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It’s every site owner’s dream to get on the top positions of search results, and for a good reason. While off-page optimization can bring a good amount of backlinks to push your site up, on-page optimization should also be spot on if you want to maximize your website’s purpose.
Think of your on-page efforts as the building blocks of your website. If everything falls into the right place, you’re providing a solid foundation for your other online strategies – from link building to social sharing.
Search engines now look at relevancy as a key factor in ranking websites. So how do you know if your site is relevant to visitors? Here are some aspects that you might want to look at before you start optimizing:
- Website performance – Is your website taking too long to load? Does your site have broken links or landing page errors?
- Quality content – Do you update your content regularly? Does your site have duplicate content on different pages? Do you have relevant content for your target keywords?
- User experience – Do visitors have an easy time looking for the things they need? Do your pages correspond to the intent of your visitors?
Important Elements to Optimize
Your site is similar to having different layers. If one of those layers doesn’t work as it should, the entire site becomes affected. You need to focus on the important elements on your site. Get started with the following:
URL Structure
Your site’s URL is one of the elements that appear on the SERPs. Not optimizing your URL can cost you visitors—online users are more likely to click on URLs that are relevant to what they are searching. You need to make your URLs readable not only to search engines, but also to real people.
Breakdown your URL into different sections: your domain name, category, sub-category, and landing page. Include your target keyword in the URL, as this gives search engines an idea of what you’re trying to rank for in the page.
Page Titles and Descriptions
Your page title and description also appear on search results—they serve as a preview of what the page is about. If your page title and description are not clear or relevant, visitors will move on to the next result.
Many search experts dispute that page title and description length is an important factor in optimizing these elements. A title or description that is too long becomes truncated, and this defeats their purpose of informing visitors what the page is about.
Like in your URLs, using keywords in your page title and description can provide value for your site. This tells search engines that your title and description are relevant to the core terms you are targeting for that specific page.
Keywords
A good site optimization strategy involves in-depth keyword research. But, keyword research goes beyond choosing keywords that bring in a fair amount of traffic and have the right balance for competition. You need to shift your focus on context.
Search engines do not only look at where keywords appear, but also at how the terms relate to each other. When optimizing your site, group keywords contextually and syntactically. Don’t place keywords where they don’t belong—they have to be aligned with the persona of the audience you are targeting.
Content
When site owners think of content optimization, the first thing that goes into their mind is creating copy with the target keywords. This is true in a sense, but content optimization goes beyond keywords. Your focus should be the target audience.
To optimize your content, you need to focus on building trust with your audience and providing them with practical value. Match your content with the search intent of users. This means you have to write content and align them with your target audience as they go down the sales funnel.
On-page optimization when done correctly can take your site’s performance from good to great. By following the best practices and monitoring your site’s activity, you can easily adjust your on-page elements and make your website rank on the first page.
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