Introduction

Search Engine Optimization executed correctly has been seen in many cases to be the key factor to online success. No matter how good your services are or how good your product is, if no one can see them, it becomes obsolete. Any top tier marketing strategy nowadays most definitely has an allocated spend on SEO whether it’s being given to in-house teams or agencies, it has become a must when it comes capturing the online market share.

SEO can realistically be split into two categories, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is simply all of the factors that affect the rankings that are happening on your website and off-page SEO is all of the ranking factors happening off of your website. In this article we will take a deep dive into on-page SEO tactics and far beyond the basics.

With that being said, it is crucial to understand that simply on-page SEO without off-page SEO will not be effective and vice-versa. In order to see success online you must execute all aspects of SEO. Avoiding key elements will result in poor performance.

Organic Traffic: How Does It Work?

Before going into our tactics, it’s important to note how organic traffic even works. On your website, on the frontend and backend, words can essentially be found that describe what your company does and offers. What ends up happening is the google algorithm essentially pulls certain words from the site that it thinks best describes what you guys do and offer, these are called your keywords.

On the internet, it’s essentially just a big competition of who shows up higher on google, when a potential customer/client searches for this keyword. This is exactly how organic traffic is made up, it’s keyword based. The foundation of your on-page SEO strategy will revolve around the keywords you decide to use, so let's dive into this topic first.

Keyword Research

Now that we know organic traffic is based on keywords, it’s extremely crucial to target the right keywords on your website so that we can not only bring traffic to the website but qualified traffic that can turn into business.

Keyword research is the process of using different platforms or software to analyze keyword data like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty and keyword intent. There are a lot of great companies who offer solutions for keyword research like SEMRush, AHREFS, etc. Most of these platforms are very similar so feel free to pick one that matches your budget / preferences.

A good place to start keyword research is to firstly take a look into your competitors. Most of these platforms will actually allow you to see what keywords are bringing in your competitors traffic and what keywords they are actually ranking for. This in itself offers a rough draft in a sense of what your keyword strategy could look like. If you currently have weak SEO, it’s not recommended to exactly copy the strategy since it would be difficult to rank for the keywords they are targeting right away but it definitely offers some guidance.

Once you’ve got an idea of what the competition is doing, it’s time to start doing your own keyword research. Realistically speaking, you should understand your customers the most, so a good first action to take is to start writing down what you think people would be searching for to find your products or services. Once you’ve got a nice list of roughly 20 keywords, whether it’s short keywords or longer phrase like keywords, it’s time to plug it into the software which you have selected. The input will provide you with some crucial data points: average monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. The search volume is self-explanatory but what does keyword difficulty mean? Keyword difficulty simply reflects how hard it will be to rank for this keyword based on the overall competition for that keyword. To start out you want to focus on keywords that have decent volume along with low to medium keyword difficulty.

Seeing the data for the keywords you initially entered is helpful, what’s even more helpful is other keywords related to the ones you entered which the software can provide. More often than not, you will see keyword ideas that you simply didn’t think of that are getting great monthly volume, the way to see these keywords is by selecting an option for “broad match”. What this filter will do is allow keyword suggestions that somewhat match the initial keywords you entered. Once you’ve selected your keywords, it’s time to proceed with your on-page SEO activities.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are pieces of text that can be put into the website's coding which will allow the google algorithm to understand your pages more efficiently. These tags aren’t actually shown on the page itself but can be seen in the search results before users click through to enter your website. There are different types of meta tags that you should familiarize yourself with:

• Meta Title Tag: Describes the title of a specific page.
• Meta Description Tag: Gives a brief description of the specific page
• Meta Keywords Tag: A list of keywords describing the page
• Meta Robots Tag: Provides instruction on what to do with the page(index or not)
• Meta Viewport Tag:  Controls how the page is shown (mobile, desktop, etc)
• Meta Author Tag: Defines the author of the page content
• Meta Charset Tag: Defines the character encoding used on the page (often UTF-8).
• Open Graph Tags: Control how the page is displayed when shared on social media

These tags are an extremely important aspect of SEO to not only target your keywords but to also help Google understand your website. The better the algorithm understands your website, the more likely it is to display it to users.

One thing to keep in mind is to avoid keyword stuffing. Your tags need to make sense since most of these are shown in search results which can be seen by users.

XML Sitemaps

The XML Sitemap is essentially a map of your website. Thai map essentially entails all of the URLs or pages of your website. Why do we care about creating a map for your website? This map will allow google to even further understand your website. First let’s get into how we can create a sitemap for your site.

1) To create your sitemap, visit this free sitemap generating website: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2) Enter your website URL

3) Download File

4) Submit into websites root files through the C-panel

5) Submit sitemap into google search console

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when you have the same content on your website as another website online. Why is this bad? Google will penalize your website for having duplicate content because this is deemed not valuable since you're simply copying someone else. Google values originality and this is why AI generated content doesn't perform well on google either.

You even want to avoid using duplicate content from your own website. For example, if you content on your homepage describing a service and the same content appears on the service page, this would be considered duplicate content. If having the exact content is necessary on both pages, you can always use a canonical tag to tell google which page is the original and which one should be indexed.

A great way to see if your website has any duplicate content is this tool: https://www.copyscape.com/ or you can visit this page to get an entire free website analysis done by professionals : Website Audit

Robots.txt check

The robots.txt file is a plain text file that provides instructions to the google algorithm on which pages to index and what pages to not index. This file can be useful for pages that would hurt your SEO rankings. For example, let's say you have a whole page dedicated to a form that potential clients need to fill out. Since this page is just a form, more often than not it would harm your rankings for it’s missing SEO components but it’s still necessary for your business. In this scenario you would utilize this file to tell google to not index this page so it doesn't affect rankings.

The issue here is sometimes websites can have this file enabled which would prevent your website from improving its positioning on google. Refer to this resource on google for further instruction.

Canonicalization Check

Canonicalization is the process of selecting a specific page as the preferred version when there are other pages on your website that are very similar or identical. This is extremely important to avoid duplicate content penalties from Google. To implement canonicalization on your website, you need to add a "rel=canonical" link tag to the <head> section of your HTML code.

RSS Feed Check

The RSS Feed Check is when you are validating and monitoring an RSS feed to make sure it’s actually working correctly and outputting the right content to subscribers and users. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds enable websites to share updates, like news articles, blog posts, product updates, etc, in a specific format. Users can subscribe making it easy to stay updated.

Why perform an RSS feed check?

• Ensure proper functionality: The RSS feed needs to be in the correct format or else feed readers will fail to parse it.
• Catch errors: If the feed has broken links, technical issues, or missing data, it could prevent people from receiving updates.
• Monitor for updates: Making sure the feed is delivering the new content and making sure there’s no issues with updates not appearing.

Common checks include:

1. XML Syntax Validation: Ensuring the RSS feed is correctly formatted in XML, invalid tags and a broken link structure can stop it from being properly read.

2. Content Check: Ensuring that the feed has accurate information like correct descriptions, titles, images, and links for each item.

3. Link Checking: Verifying that all of the URLs aren’t broken

4. Feed Update Frequency: Verify that the feed updates at frequency at which it is intended to updated.( example: when new blogs are published)

5. Feed Reader Compatibility: Test the feed to ensure how it looks in different feed readers.

How to perform an RSS Feed Check:

• Online Tools: https://validator.w3.org/feed/
• Manual Testing: Alternatively, you can perform a manual test by subscribing to it in a feed reader like Feedly or even using a browser that can support a RSS feed preview.

Image Alt Tags

Image alt tags are a text description of an image that can be implemented into your website. There are a couple reasons why implementing alt tags are important.

1) Accessibility: Alt tags can be used by the visually impaired who utilize screen readers to better understand the content of the image. Google strives to be accessible so implementing these tags in itself will help your rankings

2) SEO Purposes: Image alt tags is a great place to actually implement your keywords. It allows google to gain a better understanding of your content which is ideal to say the least.

3) Image Load Failure: If the image fails to load for whatever reason, the alt tag can be displayed, enhancing usability.

Your alt tags should be brief and descriptive while including your keywords.

Heading Tag Check

Headers on your website can be displayed in a couple different forms. H1 tags, H2 tags, H3 tags,etc. The purpose of these header tags is usually to break up content on your website to improve this visual aesthetic. Header tags are also very important when it comes to your seo rankings.

The most important tag is the H1 tag. This tag essentially tells google what the page is about, if your missing this tag, google can have a hard time understanding your page. These tags are a great place to target your main keywords as well!  

It’s important to also use these header tags in order. For example, you don’t want to put an H2 tag on your website before the H1 tag is displayed.

The heading tag check involves making sure your website has the tags in the first place and to also make sure your targeting the proper keywords within these tags.

Page Speed

Page speed is very self-explanatory, this refers to how fast your website loads when users arrive onto your website. There are two types of speed you need to keep in mind, desktop speed and mobile speed. The speed on both these platforms are very important since many users use their desktop and mobile devices to search. To check your websites page speed, visit this website Page Speed Checker.

Here’s how you can optimize page speed:

Technical Optimizations

1. Enable Compression: You can utilize Brotli or Gzip to compress certain aspects of your website like CSS, JavaScript files, and HTMl

2. Minify Code: Take out any characters that are not needed (comments,whitespace) from your website's coding.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Share your content across global servers to reduce load time based on the users location

4. Leverage Browser Caching: Store users frequently used files in the users browser to mitigate re-downloading

5. Optimize Your Hosting: Use fast and reliable hosting

Image Optimization

1. Use Proper Formats

• Use WebP or AVIF for compressed and modern images
• Use SVG for logos and icons when possible.

2. Compress Images

• Useful tools: TinyPNG, ImageOptim, Squoosh.

3. Set Correct Dimensions

• Stay away from loading oversized images - make sure to resize 

4. Use Lazy Loading

• Make sure to only load images when they appear in the viewport

 Reduce Unused Resources

1. Remove Unused CSS & JS - Use audit tools like Chrome DevTools or Lighthouse

2. Limit Third-Party Script - Limit the use of 3rd party scripts like plugins

3. Use Asynchronous Loading - Load JS asynchronously using async or defer attributes to avoid blocking rendering.

Broken Links Check

A broken link is when there is a link being displayed on your website that no longer leads to another website. This can happen because of websites being removed, content being deleted, making the link broken. This is a ranking factor on google because this can affect the user experience.

You can use this free broken link checker to ensure your website doesn't have any broken links.

Code To Text ratio

Every website online has coding and text. The code to text ration refers to the amount of html on your website compared to the amount of actual text on your website. Why is this important?

The code to text ration on your website is important because this affects your website's crawlability because search engines prefer websites that are content rich. Feel free to use this tool to check your code to text ratio.

Mobile Responsive Check

Every year more and more searches are happening on mobile devices and google knows this! This means that if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you will be punished in the rankings. If your hiring a web developer, make sure they are building the website properly for not only desktop version but mobile as well.

Keyword density

Placing your keywords within the content of your website is an extremely important activity. The amount of times your keywords are shown in your content in comparison to the content that isn’t your keywords is the keyword density percentage.

A common misconception is that people try to put their keywords as much as possible within the content thinking it will have a positive effect. This is called keyword stuffing and google does not like this. There is an ideal percentage which google favors which is a keyword density of roughly 3-4%. At this rate you will be able to target your keywords properly without affecting the user experience.

Conclusion

The basics of on-page SEO have been extensively covered and rarely do people discuss the super technical aspects. Yes, the foundational activities are crucial but it’s simply not enough. That’s why when you watched and implemented a YouTube video on how to edit your meta tags you were left with disappointment.

With that being said, on-page SEO in itself will not have extreme effects without a proper off-page SEO strategy to follow it.