Most of the people running sites want to place posts are keyword-targeted and SEO-optimized to attract more traffic. Knowing useful SEO features will enable your site to be seen easily and rank highly in the SERP.
Just to make it clear, SEO optimization of any site entails two distinct factors:
- On-page optimization: tasks carried out on the website to improve its rankings like internal linking, Meta description, and title tag.
- Off-page optimization: tasks conducted outside the website in order to make some parts of the website rank higher like social media marketing and article submission.
These Page SEO tips that am about to highlight to you will focus entirely on the on page SEO optimization. Such optimization is keenly pegged on blog posts and should not be confused with onsite SEO that entails putting permalink structures and site mapping.
On-page SEO tips that will ensure online success in 2017
1. Post title
Titles are essentially the most vital on page SEO factor as they describe what a web page topic is all about. It implies that more people will be enticed to click on an optimized and attractive title. As a consequence, when more people click on your posts, Google will automatically rank your site higher.
It is advisable to place particular targeted keywords or phrases at the beginning of a page’s title or if it’s a bit hard make sure it appears anywhere in the title.
2. Post URL Structure
Although some studies about on page SEO factors showed that URL structure negatively correlates with ranking, it remains a crucial on-page metric. It is a nice idea to include some targeted keywords in your URL especially when the page contents are slightly unclear. Always avoid utilizing symbols, special characters, commas, brackets in URL, but use dashes to differentiate URL structure strings.
3. Heading Tags
When a site owner wants to highlight various headings and sub headings in a post, it is vital to use heading tags. While H1 is normally the preserve of title tag in word press, it is best to use H2 and H3 tags for the headings. You can utilize H2 and H3 tags freely but remember that Google algorithm can penalize the usage of too many of them. Even so, almost 80% of the pages that show up on Google’s top 10 don’t have any keyword on their H1 tags.
4. Keyword Density
Keyword density simply implies the number of times a keyword is mentioned on a page text. While fixing some keywords all over the text might be good. Ideally, it’s better to maintain a keyword density of around 1.5%. Stuffing too much keyword on your text increases your bounce rate and lowers your traffic conversion and also may result in Google placing penalties on your site. You can also mix your targeted keywords with 1-3% LSI keywords to enhance your site’s optimization. So as to stay on the safe side, it is enough to utilize the targeted keyword in the first and last paragraph and elsewhere in the body content.
5. Meta Tags
Any blog post that you publish on your site should entail a relevant and unique Meta description. It’s of great help to write sensible and user-friendly Meta descriptions that are related to the particular post. While it’s not necessarily important, keywords can be inserted in Meta decryptions but in a nice way that doesn’t spam the description. While some search engines like Bing might pay attention to Meta keywords, Google on its part sees it as irrelevant.
6. Internal Linking
It is essential to link related posts in your site whenever you are publishing any post. The beneficial part of internal linking is that readers can spend adequate time on your site reading various interrelated posts. In the process, the target page will be able to spread its page rank to other pages in the site. Such links to other posts are usually placed on keywords that are in the anchor text. But linkings should not be overdone lest they create a wrong impression of the site.
7. External Linking
Apart from internal linking in your site, external linking is another crucial optimization factor. It involves creating links of your posts to external domains. It is a great idea to link posts to external sites only when the information in the external site is related to your post.
Caution should be exercised when linking to external websites so that only trusted websites are linked only. You are free to utilize a nofollow tag when you have doubt about a particular website’s authority to prevent from linking to potentially harmful sites. Known authoritative sites such as CNN or Wikipedia or your niche’s leader may have relevant content and be trustworthy to link to it. In a nutshell, utilize nofollow links on less trustworthy sites and dofollow on trusted websites.
8. Have Engaging Content
Content is what visitors are attracted to your site to improve their knowledge. When a site owner tries to be cheeky though posting low-quality content and trying to trick various search engines to rank it, the site owner is surely bound to fail. Writing engaging content instead of machine readable content is very healthy for your site. It is essential to find what way works for your audience and meet their needs. Inquire from the reader, ask questions and write the things that answer their queries.
9. Word Count Per Post
Normally posts that have very few words may not be very helpful to the readers. As a result, when your postings have fewer words, the search engines will consider them as less informative and not perform well in the rankings. At times there are fewer exceptional cases where tag posts should contain fewer words, but if it’s an informational blog, a standard of 500 words is usually applicable. Though an official count doesn’t exist, much longer posts usually rank better because of their information. However, the posts should not be overly informative but be well-researched especially when you are keenly targeting highly competitive keywords.
It’s important for any site owner that is making posts to a site to understand the page SEO landscape in 2017 very well. For a strong SEO strategy, you should consider these on page SEO factors since Google changes its algorithm often.
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