Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques: The Ultimate Guide 2021

Ranking a site on google is entirely impossible without SEO. To start with, you need to fully optimize your Content for Search engines.

In today’s post, I would show you the advanced On-page SEO techniques you should start implementing to hyperloop your blog traffic.

Without further ado, let’s dive in..

What is On-page SEO?

On-page SEO (also called on-site SEO) is the process of optimizing the Structure and Content of a webpage. The goal is to help search engines understand the structure of your site and rank it better.

What are the advanced On-page SEO techniques?

Topical Authority

Google aims at meeting its user’s requirements in the best possible way by providing them with websites that thoroughly answer the search queries. Your content should be the final destination for users; it should be deep enough to fit in the space.

Best tips to achieve Topical Authority

Users Intention: Your Content should be broad enough to answer every question a user might be willing to know about a particular topic.

What information will the people visiting your website search for next? Maybe while reading about basketball, they might want to learn about different basketball skills?

The point is to help your readers think before they *actually* do.

Expert knowledge: perhaps it’s a good idea to discuss a given subject in a form of an interesting guideline or a technical article. This way, You would be seen as an expert and quickly noticed by google. Google wants to reward experts more.

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing): LSI keywords are keywords related to your primary keywords. looking from an SEO perspective, LSI keywords play a significant role in achieving topical authority.

Write a mind-blowing Title

You can’t induce a user to click on your title if it’s not Click-Worthy. Even if your Content is the ‘meaning of Life,’ a user would `instead click on an inferior content with a fantastic title over your Award-winning-Content.

The power of an appealing title can not be undervalued.

For instance, Check out these 2 titles:

• #1 Title: How to increase your blog traffic
• #2 Title: How to skyrocket your blog traffic (even if you are a nobody)

Without any doubt, Anybody would click on the Latter over the First Title. The best way to shoot-up your CTR (click-through-rate) is by writing an exciting title. In SEO, it’s called a meta title.

A User needs to feel some sort of connection with your title. It should match their search intent.

Still on the above titles…

The first title ‘how to increase your blog traffic’ is too generic, even if the Content is of a top-class, a user would prefer the second title.

That second title is so welcoming that it would induce a user to click it without thinking twice.

Best tips to follow

⦁ Include Primary Keyword at the beginning of your Title
⦁ Title should fall between 50-60 Characters (Including Spaces)
⦁ Title should be relevant to the Content
⦁ Don’t stuff keywords in your Title (your primary keyword is enough)

Yoast Plugin will be handy here. I use it on this blog; the free version is enough. It will guide you to write a perfect title before publishing a post. So, If you have not, go install it now.

Insert Primary keyword in first 100 Words

This is the most accepted standard. Although there is no research backing this claim, but it doesn’t hurt.

Fixing your keyword in the first 100 words will not only help crawlers (if it does), it would also be a means for readers to affirm your Content can solve their problem.

Since Google BERT algorithm is centered around user search intent, it now makes more sense than ever to insert your keyword in the first 100 words.

For instance…

Someone searching for ‘advanced on-page SEO in WordPress‘ would be more relax seeing his search term at the beginning of the Content.

Even if your content introduction is in a storytelling format (as most bloggers do), keep your readers engaged by mentioning your primary keyword early. Otherwise, they won’t hesitate to use the exit button.

Best tips to follow

• Start your Content with a question containing your target keyword e.g., Do you know the advanced on-page SEO factors and how they can affect your rankings?
• Find the right spot between the first three paragraphs to drop your keyword (it should sound natural, don’t force it)

Optimize Post Permalink

Your Post permalink should contain your keyword, avoid including special characters, Symbols, numbers, commas, etc.
By default, your Permalink would look ugly and too long.

www.domain.com/tag/2020/your-post-title

To make it look more attractive, Go to settings >> Permalink and choose Post name.

Once you apply that setting, your post permalink should look like this: www.domain.com/your-post-title-seperated-with-dashes.

As much as possible, avoid using date in your Permalink. Except you are not creating evergreen content, including date in your Permalink would restrict the Content from ranking for another year.

Additionally, you should avoid using stop words in your Permalink, words like which, any, at, a, etc., are all stop words that would confuse search engines. Removing them will give more space to insert valuable keywords.

Lastly, Try to keep your Permalink as short as possible. Research from backlino indicates that the shorter a permalink, the better.

These are the average characters per URL according to the research:

⦁ Position #1 – 50 Characters
⦁ Position #2 – 55 Characters
⦁ Position #3 – 57 Characters
⦁ Position #4 – 58 Characters
⦁ Position #5 – 59 Characters

Based on the above permalink settings you set to post name, post permalink would display your full post heading. You might want to tweak it a little.

For instance…

If your Post main heading (H1) is ‘how to cook fried rice,’ The Permalink should look like www.domain.com/how-to-cook-fried-rice/.

That is fine and acceptable. What if you target only your primary keyword in your Permalink? You can edit the slug and modify the Permalink to something like www.domain.com/cook-fried-rice/.

That will help search engines understand what keyword you are trying to rank for.

Best tips to follow

⦁ Use ‘Postname’ option in the WP Permalink settings.
⦁ Use your Keyword in the Permalink
⦁ Avoid using date in your Permalink
⦁ Avoid stop words in your Permalink
⦁ Keep your Permalink short

Once you have Yoast plugin installed, you good to go. It would simplifier the process of editing your Permalink.

Improve site load time

One of the advanced on-page SEO techniques is to improve site load time. This blog loads in 1.4 secs.

Load time can directly affect rankings; Google announced is a ranking factor.

Additionally, According to 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. This is a problem since the same study revealed the average mobile site takes 15 seconds to load.

Improving your site speed will be a double advantage as you would satisfy both human and search engines. Want to learn how I increase my site load time?

Proper Heading Tags

You should use heading tags to break your content into sections. By default, Your title should be your H1 tag. Some WordPress themes do not automatically set your title as H1 tag, in this *uncommon* situation, you need to set it manually.

Heading tags are ranged between H1-H6, it’s advisable to maintain it between H2-H3. To get a clear view of how to use heading tags, see this example.

For instance…

If your title tag (H1 tag) is ‘how to book a flight Online,’ your heading tags should look like this:

• How to book a flight Online (H1)
• What is the cheapest flight to book online (H2)
• How much is the cheapest flight (H2)
• Best day to book flights (H2)

There is no count for headings; you can use as many as possible. Using sub-headings enhance readability and improve user experience.

Best tips to follow
⦁ Maintain heading tags to be H2-H3
⦁ Heading tags should be used chronologically (descending order)
⦁ Your primary keyword should at least appear in some of your headings (if possible)
⦁ Your Post Title must be your H1 tag

Keyword Density

The number of times your keyword appears in your Content has a critical role to play in ranking it. However, this is not a reason to stuff your content with keywords.

If you are like me, you just sound natural, and everything would fall in place.

To be on a safer side, You should use your keyword at the beginning of your post, the end, and anywhere it fits within the Content.

There’s no magic number; the secret is flowing well and sounding natural. Even if you use your keyword 10 times, it should sound like you are writing for human beings, not search engines.

Additionally, Use LSI keywords as a replacement for your primary keyword. That means you don’t have to keep repeating your keyword; you already have many related keywords.

Use Meta Tags

Adding a unique and friendly meta description to each post plays a significant role in increasing traffic. I have seen SEO experts say meta description is not a ranking factor.

Whether a ranking factor or not, a friendly meta description serves as a content snippet, the Ideal length is 160 characters. That means you have only a few words to convince a user.

Regardless of what SEO plugin you use, you will be opportune to write your meta description before publishing a post. This blog uses the Yoast SEO plugin, and it looks like this:

Proper internal Linking

Internal linking is considered a link from a webpage to another page on the same website. The purpose of internal linking is to spread link juice across webpages.

Search engines use internal linking to find out what content on your site is related; it helps to pass link juice.

The power of internal Linking is significant, it can help to rank new Content fast if adequately implemented.

Ninja Outreach published a case study proving they increase their traffic by 40% by proper internal linking. Even though internal linking is highly underrated, it plays a big role in ranking your Content.

Best internal linking practice
⦁ Use different anchor text: Let’s say the Content you are linking to is titled “best car in Canada,” your anchor text should be “the best cars in Canada.”
⦁ Link should sound natural
⦁ Use a reasonable amount of Links

External Linking

Aside linking to your site, you must link to other related sites in your niches. This helps search engines to understand your overall website.

External linking (called an outbound link) is more valuable if it’s linking to popular and high authority sites related to your webpage.

Speaking of external links, quality is superior to quantity. Linking to only one webpage that’s already ranking on google and related to your content is better than linking to 10 webpages that are not related to your Content.

Additionally, You can use the nofollow tag if you are linking to sites you don’t trust. This would prevent link juice from flowing to the link.

Best practice for External Linking

⦁ Link to already ranking pages
⦁ Link to sites related to your Content
⦁ Use proper anchor text in your link

Image Optimization

A single image could mean 1000 different things? That’s correct.

It’s vital to add visuals to your Content, especially image. Images are eye-catchy; they create better readability for content.

While using images are right, it’s even better if they are correctly optimized to show up in search result. Inserting a beautiful picture in a blog post is not all it needs to rank.

Image Optimization is in 2 forms:
⦁ Image Title
⦁ Alt Title

You need to be sure your image file name contains the keyword you want it to rank for. By default, your image file name look like ‘Image-00238.jpg,’ you should edit it before uploading.

If you blog on WordPress, you would see an ‘Alt text’ box every time you upload an image. That box is where you will write a short description of the image.

Don’t stuff keywords; just write a few words about the image and ensure you include the keyword you want it to rank for.

Write engaging Content

Content is king? But don’t just be content with any content, Quality content is better.

While writing quality content, you must balance between search engines and readers. That means – your Content must not be over-optimized.

There are few rules to write perfect content that will rank on search engines. I leave you with this post:
The secret to writing a compelling blog post

Kill Pogo-Sticking

Even if you miraculously push your content to Google #1 Page #1 position. There isn’t much you should be happy about (yet), as pogo-sticking can be your next antagonist.

Pogo sticking in SEO is a situation where a user performs a search, clicks on a result and very quickly clicks back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result.

It’s better not to reach the top than reaching the top just to drop in no-time. The best way to measure pogo-sticking is to focus on bounce rate. However, high bounce rate does not directly mean pogo-sticking.

Enstine wrote an in-depth guide on how to kill pogo-sticking.

In the meantime, These are the best practice to kill pogo-sticking:

• Use an attractive theme
• Write a welcoming Post introduction
• Hold skimmers down with sub-headings
• Use eye-catchy images

Conclusion on Advanced On-Page Seo Techniques

Growing a blog is hard, but knowing the right spot to hit makes things a lot easier. If you want to enjoy maximum traffic from search engines, these advanced on-page SEO techniques should push you a step forward.

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