On-page SEO is the practice of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.
On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
What are On Page Factors?
The way your page is optimised has the most profound effect on its rankings.
Here are the page optimisation factors that can affect its search visibility:
Keyword in description tag
The importance of the meta description tag today is often discussed in SEO circles.
It is nonetheless still a relevancy signal. It is also crucial for gaining user clicks from search results pages. Including keyword in it makes it more relevant to a search engine and a searcher.
Keyword in title tag
The title meta tag is one of the strongest relevancy signals for a search engine. The tag itself is meant to give the accurate description of the pages content. Search engines use it to display the main title of a search result. Including a keyword in it will indicate to search engine what to rank the page for.
Ideally, the keyword should be placed at the start of the title tag. Pages optimised this way will rank better than those with keyword closer to the title’s tag end.
Keyword in H1 tag
H1 tag is yet another relevance factor, serving as a description of the pages content.
In spite of an ongoing discussion about its importance, it is still a good practice to include your keyword in a unique H1 tag on a page.
Using keywords in the pages copy
Up until not long ago, stuffing your page with keywords was a sure fire way to increase its rankings for a particular keyword. That’s not the case any more.
Using the keyword in the copy still sends a relevancy signal of what the content is about. How you place it however has changed drastically.
Duplicate content
Not all factors can influence your rankings in a positive way. Having similar content across various pages of your site can actually hurt your rankings.
Avoid duplicating content and write original copy for each page.
Length of the content
These days searchers want to be educated and won’t satisfy with basic information. Google therefore looks for authoritative and informative content to rank first.
And it’s a common sense that the longer your content is, the greater the chance that you can cover more aspects of your topic. Don’t be shy of writing long but highly useful copy then.
Canonical tag
Sometimes however having two URLs with similar content is unavoidable. One of the ways from preventing this from becoming a duplicate content issue is by using a canonical tag on your site.
This tag does one simple thing, it tells Google that one URL is equivalent of another, clearly stating that in spite of two pages having the same content, they are in fact one.
Image optimization
It’s not only text that can be optimised on a page but other media too.
Images for instance can send the search engine relevancy signals through their alt text, caption and description for instance.
Outbound links
Linking to authoritative pages sends trust signals to the search engine. Think of it this way, the only reason why you would send a user to another site is if you wanted them to learn more of the subject. This can be a huge trust factor for Google.
Too many outbound links however can greatly diminish the page’s PageRank, hurting its search visibility. Outbound links can affect your rankings but use them in moderation.
Content updates
Google algorithm prefers freshly updated content. It does not mean that you have to edit your pages all the time. I believe that for commercial pages, such as product descriptions Google recognises the fact that they are not as time sensitive as blog posts covering recent events.
It is wise however to include some strategy to update certain types of content once every 12 months or so.
Internal links
Interlinking pages on your site can pass their strength between them.
Keyword in URL
Including keyword in the URL slug (that’s the bit that appears after the “.com/“part of the URL) is said to send another relevancy signal to Google.