On-page SEO: the essentials to optimize your website

The meaning of the acronym SEO sometimes seems closer to “Extremely Obscure Strategy” than to “Search Engine Optimization.” 

So, as marketers, you need to stay on top of what appears to be a never-ending Google algorithm update. Otherwise, you risk not being referenced for your main keywords.

Even if that’s not easy, there’s a golden rule that’s long proven to ensure your SEO strategy ‘s success: optimize your website for relevant target keywords.

Through managing the site properly, you’ll draw visitors of higher quality, improve the conversion levels, and eventually get more customers.

SEO tips to improve the On-SEO of your web pages

You will be able to attract good visitors to your site and improve the performance of your inbound strategy, thanks to your on-page SEO. Indeed, when you optimize your SEO for search engines, it is so that they understand who you are, what you do, and the topics covered in your content.

By improving your on-page SEO, you contribute to the natural referencing of your website on the pages of search engine results (or SERP for Search Engine Results Page).

1-Audit your website by SEO

Whenever you create new content for adding to your web, be sure to keep in mind the particular keywords you ‘re targeting and include one or two per tab. On the other hand, if you already have a lot of content published on your site, you will have to start by conducting an SEO audit.

This test will help you decide how well SEO suits your platform. You can then update and refine your research content by concentrating straight away on the most traffic-generating websites.

The audit will also allow you to spot a number of issues that you may be facing without knowing it so that you can resolve them as soon as possible and advance your SEO.

Here is how you should proceed to conduct an SEO audit:

Export all pages of your website to an Excel file.

Rank them in downward order by the number of visits they generate.

Assign each of them a list of keywords, then add it to the column just next to the name of the article.

Add a new column where you can write the unique additional keywords you want to use on this list. Keep in mind that the material posted on this page will be as important to the research your target audience does.

When you have completed this step for all pages (or if there are too many, at least for the most important one), you can then devote yourself to adding keywords.

2 – Put keywords (naturally) in the right places on your website

To optimize your web pages, you have to integrate specific keywords for which you want your pages to be referenced. The locations you select for the integration of these keywords, however, do not all have the same value.

Five elements of your website must be optimized with your keywords to favorably increase the SEO of your page. These are the titles, descriptions, content, Alt text, and title attributes of the images and, finally, the URLs.

If you haven’t optimized these elements on your website yet, you still have some work to do, but this fundamental task will prove to be extremely beneficial in the long run. To take advantage of this, tackle the pages that generate the most traffic first. Then, afterward, consider optimizing your new pages as you create them.

Page titles

Titles (meta title) are the HTML elements used to define a web page’s subject matter, they appear in search engine results (as seen below).

Titles have a significant effect on search results, both on user click-through rates and on the ranking of your blog. Try to limit the titles to a maximum of 65 characters to optimize both search and click-through rates, so they are not truncated on the results pages of the search engines.

Technically, Google calculates the length in pixels and not the number of characters, but this 65 character cap would usually allow you to view all of your titles in search engine results pages. Also, try incorporating keywords into your titles to allow users to determine if your site is relevant to their search at first glance; place them at the beginning of your title to reduce the risk of them being cut off.

The meta description

The descriptions (meta description) are displayed below the title and URL of the search results, as shown below.

Descriptions no longer have a real impact on SEO today, but they still have a strong influence on the click-through rate.

Their main purpose is to meet a human need and not to be indexed by search engine robots. You can, therefore, take advantage of this to tell Internet users why they should click on your page. 

Use in your description one of your target keywords and ensure that it is designed to catch the attention of people so that they can decide how important your content is to their quest.

The content of your page 

Visitors are more likely to linger on a website if it includes in its body text the words they are searching for. Google will help you advance your page in the SERPs, depending on their inclusion in your content to decide the SEO for your site.

Just make sure to use them naturally because Google has mastered itself to detect the stuffing of keywords. Reflect on what attracts the audience when creating new material, rather than trying to find out how much you can apply a keyword to it. By doing so, you’ll find that you are automatically optimizing your content.

While there is nothing wrong with adding keywords to different sections of your website, don’t overdo them either, or your web pages may drop in search results. Plus, no one will enjoy reading this kind of content.

3 – Optimizing the alt text and title attributes of images

Keywords can also be included in the images’ alt text and title attributes, obviously. They are elements that can be applied in HTML language to a picture tag.

An image’s alt text attribute tells search engines what that image is for in order to list it among the search results. This attribute is displayed in the frame of the image when the image cannot be correctly rendered and simplifies the use of the site for people with visual impairments who use screen readers.

The title attribute of an image is used to display the text when hovering over it, a bit like a pop-up window. However, it does not appear when the image cannot be loaded.

Putting keywords into these attributes might seem a little insignificant, and this will certainly not have the same impact on your SEO as some of the other suggestions offered here. But the game is still worth the effort, and a few minutes (and more) that you will spend renaming your image to change the default name “IMG23940” to a more precise description will pay off. 

4 – Choose the right URL

Using keywords in your URLs is only smart if they accurately represent the content of the page you are referring to. This method is of particular interest for companies who maintain a frequent and daily blog, because it represents an opportunity to optimize the URLs for each new article that is written because they vary with each post.

Indeed, by practicing keyword stuffing in URLs, you have a good chance of penalizing your website because this practice is prohibited by Google’s guidelines. 

Some tips for choosing the right URL:

Create intelligible URLs for your audience.

Allow your audience to get a feel for where they ended up on your site.

Reduce the URL to a keyword.

Separate the words with hyphens.

Avoid accents.

Remove unnecessary terms, such as defined or undefined articles, from the part of the URL corresponding to your page (optional). If a keyword naturally contains articles, it is not useful to delete them in a URL, for example, in the case of a chocolate cake.

5 –  Avoid penalties search

There are various counterproductive strategies, which surprisingly are still in practice today and which you should avoid resorting to when optimizing your website for keywords. 

Never hide your keywords

Do not use the same color for the background and texts of your website, do not hide your keywords behind the images or on the sides using cascading style sheets (yes indeed, it is hardly believable to have yet to clarify this point today).

Even if this scenario is less easily detectable than others, the most sophisticated modern search engines spot it very easily, and it can lead to very serious search penalties.

Avoid keyword stuffing

This practice consists of repeating the same keywords in a text, whether it is the title, the description, the content, the URL, or the mention in very small characters at the bottom of the page. Clearly, if they seem to have been added unnecessarily to a web page, it is probably keyword stuffing.

This tactic is one of the oldest in SEO, but search engines today are specially designed to detect it. In addition to being akin to spam, it is rejected by search engines and also leads to search penalties. Do not add keywords where there should not be.

This practice, somewhat different from keyword stuffing, is more about inserting keywords, or even a single keyword, into contexts where they don’t belong. If you can’t fit a keyword naturally into one of your content, it’s probably because the content doesn’t really meet the needs of your personas.

Remember that SEO is not so much about how many keywords you can add to a web page, but how relevant they are to your target audience.

6 – Promote a quality user experience

Fostering a quality user experience should be your main goal. If optimizing your website for an algorithm seems to have a purely technical connotation, the objective of a search engine is to offer the best possible user experience to Internet users. Keep this objective in mind when developing your SEO strategy, and you will be more likely to make the right choices. Put the human before the search engines, and you shouldn’t run into insurmountable problems! 

We understand that as a marketer, your schedule is extremely busy. Still, you need to keep SEO from being relegated to the end of your priority list for lack of knowledge, or worse yet, because you’re afraid of going the wrong way.

So we hope you can use this article as a launching pad to put your on-page SEO strategy in place.

Leave a comment