title is set for proper indexing on search engines.

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2. Post-Permalink Structure On-Page SEO

Permalink is one of the factors for on-page SEO, the post permalink must be short with no special characters, symbols, brackets, commas, conjunctions, etc as part of it. You should aim at using targeted keywords towards the beginning of the blog post URL. You should avoid using special your post URL. Most of the time you should be using alphabets and numeric from 0-9 in your URL structure and use dashes to differentiate two strings in the URL structure.

3. Headings Tags On-Page SEO

Headings tags are just useful to highlight various headings, sub-headings, and other important points in a blog post. You should use heading tags like h2, h3, and h4, etc, h1 is not mentioned because it is already the one used for the main title of the blog posts but only in a single post on blogs. So there is no need to use any h1 tag in our blog post body section. It is also advisable not to repeat headings tags in a post (e.g. using h2 or h3 more than once in a blog post) this is considered a negative SEO practice.

4. Checking Keyword Density for On-Page SEO

You should keep the keyword density to up to 1.5% percent have mostly noticed this while using the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress. It is advisable to be using your main keyword once in the first paragraph and then in the last paragraph apart from regular use in blog post content. Bold, italic, and underline can also be used to highlight important keywords and phrases in blog posts.

5. Meta Tags

Most website owners are lazy in adding meta tags they only want search engines to pick this automatically from their posts which is a bad idea. It is better to add unique and relevant meta keywords and meta descriptions to each blog post. While writing meta keywords/descriptions you should lay more emphasis on using your targeted keyword.

Your meta description should be a short summary of your post, easy to read and understand, and should not be more than 160 characters including spaces. You should write user-friendly meta description tags for better Click Through Rate (CTR) in search engines.

6. Images Optimization

The addition of images in blog posts is a good practice of on page SEO, the images give more explanations to the posts and make it more understandable. The availability of images makes our blog content more interesting and attractive. These images must be of small size and medium size to reduce the page loading time as website speed is also one of the on-page SEO factors. These images need to be optimized for better rankings, this includes adding a title and alt tag to the images.

When adding the title and alt tags, the focus Keyword of the post must be added. It would help to make your blog post more focused and targeted. In short including targeted keywords as part of the image name, image title, and image alt text is very important.

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7. Word Count in a Post

It is rare seeing a blog post of 300 words at the top of search engines. When you search for any keyword on search engines the top posts would be posts of many words sensibly written and well-formatted. As a writer, you should try to draft blog posts carrying a minimum of 500 words, but if possible write long and well-researched blog posts while targeting highly competitive keywords in your niche. It is better to analyze other posts on the target keyword and see what you are missing to determine if your post is better than post ranking on the first page of Google or not.

I have learnt that the minimum word count for good SEO-optimized articles should be 500 words and above but ideally keeping more than that would give more room for indexing on the first page.

8. Content Linking

While writing new blog posts, it is advisable to link to other blog posts on your website related to the topic you are writing about. This is to be done when necessary and not just linking posts that are not related at all.
Apart from linking to your own blog posts, it is a great idea to link out to external websites if you feel adding the links will help your blog readers find more and relevant information about the topic you are currently writing about.

While linking out to external websites, only link to trusted websites only. And if you have doubts about the authority or popularity of the website you are linking to, you can use nofollow tag to avoid passing page rank and search engine rankings to bad neighbors.

Once you can strictly practice all this then you don't have any problem again with on-page SEO optimization. You would be ranking higher and would also be receiving traffic from search engines.