What is On-Page SEO Optimization? Ultimate Guide for SEO Beginners

In this post, Vishal Meena will explain On-page SEO optimization alongside how to implement it on your website.

SEO is like flirting. The objective is to attract the attention of users and Google to show them how good we are and invite them to spend time with us.

But how do we get them to notice us?

When it comes to flirting we not only use our appearance and personality, which would be On-Page SEO, we also turn to that friend who throws us a cable to introduce ourselves and that the other person notices us. This is what Off-Page SEO would be.

Like everything in this life, you have to fix it. Let me give you another example, that today I feel inspired.

We can be very handsome and when we open our mouths we screw it up and lose a flirt.

That equated to the online world would be to have a very attractive and super cool website but that takes more than 5 seconds to load or that the user does not find what she is looking for and leave.

In short, if we do not optimize the factors that intervene in On-Page and Off-Page SEO, we will never have a presence in search engines and potential clients will not find us.

In this On-Page SEO optimization guide, we will review the different relevant factors that intervene to position a website.

From the pillars such as good web architecture, through linking without leaving us the contents and aspects a little more technical.

Surely when you finish reading this post, you have a general idea about how you should apply On-Page SEO to optimize your website and link to everyone who reads you 😉.

Get into a comfortable position and let’s get started!

What is On-Page SEO Optimization?

On-Page SEO is also known as internal SEO or On-Site SEO and it is the optimization that is done within the web page to rank higher in the search engines.

Its ultimate goal is to increase the flow of organic traffic to your website.

Most on-page SEO optimization advice focuses solely on placing keywords on the page – in the title, meta description, in H1, and so on.

Unfortunately, recommendations of this kind are orderly out of date. As of today, Google has grown wiser enough to understand synonyms and semantically related keywords.

This means it’s time to stop obsessing about placing exactly matching keywords on your pages.

That is all the factors that depend on us because we have access to the code and content of our website.

Relevance On-Page SEO Optimization Techniques –

How to Do?

For Google or any search engine to index the pages of your website, you need to make it easier for the robots that are going to crawl your website to know what it is about and which are the most important pages.

You have to take into account different factors that affect On-Page SEO. We are going to highlight the most important ones.

So let’s dig these some important On-Page SEO techniques. Here’s 8 On-Page SEO techniques for an SEO friendly article.

On-page SEO Optimization #1. Keyword search

Before starting any web project, we have to decide which keywords we want to rank for. And that will mark the architecture of the website (which we will see in the next point).

When looking for keywords it is important to keep in mind the search intent that our users have.

Ultimately it is them that we have to satisfy, and if we do, Google will know and will upgrade on their results page.

Search intent or search intent is very important when doing keyword research to see search volume and competition for keywords.

Keep in mind the search intent of your users when working with keywords.

Depending on the type of business or project we have and the content we are doing, we will emphasize more on one type of keyword.

2. Web architecture

The structure of the website is another key factor within On-Page SEO.

You have to create different levels of navigation so that users and search engine spiders interpret what is the most important information.

These levels are created precisely to offer a good experience and structure the content, from the most important that will be at the level of the home and categories to the most specific such as subcategories, product sheets, or posts.

3. Tag optimization: title and description

At this point, the Title and Description tags come into the On-Page SEO, which are the ones that show the content on the search results page or SERP.

These tags or tags are essential for web positioning. It is recommended that the title and the URL contain the keyword.

The meta description must be attractive to capture the user’s attention, it is also important that it includes the keyword or some semantically related term.

The CTR (impressions/clicks) depends on these elements, which is an indicator for Google of the relevance that page has for the search carried out.

The more optimized these tags are and respond to the user’s search intent, the better to increase in the ranking.

Disclaimer: although there are times that Google does not show the meta description that we have put, but adding your meta description will make it easier for Google.

4. URL syntax

Since we have mentioned the URL in the previous section, it is important not to forget to get friendly URLs as they say.

There are several things to mention about URL syntax for you to keep in mind:

1. Short URLs. Long URLs do not appear in full-size SERPs. The shorter the better (and if you can use breadcrumbs, the better, although this does not have to do directly with the URLs, but with the internal organization of the web).
2. Eliminate prepositions. “In”, “the”, “the”, “and”, all those words that appear in your title, remove them from the URL. You will optimize the number of characters and you will not have any problem because Google does not take them into account.
3. Keyword. Include the target keyword once. No more!
4. Don’t use weird symbols. The numbers are on the limit. You can use them, but without abuse and with sense. What cannot be used are the rare symbols, nor the accents.
5. Don’t use underscores. Use normal or middle hyphens (like this -). Underscores cause problems on different types of servers so better be sure and use the middle dash.

I leave you here an image that is worth a thousand words so you can get SEO friendly URLs.

Here’s another image:

#5. Optimize Content

I come to the icing on the cake. Mostly is said that content is king and indeed it is.

Content is not only the blog articles, but it is also home texts, product sheets, and images.

We often tend to think that only the text is content but the graphic material is also content and is very important for the experience user number and time spent on the site.

Content is still king, but it has to be optimized to be useful to the user. Publish 101% unique content. Use the best plagiarism checker tools like DupliChecker to see the uniqueness of the content.

At this point, I will focus that you should outsource your content writing.

To write quality content you have to use tags properly H1 (which is the title of the page or post), H2, H3, etc. and that contain the target keywords and LSI.

Do not lose sight of the density and prominence of keywords and the use of synonyms.

Maybe this sounds like you because it is from the school of classic SEO. However, it never hurts to remember it.

6. Alternative Tags in images

Another important part of the content is the images. As you can guess, you also have to optimize images.

Although Google is capable of detecting images thanks to its Artificial Intelligence, it must be given information about what is in a photo, infographic, or image that we upload to our website.

In this sense, there are two layers of information, as if it were an onion.

The first layer of information (the one you find most useful) is the one that surrounds the image itself:

ALT tag, image title, file name, and caption. The second layer is all the content that you generate.

Thus, if you leave all the information in the first layer empty, Google will be able to get a slight idea of which keywords are related to your image, but it will do much better if it has all the information in the first layer at its disposal.

That is why it is recommended to optimize the images as much as possible. By the way, the optimization of the images is positive for the positioning of the website, but also (and fundamentally) for the positioning of the images in the Google Images search engine.

Now, let’s see how to optimize that first layer:

1. Filename. Many websites upload photos and images and optimize the other sections of this first layer, but they forget the file name.The file name provides information to Google, so before uploading it to your site, give it a related name.
2. ALT tag. The ALT tag is the text that appears in place of the image when the image cannot be displayed. The ALT thing is alternative 😉.

Here it is recommended that the main keyword be added if there is only one image. If there are more, secondary keywords and long tails can be added that would be difficult to place in the written content that the user sees.

3. Title. The image title is the text that appears when hovering over it.It is also important, and it is convenient to use main and secondary keywords (it is not recommended to use very long tails because it is not positive for the user experience).
4. Legend. The legend is the farthest part of this first layer, being between the first layer and the second as if it were a border.

Therefore, you can use a text that includes the keyword. You can use the keyword only, but when I use a legend, it is to offer a little more information about the image or that visual content.

7. Internal linking

Internal linking is another fundamental leg of good On-Page optimization.

As you well know, Google determines the quality of a website, in part, by the number of links it receives from other websites.

This also applies to the interior of a website, so that the pages that receive the most links from other pages on the same site, Google considers more important.

That is why most of the authority of any site has the home or home page because it is the page that receives the most links (or so it should be).

Having a good internal linking strategy will not only help spiders to index our site but also users because we will direct them where we are interested.

To optimize internal linking, different structures can be used to get the website to achieve more authority as a whole. I recommend that you use the SILO structure.

8. External Linking

External linking is also important and is rarely covered in On-Page SEO optimization guides.

The first thing to be clear about external Linking is how the Internet works. The Internet is a network of links from one website to another and from one web page to another.

That is why, if we break this way of operating, Google will suspect us.

As a well-known SEO expert said, “your website cannot be a link black hole.” You cannot capture tons, hundreds, or thousands of links, and that none of your websites comes out. That is not natural.

So how do you should operate with external links?

I recommend the following two criteria based on two popular SEO experts sayings:

1. With whom, I saw you, I compared you. This means that, to the extent that you link to authority websites, Google will consider your website to be an authority.

If you link to websites with scientific publications, Google will assume that you have been inspired by them to create your content and will give it more value than if you link to a website with little authority in this regard.

1. Whoever gets close to a good tree, a good shade covers him. The logic here is similar to the previous one, but not so much focusing on the authority of being a journal or scientific publications brings, for example, but on the authority in Google’s eyes of the site.

That is, taking into account the PA (page authority) or other SEO metrics, link quality, traffic, etc. If we get close to those trees, part of their shade will shelter us.

9. Website Loading Speed

Another On-Page SEO factor that influences internal SEO is page loading speed.

When a website takes time to load, it generates a rejection in the user that will return her to the results page to enter another website.

That is why, since 2010, page loading speed has become one of the ranking factors.

Web Performance Optimization (WPO) refers to the loading time and the way that the website has to load the different contents and codes.

Here we have to differentiate two parts: the reduction of the loading time itself, and the optimization in the order in which the elements of the web are served.

Starting with the reduction of loading time, the truth is that a whole guide could be written about it.

You have to keep in mind that you have to reduce the number of images, their weight, their size, and even their quality.

You also have to improve the number of requests made to the server, the number of widgets and plugins you use, clean the code so that there is no excess code, not use inline styles in the CSS.

There are many aspects and, as I say, it is a topic that I would give for another complete guide.

For that reason, I recommend that you look for information about it since there are many publications with tricks to improve loading time.

We can know the loading speed of our website with the free PageSpeed tool.

When we enter our URL it gives us a rating for the mobile and desktop version and some notes to improve optimization.

Using Gtmetrix, here’s a report on the speed of this site:

10. Redirects

Redirects are also important when it comes to On-Page SEO.

Fundamentally, there are two types to focus on:

1. The one that corrects the problem of www.
2. Those others whose objective is to correct broken links.

Starting with the www redirect, it is important that you only have one address to access your website.

It does not matter if it is http://guruscoach.com or http://guruscoach.com, the important thing is that it can only be accessed from one of the two.

The other option should redirect to the option you choose.

Thus, if you choose http://guruscoach.com, when someone tries to access http://guruscoach.com, they will be automatically redirected to the first option, which is the one that appears in the browser’s search bar.

Why is this important? Because if you don’t, you will have identical content at two different URLs, and duplicate content, as you well know, Google doesn’t like at all.

On the other hand, there are the redirects that must be carried out on all those pages that, for one reason or another, no longer exist. Generally, this is not necessary for newly created websites. However, when you have a large number of pages on a site, some internal links may no longer work.

The reasons can be varied: you delete an article because you are no longer interested or you have cannibalization, modify a URL …

As I said, in the case of newly created websites there is nothing much to do, since these pages have not had time to obtain authority, so modifying the internal links is enough although I always recommend doing a 301 to the new URL.

However, suppose a certain URL is authoritative and for whatever reason, you have to change the URL.

This change of URL entails a loss of authority, so it is advisable to maintain the said page so that it continues to position itself and make a 301 redirect to the new URL, whether it has the same content or a different one.

In this way, Google does not delete the page with authority and you do not have to change your internal links.

11. Essential files

Last but not least, we must also talk about two essential files: the robots.txt, and the sitemap.xml.

The robots.txt is a file that tells the robots how to behave. It indicates which pages they can access and which pages they cannot, how often they should, etc.

They are the rules of etiquette that you impose on robots to access your site.

On the other hand, there is the sitemap, which is an expandable file, since, if you have an optimized website, the robot should be able to navigate your site easily without needing a map.

However, it is recommended to have it because that way Google robots have much easier to crawl your content.

They simply go to the sitemap, check page by page for new content or changes to old content, index, and leave.

When you make it easy for Google, Google thanks you with better rankings.

Conclusion on On-Page SEO Optimization Guide

Our On-Page SEO optimization guide ends here. I hope it has been useful to you to start “getting your hands on” your website.

There is a multitude of factors that depend on web positioning. They are all important and we must not lose sight of them if you want to take care of your SEO.

What you do need to remember is that before you start getting links to improve your authority, have your SEO On-Page well optimized to “link” to other websites.

Now it is your turn…Login to your website and starts fixing it until Google takes you to the first place!

I invite you to leave a comment to share what are the factors that you consider most important or if I have left some in the pipeline, I wait for you!