On-Page SEO: Learn How to Use in 2023 to Get Top Ranking in Search Results

If you’re new in SEO, chances are, you’ll have little-to-no idea what On-Page SEO is –you might not even have heard of it in the first place.

So, in this post, you’ll not only be taught what you need to know about on-page SEO, but you’ll also learn a few of the most efficient and effective strategies successful websites use for them to be at the top and best ranks.

Understanding SEO

SEO is a widely used term across the internet and it stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing your website in order to be more visible to the people who are looking for it.

Let me break it to you one more time; SEO is the technical, in-depth procedure of improving your website using various methodologies in order to rank higher than your competitors, and appear at the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This will:

• Make your website more popular
• Bring in more traffic to your website
• Increase your chances of conversion
• Convert more leads to sales

Over time, a lot of types and kinds of SEO have been brought to life – mainly, Off-Page SEO, On-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. What are these SEO types? How are they different? Can you use all of them at the same time?

Let’s dive deeper in knowing the differences of each.

The 3 Types of SEO: Off-Page vs. On-Page SEO vs. Technical SEO

Before we delve deeper into the depths of each type, it is imperative that we have an understanding of each of them so we know and we’re aware of their purpose and overall function.

Off-Page SEO

This is the category of SEO that deals with the activities that are outside your website. Off-Page, meaning, off the page – all activities and modifications are to be done outside the webpage or website. There are quite a few direction toward off-page SEO, and they include:

1. HARO or Help a Reporter Out
2. Guest Blogging/Guest Posting
3. Press Distribution
4. Competitor Analysis (Competitor Research)

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is the heavier option among the three. The reason for this is because this is the complete opposite of off-page SEO – all modifications and changes are within the website. This SEO category requires an extreme amount of skill – usually a team – that can allow your content to beat competitors in terms of delivering information to people.

A successful on-page SEO process entails:

1. Relevant SEO Keyword Research and Intent Research
2. Quality Content (No Fluff, Straight to the Point, Intent Target)
3. META Optimization
4. Internal and External Linking
5. Image and Alt Text Optimization

Technical SEO

Last but most definitely not least is Technical SEO. This is the SEO category that works on the entirety of the website. It’s not similar to on-page SEO, though, because technical SEO involves a few things – most, if not all, don’t involve content.

The most impacting factors for technical SEO are:

• Mobile Friendliness and Optimization
• Loading Speed or Site Loading Time
• Keyword Audits
• Duplicate Content Audits
• Ease of Use and Navigation

These are the three (3) different categories or types of SEO that are identified today. Some experts actually consider local SEO as a category, but for us, it’s a totally and completely different playing field.

Local SEO has its own set of rules and effective methods – separating it from the three (3).

For this guide, our bull’s eye-focus would be with how on-page SEO works. So, now that you have an idea on what it is, what do you think is its essence compared to off-page SEO, technical SEO, as well as local SEO? How optimized should your on-page settings and structures be?

Why On-Page SEO is Vital to Your Website’s Success

The success of a website is determined by many things. It can be identified through the sales of the website, through the clickthrough’s, the leads, conversions, etc. The bottom line is, the more users on your site, the better.

The imperfections of technology caused a toll on how Google is handling its ability to help and assist users. As we all know how they change up the algorithm annually, the factors and characteristics affecting on-page SEO are minimal.

You read that right, on-page SEO is an important ingredient in making sure that your website or webpages are up-to-date. They ran about 800,000 experiments, causing the algorithm to change at least 5,000 times in 2021.

Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search of Google said that they’ve ultimately decreased the total number of irrelevant results over the years.

Over the last seven years, we’ve decreased the number of irrelevant results by over 50%.

Despite these changes, Google still needs a hand in delivering quality content to users – and that is where on-page SEO comes in.

9 On-Page SEO Techniques to Improve Search Engine Rankings This 2023

Over the years, experts have come up with different techniques and strategies in improving website ranking, and as the years go by, they evolve and improve.

The reason why this is so is because every year, Google updates its algorithm and refreshes to make sure that all the content people are searching for are fresh, direct-to-the-point, effective – and of course, new.

Here are the best strategies and techniques for the coming year:

Technique #1: Use and Integrate Relevant Keywords to Your Pages

The first technique that experts have used for years is by finding and integrating relevant keywords to the site – the pages. When you think about it, it’s kind of easy – you just have to include the important terms and words pointing towards your site, right? But no, that’s not how it works.

There are a few different approaches to integrating keywords. However, the most effective, ever since, has been by performing keyword research. From the term, this is the process of researching keywords that befit the particular niche or industry your website has.

You can also take a look at your competitors to see the keywords they rank for. From there, you can imitate them, do better than them, and of course, add more factors so that yours will appear higher than theirs.

NOTE: For these keywords, it’s crucial to utilize long-tail keywords, or longer keywords because they show more intent than generic keywords or those that are shorter.

These keywords can be anything from buttons, content material, your product, etc. It is important to use them moderately because overusing keywords will result in keyword stuffing, which is essentially bad for the website, overall.

Technique #2: Create High-Quality and User-Friendly Content

Today, you consume almost all types of media – from images, videos to blogs, articles, biographies, etc. One way of ensuring that your website or page is fully optimized is by creating content that are user-friendly and high-quality.

Content is an integral part of every website. No matter how long or short content is, it’s still content – and it’s relevant. Two of the biggest and most important factors about content are user-friendliness and quality.

The intelligence of search engines is way more complex than you think. As we mentioned above, the algorithm changes every year in order to put the best type of content in front of users and searchers. So, whenever you’re creating content, think of it as creating content for “people” or “users,” not “search engines.”

Here are some of the best and most important tips to create solid content for people:

• Break contents up with headings and sections in the article to help people skim and read faster.
• Use bulleted lists and numbering for fast and urgent-information.
• Take advantage of visuals to break text up on the page.
• Refrain from using jargon or terminologies that your audience wouldn’t understand.
• Refrain from exceeding 20 words in sentences; more than 3 lines of paragraph in your content.

These are some of the most important elements of structure in your website’s content. Practicing and exercising these will allow you to create higher-quality content that is user-friendly, easy to read, and, of course, faster-to-provide information.

Technique #3: Optimize Meta Descriptions and Page Titles

Metas area among the most important factors of SEO. In case you’re not fully aware of what a meta is, it is the snippet or shortened version of a page or a piece of content. In technicality, these are code snippets that allow search engines to give people information about a web page via the summary or the shortened form of content in SERPs or search engine results pages.

There are different Metas to note, but among the top ones are the following:

META Descriptions

These are the descriptions or short forms of viewable content even without accessing the page. In a SERP, these are the short-form descriptions of each link to a website, and is usually a summary of what is inside the content.

META descriptions are vital for a page’s or a website’s SEO success because ultimately, they help users determine whether the page being displayed is what they’re looking for or not.

Page Titles

Page titles also play a significant role in a page’s optimization. Also commonly referred to as META titles, these are texts displayed on SERPS or search engine results pages to help a reader find out what the topic is about. They’re usually the link that appears on the SERP, above the META description.

Google Update 2021: Back in August 2021, Google updated the way they present and handle title tags. What they did was they took control of updating and editing page titles depending on similar elements on the page, including the anchor text and headings.

Here are a few important tips to help you optimize META tags on your pages:

• Place the keyword in the title, META description, and the first word of the article/content.
• Ensure that the META description would not exceed 140 characters.
• Refrain from using the same terms over and over again (to complement a keyword, write topical keywords or adjacent keywords and link back to it internally).
• Avoid using ALL CAPS on your titles.

Technique #4: Structure and Optimize URLs

The next strategy that many beginners think is just a simple process, but, is actually an important one would be by optimizing and structuring URLs. URLs are an important part of any type of page – it sets the tone of what the page is and how the user can benefit from it by giving some type of title in the beginning.

By default, URLs will be a combination of alphanumeric characters like this: https://www.XYZ.com/oiu/uio-en-34521/23/pelk. By structuring it, you’ll have something like this – https://www.XYZ.com/what-is-on-page-seo.

By seeing it, you’ll immediately have an idea on what the page is about even before you click on it. Here are a few tips on structuring and optimizing URLs on your pages:

• Include the main keyword in your URL
• Avoid using more than 5 words in the URL
• Use first-party cookies instead of Session IDs in your URL
• Convey intent in the URL as concisely as possible

Technique #5: Total Content Audit

Auditing is an essential process in almost every business – like how it is when it comes to your websites. Now, you might think that auditing content is extremely tedious, but no, it’s not! You can hire someone to do it for you, or if you plan on doing it yourself, you can!

Doing a complete content audit will allow you to identify what you should remove and retain in your website, as well as new content that needs to be done. Furthermore, auditing will also give you crucial information on who read the website, who clicked links, how many users were there per day, etc.

You’ll be touching both quantitative and qualitative measures when you audit. Both of which are perfect complements of each other.

NOTE: Audits can be done anywhere between three (3) and six (6) months. You can do it every month, but that usually won’t have much effect on rankings, as well as quality because information does not change that often.

Technique #6: Internal and External Linking

Crawling is one of the few most-effective discovery methods search engines carry out in order to find new, updated, and relevant content. This happens as Google sends out a team of spiders to “crawl” around the internet to look for fresh pieces of content.

This is where the importance of internal and external linking come in. Properly structured and linked websites would have relevant links in each page pointing towards another page or piece of content that’s anchored from the exact text or media from the previous page.

Internal Linking

It’s one way of telling both users and AI that your content is well-thought of and that they don’t need further help in navigating through your site. Internal linking is like hitting two (2) birds with one stone – you optimize your page properly and you get to promote and link people to other pages in your website for higher chances of engagement, conversion, or even sale!

External Linking

External linking, on the other end of the spectrum, is a type of link that points a particular term, claim, or statement to a link outside the website. This won’t help your site in terms of technicality, but it will help the user find out more information.

On the side, Google will recognize this as further help in explaining what a particular term or topic is about; it shows that your page or site is a collection of significant information.

Here are a couple of practices you want to exercise regarding internal and external links:

• Avoid flooding a page with internal links because it can seem like you’re just link-stuffing.
• Only provide external links that have value to the reader.
• As much as possible, add internal links to the body of the page, not in headers, footers, and sidebars.
• External links should only be applied when it has value to the user/reader.

Technique #7: Optimize Page Content (Per Page)

Per page, you would usually have images, GIFs, videos, or any other type of media – these can be optimized too. A huge chunk of websites that found success in marketing abuse visuals in their site. This is mainly one of the reasons why info-graphics, charts, and other sorts of media are effective.

Optimizing Images

These visuals, on the contrary, may actually be detrimental if they’re neither optimized nor tagged in your pages.

So, it’s important to make sure that your media are optimized properly by making its size smaller and narrower and by adding alternative text (alt text) that explains what they are to readers and users.

Content Optimization

If you’re optimizing your images, then, you should also optimize the content of your pages. To do this, you’ll have to do a combination of strategies and techniques in order to properly optimize your site’s pages.

– Compress your images so that the file sizes aren’t too big.

– Make use of alt tags or alt texts so that search engines could read and detect them.

– In optimizing content, it’s important to know the exact keywords you’re targeting via keyword research.

– Ensure that the headings, tags, and links are placed correctly in the page.

Technique #8: Headings, Tags, and Content Formatting

A study back in 2021 said that 80% of readers only note and pay attention to headers. The remaining 20% are the only ones who decide to skim through the text body – and less than 5% actually read through the entire text.

Headers help readers skim what they’re looking for in a page, in case they don’t have the luxury of time to read the entire page. Take advantage of H2 and H3 headers in your pages.

• Each page should have at least one (1) H1 or Header 1 Tag (usually the title)
• Depending on the length of your article, use H2 or Header 2 Tags.
• Expound further by using H3 and H4 tags.

Technique #9: Web Vitals and Core Properties

Last but most definitely not least is by checking core properties and web vitals. Many would argue that there are a multitude of properties and vitals you need to take care of. For the most part, those would be under technical SEO already.

However, under the umbrella of on-page SEO, the most significant and essential vitals are visual stability, loading and speed, and interactivity.

Visual stability is the measure of how your site is while it’s live. The easier it is to read, the more vibrant the colors are, the better it is.

Loading is the measure of speed. Google’s moderate level lies at about 2.5 seconds – exceeding 3 seconds is considered fairly slow.

Interactivity, lastly, is the speed in which your site responds to clicks and taps. As per Google, the average interactivity is 100 milliseconds.

These are the nine (9) core strategies of on-page SEO. Do all of them correctly and expect your site to be on the first page of the SERP of the particular keyword you rank for!

FAQs

I know that you’re left with a couple of questions about on-page SEO and its strategies – so, don’t worry, we left you out and gathered some of the most important and most asked questions revolving around the idea of on-page SEO.

Why Do We Do On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is among the most important factors of website health because it allows search engines to help and understand your website and how it’s structured. This way, Google or any other engine can put them in front of the people that need the information the most.

What Are the 3 Most Important On-Page SEO Factors?

Out of the many factors and components of on-page SEO, the most important ones are high-quality content, title tags and META descriptions, and domain authority. Having these three (3) at the highest quality can give you the assurance of on-page SEO.

What Are Other SEO Techniques?

Besides on-page SEO, other solid and effective SEO techniques (that are mostly off-page are) backlinking, spamdexing, link building, and keyword research (including LSIs and NLPs). These assist pages to become more effective and efficient – overall better and easier for users and readers to process.

What On-Page SEO Tools Are Commonly Used?

The top tools used for on-page SEO are:

• Copyscape –originality and plagiarism
• Google Search Console – website presence, domain authority, and analytics
• Ubersuggest – keyword tracing
• Ahrefs – overall SEO tool
• SEMRush – SEO marketing, traffic, and organic traffic insights

Conclusion

We do hope that we’ve shed some light onto what on-page SEO is and the different techniques and strategies linked to it (no pun intended). If you’re trying to improve, develop, and enhance your website without the need for paid ads, exercise healthy on-page SEO strategies.

Many webmasters said that they saw development within 6 months of continuous on-page optimization – that could be you!