There are various on-page SEO ranking factors, some of which are still unknown to the public. But, there are some tried-and-true known factors that you can start optimizing today for better performance in search results. They can include images, ratings, reviews, and other structured data. They offer users a more informative preview of your page directly in the search results. Including keywords in your URL can signal to Google what your page is about. And parts of your URL can appear in search results, meaning optimized URLs can help users understand what your page is about too.

In this article, we’ll break down the fundamental components of on-page SEO — Meta tags, Content Optimization, and Internal linking — and how you can leverage them for success. SEO professionals use various methods to generate quality incoming links, including social media, creating sharable infographics, and even asking for backlinks. We created this complete guide to help refresh your on-page SEO knowledge and keep you updated on the current best practices for optimizing on-site ranking signals. On-page SEO has changed a lot since the beginnings of search engines– while some of the fundamentals stay the same.

The Complete Guide to On-Page SEO

• These are all elements on the page that, when optimized, can help your website content rank higher on search engines—and drive more traffic.
• Some types of images (like infographics) are also easier to share and can make your content more popular.
• If you want your page to display prominently in the SERPs, use schema markup.
• When people searched for “what is wordpress multilingual seo,” Google wanted to display our page but customized the description to match the search term.

Because it’s page-based only, on-page SEO does not include off-page techniques, like getting backlinks to your website or building domain authority. Up to this point, we’ve discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based on complete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those phrases. Plant and factory together might refer to a manufacturing plant, whereas plant and shrub refer to vegetation. From an SEO point of view, this means creating content using natural language and variations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.

Time and Resource Efficiency

These snippets should provide a brief overview of the page’s content and include targeted keywords. Well-crafted meta descriptions can improve click-through rates from search engine results pages. These tags appear in the HTML document containing instructions for rendering a web page and do not appear to users as they browse it. Some types of meta tags (like title tags) might appear on the search engine results page (SERP), though. To add or edit them in your content management system (CMS), simply look for the corresponding fields and enter the appropriate meta information.

If you use WordPress, you can easily add schema with a plugin like Yoast or RankMath. Alternatively, use a tool like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code yourself and add it manually. Images on your page can rank in Google Images and send you more traffic. You can use a free tool like this one to check for truncation before publishing, or Ahrefs’ Site Audit to find all the issues on your site.

Some types of images (like infographics) are also easier to share and can make your content more popular. On-page SEO tells search engines a lot about the structure of your site and the content of your site’s pages. The great advantage schema offers is that it leaves no guesswork for the search engines. The challenge is it requires webmasters to employ special markup. The rest of the concepts listed here can work on any page containing text. Backlinks from trusted websites signal authority and improve rankings.

Search engines also do not understand how to separate words in URLs when they run together without a separator (example.com/optimizefeaturedsnippets/). Instead, use the hyphen character (-) to separate words in a URL. The more links on a page, the less equity each link can pass to its destination page. In the BHS Links next sections, we’ll talk about the other on-page optimizations your pages need, as well as naming and organizing your content. Majestic offers extensive backlink analysis and domain authority information, which are crucial for assessing the strength and reputation of your website in the SEO ecosystem. As mentioned earlier, incorporating links throughout your pages is a must, but it’s often something that’s easily overlooked.

Other headings can be formed around closely related search phrases or secondary keywords that users search often. SEOBoost can help you identify the right keywords to add and help optimize the content. It includes a complete list of secondary and LSI keywords, their importance, and the number of times you can incorporate them around your content for the best results. Every detail matters in on-page SEO, from your page title to meta descriptions to avoiding keyword stuffing and how your web pages link. Each page must have a unique title that will help search engines, and users understand what the page is about. The easiest way to find out what type of content to create is to take advantage of Google because they already did a great job of understanding what users like for different searches.

Speed is becoming an increasingly significant SEO factor as search engines become mobile-first. Get a report detailing which assets may be optimized to increase the speed of your website by running a speed test on both mobile and desktop devices. Part of on-page SEO is ensuring your website is discoverable by search engines. Search engines, and their crawlers (automated software programs that browse and index webpages on the internet), discover your site by following the links on your pages.

So if you’re using stock photos that a thousand other sites use, consider creating custom images. And I quickly realized that 100% of the type of content on the first page results were tools. AI tools, like ChatGPT, can be a great place to brainstorm potential titles, offering a good starting point for your creative process. Because users will instantly know that your content matches their search query (which can make them more likely to click). The tool lets you know if you have your keyword in all the key locations like the H1 and body content (more on why this matters soon). Mastering on-page SEO can have a HUGE effect on your rankings, traffic, and conversions.