Overview:
On-Page SEO is one of the most important task in an SEO Campaign. In this article we provide you the complete On-Page SEO Checklist.
What comes to your mind at first from the word “On-Page SEO”?
Of course, Doing SEO on the Page.
But what does it really mean?
Well, it means you are doing some stuff on “your webpage” that will improve its search engine ranking.
The word On-Page really means your own webpage.
So, On-Page SEO means doing SEO on your own webpage.
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
Well, doing On-Page SEO will improve the ranking of your webpage on Search Engines.
Improvement in ranking will increase organic traffic which in turn will improve sales and other goals of your website.
So, if you have SEO in your calendar then you must mark On-Page SEO to some date because it is vital.
Now, it’s time to learn How to do On-Page SEO on your website.
So, without further ado let’s start.
How to do On-Page SEO on your Website?
A website has different sections. For example, The Homepage, Blog Pages, Product Pages, and a plethora of others.
Each section has its own role, hence, the On-Page SEO strategies of each section are different.
In this article, I am explaining to you How to do the On-Page SEO of a Blog Post for Higher Ranking?
On-Page SEO of a Blog Post
Generally, Blogs are the most visited section of a website.
The reason is it has a plethora of content.
You can’t be a true online marketer if you don’t know how to use your blog to drive customers to your product listed online.
So, “Blog” has an essential role.
Hence, optimizing (I mean On-Page SEO) your blog posts will improve your website’s search engine ranking.
A blog post also has different sections. For example, The Blog Title, The Blog Featured Image, Meta Descriptions, and others.
All these sections are places important for On-Page SEO.
Before moving further, I suggest you read my article about Keywords because you are going to need it further while reading this article.
So, at this point in time, I think you have learned What Keyword is Why it is important and What’s its use.
Let’s continue our On-Page SEO journey now.
On Page SEO Checklist
Below I have made an On-Page SEO checklist that you should remember or always keep handy while doing On-Page SEO on a webpage.
Keyword Placement
I know, at this point in time some of you might want to tell me, hey it’s 2022 and keyword stuffing will not do anything.
However, let me stop you from judging me at first.
I am not going to tell you to stuff keywords.
First, answer me, Do you call placing your Primary Keyword in your article’s title “Keyword Stuffing”?
Well, I guess – No. The reason is that placing the Primary Keyword in the article’s title is essential.
Why? Because Title is one of the essential elements of a blog post.
So, from here you learn that “Place your keywords in all the essential places of a blog post”.
But what are those essential places? Well, I guess everything. But I became more specific below.
Now, again you might yell at me and say dude isn’t it keyword stuffing.
I am telling you No. Placing keywords naturally (not forcefully) isn’t wrong.
So, here is the list of places inside a blog post where you must place your primary keyword naturally.
- Title
- First 100 words in your article and of course inside the article at different places where it is required.
- Article subheading
- Under Bold Tags
- Image alt text
- Meta Description
- Article URL
You can use the same thing for the website’s landing pages as well.
So, this is about primary keywords.
To improve the Latent Semantic Indexing of your article, I suggest you use some relevant secondary keywords as well.
Places where you can use Secondary Keywords.
- Subheadings
- Content Inside the Subheading
- Image Caption, Image Alt Text
- Meta Description
So, this is how you have to use keywords in your blog post or webpage to do its On-Page SEO. But there is a plethora of other On-Page SEO stuff.
Internal Linking
Internal links are the links from one page of your website to another page on your website.
Internal links play a vital role in SEO, especially, On-Page SEO.
Internal links Increases Crawlability
Suppose you have a popular landing page on your website that is ranked on search engines and getting enormous traffic.
There are plenty of things you can do with that landing page.
Driving traffic to another page of your website is one of those.
You can do so by placing an Internal link on that landing page.
So when visitors hit the landing page, they also click on the internal link (if they like it) you have placed.
The search engine bot does the same thing as well.
Hence, Internal linking increases the crawlability of a website.
Internal Links Increases Expertise
Do you know with proper internal linking you are telling the search engine that you have expertise on a particular topic?
Well yes, suppose you are writing an article about Random Access Memory (RAM) and in that article, if you link to the article that is about Graphics Card, then the search engine thought you have expertise in Computer hardware.
Hence, the best way to choose internal links is the topics related to the page.
Content Readability
Optimizing the readability of the content is also one of the most vital parts of doing On-Page SEO.
From readability I mean, How easy it is to read and understand the content.
To increase the readability of content, you may use
- Less adverbs
- Convert Sentences in Passive voice to Active voice.
- Write short sentences
- Use simple phrase for words
You may use the Hemmingway editor to check the readability of your content.
Image Placement
In my five years of SEO journey, I saw that the number of images used in an article is directly proportional to its ranking.
That means the more images you use in an article, the more its chances to rank higher on the search engine.
It is obvious because an image gives more insight to the user which in turn increases user experience and it is not hidden that search engines favor those websites that give the best user experience.
While using images in your article, make sure to optimize them.
For example, filling out its name, alt text, description, URL, etc.
URL Optimization
You may think that why are URLs important. Most of the users don’t in fact read it.
Well, the users may not read the URL but the Search Engine does.
Hence, to rank on the search engine you better optimize the URLs.
Below are some points you should consider while optimizing URLs.
Create Short URLs
We know that every factor that improves the User experience will improve the ranking.
Shorter URLs improve the user experience because they are easier to type.
Longer URLs don’t affect SEO but their structure and complexity definitely do.
So my definition of shorter URLs is URLs that contain the Primary Keyword and other important words.
A general rule of thumb people uses while creating the URL is sticking to the Heading 1 of the page.
Primary Keyword in the URL
A URL is one of those things (others are Title and Meta Description) that appears on the SERP when a user places a query on the search engine.
Hence, most SEO experts believe placing the Primary Keyword in the URL provokes the article to appear higher on the search engine.
Remove Stop words from the URL
Stop words are common words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns that are ignored by the Search engine when a user is placing a query.
Some examples of stop words are – a, an, the, for, it, etc.
Relevant Tags
Tags are the best way to cluster your content.
It helps your site visitors to find relatable content in one place.
In WordPress, Tags are the second most important thing to cluster content after Categories.
To avoid duplication, some experts insert Meta-Robots No-Index tags on Tags.
External Links
External links are links to other websites on your webpage.
While doing On-Page SEO external links are important because they tell search engines the article has taken some information from an external website.
Search engines consider it a good thing because it helps the search engine to explore a new website.
Think of it from a search engine perspective.
With external links, basically, you are telling the search engine to check out another awesome webpage that is good for search engine visitors.
And since you are helping out the search engine to find a new website, it rewards you by ranking your website higher.
A healthy way to place external links is by first analyzing the external website’s authority and expertise.
Conclusion
While running an SEO campaign, On-Page SEO is one of the most important things to look for.
Following the above-described On-Page SEO checklist will definitely help you out.
If I have missed any other On-Page SEO factors to mention, please let me know in the comments down below.