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What are currently the most important on page SEO elements or factors?
Updated: May 24
In this Article, we will discuss the one of the key areas of SEO, known as on-page optimization. After this article, you will be able to define all of these focus areas, learn the role these play in the art of optimizing a website, and specific strategies to help your website rank higher in search engines.
The optimization of a website is divided into three key areas:
1. On-page optimization
2. Off-page or off-site optimization
3. Technical optimization. We will cover each area in different articles.
This will allow you to gain an in-depth understanding of the tactics needed to create a full SEO strategy.
How to Boost On Page (SEO) Search Engine Optimization
On-page optimization is the practice of optimizing elements of a page, or a group of pages throughout a site to improve the SEO of the site as a whole. We call this on-page because we focus on various elements within a page or the code of a page. This refers to the content on the page, keyword choices for the page and optimizing the page's meta data. (After this article, you will be able to understand what meta data and meta tags mean, as well as analyze the search results and recognize the individual meta data elements.) Before we begin, let's discuss the anatomy of a search result. When you perform a search in a search engine, you will get a page of results that look like this. This is a single result from the page.
Each of the areas you see in this result are related to SEO and are areas we focus on in our on-page optimization process. When referring to all of these areas together they are known as a site's 'meta data', but each individual area has its own name. The term meta data basically means data that describes other data. Each page of a website contains an area of meta data. This area is made up of individual meta tags.
Title tag describes the title or name the webmaster gave to this specific page
URL of the page or website address
Meta description is the block of text describing the content you will find on the page
Meta keywords are words which are in bold font in the meta description
Let's explore more about these each elements....
What is a Title Tag?
The title tag is a major component of your on-page optimization strategy. When optimizing a website, you want to make sure that each page of the site includes a title tag optimized for SEO. To keep your title tag short and concise, make sure you are only using the most important keyword or keywords for your page. The best length for title tag is 55-60 characters. The best method of optimizing a title tag is to first put the keyword or keywords followed by the location and then your brand name. Example: Cheap SEO Packages | Australia | Sumo Digital
What is a Uniform Resource Locator(URL)?
A URL is basically an address that loads a particular site or document. URLs describe a page to both visitors and search engines. Like important metadata elements, the URL should be relevant and contain important keywords while remaining brief and user friendly.Example: www.sumodigital.co/seo
What is a Meta Description and Meta keywords?
Since meta description keywords don't help a site rank, this can be overlooked in SEO, but we'll look at how this can be used to direct website traffic. It's important to use as many characters as possible without exceeding 160. If your meta description is too long, it will either not be displayed by search engines or the text will cut off randomly. Once you fully understand the purpose of the meta description, you'll see how to best use it on page optimization strategy to get more traffic. Example: At Sumo Digital we have SEO packages for every budget to ensure your website gets found. Packages start from just $189.
What is Heading Tags H1 and H2?
Headings are used in documents and papers to help organize them. This is a similar concept for webpages, but it is also important for SEO. Heading tags not only help to arrange content on the page, but the words within these headings are analysed by search engines. Search engines read these headings to determine what the page is about. The H1 tag is the most important of the heading tags and H2 tags are somewhat important. H1 tags are used for the page title, and H2 are used for subtitles. Its important to use the best keywords for H1 and H2. You should only have 1 x H1 tag on a page, but you can have several H2.
What is Alt Text for Images?
Images are important to give visual references and break up a lot of text, making the user experience more friendly. Google has a unique way to understand what the image is about. Alternate text (Alt text) is a text description that can be added to an image's HTML tag on a web page. You should set the Alt Tag to include keywords you are using for the page.
Why Creating and Optimizing Unique Content is important
Creating unique content is important not only for search engine optimization, but also for user experience. Content is generally described as the text, images and video you use throughout your site. A website with many pages filled with good quality content, which has been carefully put together with SEO keywords in mind, will perform well in search engine results. However, without a lot of content, your page will never rank well. Your website needs quality content around the topic or theme of your pages. Ideally, this content will include the focus keyword of the page and related keywords. However, it is important to focus on quality content where keywords fit naturally into the copy, rather than force the keywords into the copy, which can sound unnatural. Here is some useful tools that help you to optimize your on-page SEO for search engine.
Analyzing On-Page Elements with MoZbar
MoZbar is a free plugin that provides on page and off page SEO metrics, and also features other useful tools. You can install it to your browser quickly in order to analyse different pages at the click of a button.
Analyzing On-Page Elements with SEOquake
SEOquake is a free plugin that provides you with key SEO metrics, along with other useful tools such as SEO Audit. Since doing this individually can be quite time consuming, I'll show you how to analyze a website all at once.
Analyzing a Website Using Web Crawler
A good way to view information across an entire site is to use what is referred to as a crawler or spider tool. A crawler is a tool that crawls or spiders your website, just like a search engine would. This shows you what data it has extracted from the pages of your site, allowing you to get a large-scale view of the information we discussed in these lessons. To crawl a website, I recommend a program called Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is free to use if you crawl up to 500 pages on a site (you will have to get the paid version it if you want to crawl more). For learning purposes, the free version is fine.
On-Page SEO Checklist
Once you get into the habit of optimizing each page for search engines by implementing the tactics above, it will become like second nature. You may want to make a quick bullet point 'onpage seo checklist' in your desktop notes until you get the hang of it. Please let us know if you have any question or suggestions by writing a comment below. Related article What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?