Most of us concentrate on link building and other off-page SEO activities, and completely ignore the on-page SEO part. However, we should concentrate equally on both on-page and off-page SEO.
You blog/website should be well optimized for search engines. Why? There are many on-page factors which Google and other search engines take into account while ranking a website.
Here is your On-Page SEO Guide to make your blog/website search engine friendly.
Content
Content is the most important part of any website. If your content is not good, SEO will not work. So make sure you do not ignore this part.
Each article must contain at least 500 words. Ideally, it should be between 700 to 1500 words.
Your keyword should appear in the first 100 words of the article.
Never copy content from other sources.
If you republish the full article on some other website, use rel=canonical on the original source.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the percentage of times your target keyword appears on the article compared to the total number of words on the article.
Ideally, keyword density should be within 1% to 2%. Do not overdo it. It will negatively impact your search rankings.
Title
The Title is the most important on-page SEO factor. The length of the title of any page should be between 20 to 65 characters.
Ideally, you should start your title with the target keyword. Why? An experiment conducted by MOZ found that pages that started the title with a keyword ranked higher than pages with the keyword in the middle or at the end.
This is not always possible. Hence, if possible, start the title with keyword; if not, just make sure the title contains the keyword.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are used by search engines to display snippets for a given page on the search engine result page (SERP).
Meta description should contain 60 to 160 characters. Search engines count only 160 characters, so make sure your Meta description does not exceed that limit.
You should add your target keyword once in your Meta description.
Meta Keywords
Search Engines have publicly declared that Meta keywords are not taken into account while ranking a website. So, you may or may not add keywords in your Meta keyword section.
URL structure
URL of the page should be short, sweet and keyword rich. The first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight by search engines. Hence, use the target keyword within the first 3-5 words in the URL.
The URL length of the web page should not have more than 100 characters. It must not contain special characters, except hyphen “-“.
Heading Tags
The title of the page should be wrapped in H1 tag.
For headings and sub-headings, use H2 and H3 tags in your article. You must use the target keyword at least once in the sub-headings.
Images
You must add image(s) in your article and make sure they are well optimized for search engines.
You must add your keyword in the file name and Alt Tag of the image.
Internal Linking
Internal Linking not only increases traffic, but it is also good for SEO. Hence, you must link to your own articles.
You don’t have to use keywords for linking to your own articles. Use long tail keywords or generic terms.
You may link to 2-5 of your own articles, even more if it is relevant.
External Links
It is a good SEO practice to link to articles of external sites from your own articles. However, you should only link to authority sites.
You may add rel=”nofollow” in the external links. Never link to spammy sites.
Ideally, you may link to a maximum of 3 articles of external sites in a single article.
Sitemap.xml
Submit the Sitemap of your site to Google using Google Webmaster Tools and Bing using Bing Webmaster Tool. This helps to index the pages of your site quickly.
Page Speed
Page Speed is another important factor considered by Google. So make sure your site loads quickly.
Check the page speed of your site at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
The page load speed score for both desktop and mobile should be more than 75. Follow the suggestion summary to improve your page load speed.
Broken Links
Broken links are links that lead to pages that do not exist. When clicking on a broken link, the page you land on is called a 404 error page.
Make sure your site does not have any broken links. Broken links are not good for SEO.
How to check whether your site has broken links or not?
Open Broken Link Checker and check your websites/blog for broken links (for free). If your website contains broken pages or you are linking to broken links, you must remove those pages or links ASAP.
EndNote
Make sure you follow all the above guidelines and ensure that your blog/website is well optimized for search engines.
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