The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO in 2022 (Step-By-Step Guide)
Ren Hao
Updated 15 October 2022
What is On-Page SEO? It is one of the ways that uses on-site methods to optimize your SEO page’s ranking in relevant search results. Let us dig a little deeper to know actually how powerful SEO is before we start to talk about On-Page optimization in SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the power to drive thousands of potential users and customers to your site, Why? One of the reasons is SEO can understand the voice of the users, so it means you can get much more precise traffic than advertisement (We call it Ads). You can learn more about Why SEO Matters here.
Actually, do you know that SEO is totally your own responsibility. You decide what the subject of your pages will be. So, you can manage how well your content is and how popular your content is by doing keyword research and understanding user search intent behind, you can know more details at How To Do SEO Keyword Research (Step By Step Beginner Guide).
Your website must be chosen to target the target market. We call it a niche market. It means who is your target audience? What content are they looking for? Then, plan your keyword and content after it. It is both intimidating and powerful.
After that, you can learn more about What Is Off-Page SEO & Why You Need It? (+Helpful Checklist) Once you have done the On-Page SEO, it will help your SEO grow faster and your web page rank higher.
Once you understand which On-Page factors will impact your search engine results pages (SERP), I mean the search result ranking. You will know what things you should focus on. We will talk about it in the following content, you will understand them clearly.
In this content, you will learn how to start to do On-Page SEO by following 5 sections, as follows:
What is On-Page and Off-Page SEO?
Let us go into much more detail. On-Page SEO, also called on site SEO, it describes the SEO factors and the methods for enhancing aspects of a page you can control. Off-page SEO is SEO factors and strategies that promote your business online.
The On-Page Search Engine Optimization process is the process of optimizing the backend component or frontend components of a website. There are content elements, website architecture and HTML elements. We can categorize them as On-Page elements, we will talk about them one by one later.
One more thing I want to share with you is algorithms that Google uses for ranking sites are basically based on three parts: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and technical SEO.
You can go What Is Technical SEO? (Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide 2022) to learn more about technical SEO and its importance, then to clearly know how it can help you to stand out in both Local SEO and International SEO.
Why is On-Page optimization so important?
In Every part of SEO, they are all important, but what are the benefits of On-Page SEO? Let me share with you “Why We Need to Optimize It”. On-Page SEO can lead to higher search results rankings, so it will increase your traffic and then increase more conversion.
It not only tells Google search engine bots all about your website content and how you provide value to visitors and customers, but it also helps your own website be optimized for human eyes to get high click through rate (CTR) after they search. (search results)
On-Page SEO takes time to do but once you start to run your On-Page SEO strategy, it can make your rankings and sales soar.
We can say that, only creating and publishing your website content is not enough yet, you must optimize it for Google search engines to get better ranking and much more precise traffic for higher conversion rate to help your company get more leads and revenue growth.
How to Optimize Your Content for On-Page SEO
On-page optimization is the focus of search optimization on your website. It will be helpful to have a “page-based” SEO that uses SEO for a site. The key elements of achieving high ranking in search engines can be a good starting point to develop a website with high conversion rates.
In what follows, I’ll discuss the entire On-Page SEO process, including elements you can apply in the On-Page SEO section and some advanced SEO techniques. Let’s do it.
What Are These On-Page SEO Elements?
1. Use your target keyword in the first 100 words
This is a classic on-page SEO web optimization strategy that makes a difference. Just use your primary search term for one of the first hundred or even 150 words. It gives more emphasis to the search engines to terms appearing in your pages, it is a good way to start a blog and at the same time it will make your goal and topic clearly visible to readers as well as to searches.
Imagine if someone wrote something about Keto Diet. Is there any reason for using “keto diet” in your article? The answer can be “Yes”, it may appear in some paragraphs to show the reader more knowledge about “keto diet”.
Instead of using the primary search term in the article only, you should always use relevant semantic words and phrases to build on your main content, with no keyword spam, like weight, low carb and keto diet plan word, you can use this Free Semantics Tool to know more about it.
2. Optimize title tags and meta descriptions
The title is listed below the URL but above the meta description. Your site title tags are arguably the most valuable SEO element on the web. Title tags provide rankings and help users look through the results pages and find your website’s content.
In this part, it will determine their CTR conversion rate after the search term in the search bar. Users will look into the title tags to know whether the content is aligned to the search criteria of their needs.
Hence a well-crafted title with a good keyword can help increase clicks and traffic.
For optimum ranking, make sure you add the focus keyword in the title. Be careful here, it’s important to identify keywords naturally and consider why users are clicking on this result, you can’t just focus on SEO and ignore why users are clicking on this result.
In this section, the words you use are critical. We will use different keywords in the title followed by different search intent. We have to match the search intent of the user’s search queries, like informational search intent. We can use Best Guide, Review, Check List, Fast Review to assist in improving ranking for long-tail keywords. You can check at How To Do SEO Keyword Research (Step By Step Beginner Guide) to learn more.
You can use this Free SERP Title Tag Preview Tool to get an idea of how your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) will look.
3. Fill in missing Meta Descriptions
Meta description consists of a short description of a page under a title. Although the rankings of websites can vary from one to the next by ranking them on Google, it is still important to do SEO on the internet. This can also encourage CTR (click through rate), helps your reader know more about your content before click.
We also found that pages with meta descriptions had roughly 5.8% higher clicks than pages lacking meta descriptions.
4. Image optimization
In this part, I found that most of the people will ignore it and think it is not important. Actually it affects your web speed performance, it means the total time your web page content loads out, and also the effect Google search engine robots (we call it as crawler) does not really understand what your image content is. I will talk about three parts in this section.
4.1 Image file name
Please remember to add your related keyword and put the related name for this image file name before uploading to your page’s content. It will help you to boost the image exposure.
4.2 Image Sizes
If you do this part, it will help you to load your overall page elements quicker than before. Here is a problem, most of the people do not know how important it is to optimize the image size and let their site be affected by site speed issues, in particular the E-Commerce site.
You can go to tinypng to optimize your image before uploading, which means compressing the image.
4.3 Image Alt Text
Image alt-texts are similar to SEO for pictures. This is important because Google has nearly as many image results as text. This will not only let the Google search engine robots know what the image is, but it also lets the user know that it is this when your image hasn’t fully loaded yet.
5. Internal linking
Internal links are important in on-page SEO to ensure the relevance and accuracy of the content of each page of the webpage. The fundamental of the internal links is actually doing link building from “A page” page to another page “B webpage” to let users know more other pages related content.
It can help your webpage to often let crawlers crawl and update if you know which page content at your website is actively crawling. So we know it’s important to create content authority, but if you don’t know how to get your content seen. It’s a fruitless effort.
Not only about internal links, a comprehensive external linking framework strengthens context and relevance along with the depth you have covered on any particular topic are also very useful to the user. It helps people learn about your website by providing links to other articles or valuable examples.
A good internal linking strategy can improve conversion rates and other data metrics. Combined with internal links and external links, you can provide more relevant content and websites to increase your content authority.
6. URLs Help On-Page SEO
URLs can be used in many other ways. When you create a URL that uses key phrases, the content becomes clearer about the subject of the page. The site’s URL must give users the best way of understanding the content of the webpage. Ensure your URL structure is clearly visible. Keep things short and refrain from stumbling over something.
Also, They are crucial in the design of site structure as well as creating a variety of pages in a sub-page or blog post. Here’s some helpful information to create an SEO-friendly URL Structure.
A. Keywords in the URL separated with a hyphen (-)
B. Keywords in the URL joined together
C. Simple , descriptive words, structure category in the URL
7. Write Unique, Optimized Content
I mean releasing something that does more than simply repeat what was once there. Content dominates search engines. Google’s sole purpose is to offer the searcher precisely what he wants, thus focusing on the most relevant, valuable content that fulfills all the needs of search engines.
Its contents are balanced by authoritative and keyword-searched information. Moreover, the blog post contents of the site are unique. This will help you distinguish yourself from the competition. We will talk more later.
7.1. SEO Copywriting
Copy writing can increase the SEO effectiveness of the website. Having a great content strategy can boost the engagement of the customer. The best copywriting practices for SEO do not only benefit the SEO engines either. They help you improve content promotion for your readers.
As we know, You need to have the semantic keyword and focus keyword to appear in your content. Let me share with you, you can use this SEO Copywriting Ai Tools to help you in SEO Copywriting. Besides this, I have found that how Google actually wants, how the Google algorithm works, it does not only focus on keyword input only. One of the algorithms is about its quality of content. You can see more at How Google Search Works.
7.2 Write Readable Text
Although readability doesn’t determine the ranking factors, it is a necessary element in your online SEO efforts. This is because re-readability of texts makes search engines digestible and ultimately helps SEO.
Depending on how difficult your text is to read, your text could be an issue for your conversion rate, sales, revenue and profits. Do you agree with this? Be remembered to write the word optimize for search engines and also good for readers.
8. Heading (H1, H2, H3…)
Headers commonly referred to as body tags refer to HTML elements. This tag makes your website searchable for readers and helps Google determine if you are important and useful based on your search intent.
This tag shows Google the structure of your content. The headings and subheadings also give key clues about material in the pages following this heading, this allows the search engine to easily register important info about this material.
Google prioritizes content with an attention to user experience. Often the contents appearing as large walls can make the reader difficult to read especially on mobiles. Organized pages make finding pages easy for searchers.
Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques
Once your basic understanding of on-page SEO is complete you can start looking at more complicated aspects of On-Site SEO. Actually, it is quite more on the Technical SEO part, I think it is important so I talk a bit here.
1. Snippets Featured
This snippet of information appears above ganic searches and is extremely important. There are different types of featured snippets.
2. Structured data (Schema)
Structured Data helps Google understand your content more effectively and should become an important part of an SEO audit. Users can know more details before they click the search results like product structured data will display pricing, availability, reviews and so on.
There are many types of structured data. The easiest means of managing structured data is using the Structured Data Markup helper. Enter the URL and Google will show you how to add structured information. You can also test structured information using Google’s Structured Data Test Tools.
3. Site Speed Optimization
Your web pages can be loaded rapidly. When looking for online SEO, page speed is of the utmost importance. Google is focused on ensuring that users are satisfied with the site. If your website loads slowly, your customers might not stay there.
Also, the speed of websites affects conversion and site visitors returns. Check your web page speeds using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to know why your website loads slowly. Optimizing web pages is a must, but there are still many people who don’t care about it.
Once you did the test, You will get some metrics in your page speed test results, including First Content Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Maximum Content Paint (let’s call it LCP), Interaction Time, Total blocking time and cumulative layout shift. Then, you can go to optimization by following the suggestions shown.
Starting your SEO success is hard work.
To read more about SEO knowledge, check out my other guides:
Now, it’s your turn to start SEO Today.
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Ren Hao
Ren Hao is a full-time Google SEO Specialist and Funnel Designer. Join Ren Hao’s SEO Community and read on renhaoseo.com to learn how to scale your influence at Google. Before becoming an SEO Specialist, Ren Hao is a Full Stack Web Developer, who helps companies develop their business website. Now, Ren Hao helps companies achieve sustainable traffic growth and reach the right target audience to get higher conversion rates with a strategic plan. He fully combines White Hat Google SEO & Content Funnel Design for sustainable traffic growth and conversions.