Mastering On-Page SEO

Digital marketing is something all business owners need to master if they want to generate more leads and increase their sales. However, doing that is not as it was years ago since catching the public eye is a little more difficult than before.

Business owners need to consider all kinds of things, such as internal linking, URL structure, and using a particular keyword that was used in multiple pages. After doing that, the marketing team in the company has to do everything in their hands to apply all those strategies in the best way possible.

All these processes are called on-page SEO, and tons of people study it every day to ensure their site stays on the first page of results. On-page SEO is important since it's what can determine if a website receives a lot of views and engages with a lot of people, or if it goes unnoticed.

The Phase Marketing blog page includes several blog posts that aim to teach its readers more about optimizing web pages, managing internal links, and on-page optimization in general. People can read this post if they want to rank better on search results and understand more about on-site SEO.

What Are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of optimizing your content with the correct title tags, keywords, outbound links, and other SEO tools. The thing is that SEO includes many different strategies, areas of practice, and thus, has different types.

On-page SEO is the type of engine optimization we are dealing with on this page, and it represents all the processes made to optimize the content of a web page. To explain it in simpler terms, web pages with the correct link building, keywords, meta tags, and title tags are more prone to rank better on search engines.

The first three or five websites that appear at the top when someone makes a Google search are the ones that are better optimized and that have the best meta descriptions of them all. Content creators and SEO experts know which keywords and SEO tactics are better for specific pages because of the information Google Analytics has given them.

People wanting to rank higher on organic search results should use pages like that and search engine rankings to know what they should include in their content to make it better.

On-page SEO is commonly confused with off-page SEO, yet, both are completely different concepts. The latter consists of optimizing the content leading to a web page or related to it. That includes outbound links, social media accounts, and local SEO.

Yes, even the content outside of a webpage itself can affect if search engine crawlers determine that the content is relevant for the searcher's query. The reason for that is that links, images, and even the click-through rate are ranking factors that can make a web page do better on search engines.

What Makes On-Page SEO Important These Days?

The reason on-page SEO is that important today is that it represents the new era of marketing. Before digital marketing came into everyone's lives, there were tons of on-site strategies to make people get interested in the products of a company. Those strategies still exist but are not what they were before.

Almost all people in the country are checking a digital channel of communication every minute, and whether it's their smartphones, laptops, tablets, or emails, each one of them plays a fundamental part in delivering the message content creators want their target audience to receive.

Ads are one of the main methods of eCommerce companies to get people to know their services. The problem with that is that most people hate it when ads pop up on their phone screens or laptops, so businesses need to approach leads in a different way.

The best method to do it is by letting them search the business's web page by themselves, and by that, we mean investing in on-page SEO. People don't tend to go farther than the first Google's result page, so getting there represents a huge profit for service pages.

Search engines reward the ones who put an effort into keyword research, optimizing meta descriptions, adding an SEO-friendly title tag, and more. That's what makes SEO that important these days; it's the most natural way to approach people. Companies can get to their target audience without talking to them directly but by just making their web page better.

How Can Companies Rank Higher in Search Engines?

Top ranking pages have many ways to make high-quality content that is also SEO-friendly. Digital marketing agencies try to do as much as they can to find that success for all their clients. Is that possible? It could be, but they would have to follow all the SEO hidden tricks to do so.

Here are the best SEO strategies to rank higher on search engines:

Check Keyword Rankings

Keywords play a fundamental part in optimizing a web page and making better content. The most effective keywords in a category page depend on what people look at on the internet and their search intent when typing something in the search engine.

On-page SEO is directly affected by keyword research, so digital marketing agencies need to research what the target keyword should be for the web page they want to design. However, that doesn't mean everyone can duplicate content from people to rank higher than competing pages.

The main target keyword of a web page represents what the website should be about, so the website writer should create content around that keyword. However, they can't copy the exact same keyword from other web pages. Search engines don't see that as optimized content as it's not counted as a valuable ranking factor.

Keyword density is also something important in the SEO checklist of on-page strategies to rank better. Even though Google is not the only search engine online, other search engines follow the same rules and take into account the same on-page factors when ranking web pages.

One of the things all search engines agree on is that keyword stuffing is not something helpful when trying to apply on-page SEO strategies. That is because doing that is not using the target keyword to make high-quality content, but copying the exact keyword of another blog post to deceive the search console.

Using the correct keywords can make Google use the content of a website or blog for rich snippets, which can help that content creator earn more readers each day.

Improve Meta Descriptions

Google recommends that the author of the content also writes the meta description of it. That's because the author is the person who best knows what the page is about, and it can seem off if another person writes it. Adding an accurate meta description is directly related to getting to people with the user intent you are targeting for your content.

If a house cleaning service page, for example, wants to get people looking for house cleaning pages to hire the services they are looking for with them, then they should write the meta description for their own website.

The description should be something like "If you are looking for amazing housekeeping services, we offer a number of options including heavy-duty cleaning and laundry," and something else to invite them to read the page. If the website of a company is ideal for people with specific search intent and they keep clicking on it, it may be on the first page regardless of the search engine they use.

Title tags help on-page SEO in the same way that meta descriptions do; they give a little overview of what the reader can expect from the web page. When showing search results, Google highlights the words the people searching looked for, so you should also put some effort into adding the correct keywords to your title tag and meta description.

Get into Technical SEO

When talking about on-page SEO, technical SEO consists of improving the technical aspects of a web page to make it rank better on search results. Some examples of those technical aspects are the page speed, how it interacts with mobile devices if it has SEO-friendly URLs, the structured data it has, the HTML source code, and other on-page elements.

Technical optimization is not so easy to understand by everyone, let alone lawyers attempting law firm marketing on their own, so most people hire digital marketing and SEO experts to help them optimize their content with appealing landing pages and LSI keywords.

A technically optimized content should be safe from dead links and any other things that could confuse search engines or readers. Apart from that, it should be filled with structured data and avoid duplicate content. This type of on-page SEO also takes into account voice search and other search practices.

Internal links are also part of technical SEO, so digital marketing agencies must make sure that links linking to and linked from their website have a keyword-rich anchor text to take the most advantage possible from them.

Some people prefer to focus on basic on-page SEO and forget about the most technical parts of it. That's not recommendable at all. Each type of SEO, including technical SEO, off-page SEO, and on-page SEO forms part of a whole that aims to make websites succeed and rank better on search engines.

Regardless of that, if a website doesn't engage in all that SEO englobes, it's not following the complete optimization process, and therefore it may not have the same results as a blog that completely optimizes its website.

Focus on Image Optimization

While not all websites use pictures to make their content more appealing, many others use Google images to try to rank better on that specific search engine. However, using the wrong pictures or using them incorrectly can make engine crawlers ignore your content or classify it as bad quality content.

The best way to prevent any issue from happening is to take advantage of Google Image Search and other ranking opportunities that offer a better user experience and better load times. After a business has chosen an image, it's important to add text to the image alt tags.

Images are an excellent way to get people to get more interested in web content. Photos can show things to the audience without needing someone to write them. Content creators can use them to help readers understand everything in a better way.

Using pictures as fillers doesn't help websites in any way, so it's best to use them to guide the reader throughout the article. That way, reading the content becomes a whole experience rather than just looking up something on the internet.

Can Someone Who Doesn't Know Anything About SEO Optimize their Website?

The answer's both yes and no. People who are just getting started into on-page SEO can only do some things, but may not be able to achieve the most technical goals of the optimization process. An average person, for example, can write an SEO-friendly title tag or page title and use the best keywords possible when writing the content.

Regardless of that, it may be more difficult for them to identify structured data and other technical features such as the page speed and the URL structure, so it's better to hire a digital marketing company to take care of that.

Some people consider it an unnecessary expense, but taking into account how the digital era has taken over all the different channels of communication, doing that is a more than profitable investment in the long run.

Wrapping Up

SEO and digital marketing strategies are some of the most interesting things someone can study these days. Doing it can help companies of any kind, and even freelancers to get more projects. Yet, trying to apply SEO strategies without completely mastering them can lead to generating the opposite of what the website owner is expecting.

People getting into the SEO world shouldn't start using the terms given in this article without first consulting it with their parents.

The Phase Marketing blog has several blog posts regarding SEO use and digital marketing in general, so reading it can help people trying to learn more about that matter.