As a Small Business owner or Content Expert, Search Engine Optimization is not only critical to your success online, it is one phrase you're going to come across again and again.

But what exactly is On-Page SEO?

On page SEO simply refers to the internal search engine optimization done on a webpage. It is a collection of SEO strategies you implement within your own website pages, in order to make the site more visible on the search engine.

This strategy sometimes involves the use of keywords and other information in a strategic way, to drive specific search engine results for a website.

If you’re a new blogger, you may not know quite a lot about the importance of On-Page SEO but notwithstanding, the importance of on page SEO for every website cannot be overemphasized. In fact, on page optimization is one of the key SEO strategy you’ll need to put in place if you want to build a successful website.

To be more categorical, if you want your web page to show up on the search engine, you need to optimize it for the search keywords you want to rank for. And the first step towards getting this right starts with setting up a proper on-page optimization.

That said, you might be asking yourself this question… How can I really do an on-page optimization for my website?

To be honest, optimizing a new website for the search engine can look really daunting and overwhelming but, if you can get things right from the onset, you can get on to achieve a lot for your website within a short period.

In the following sub headings, I am going to walk you through the step by step approach you can use to optimize your website for SEO all by yourself.

Understand your Keywords

A lot of post like this will mention that keyword optimization is dead. But truth be told, people will always use specific phrases to search for terms on the search engine. So, even when the relevance of keywords in SEO has reduced (or let’s say evolved), compared to what it used to be, the use of keywords are still very important when it comes to on-page SEO.

Now, the first step to a proper on page SEO optimization is to understand the keywords you want your website to rank for. To do this properly, you want to find out the goal you want to achieve with the website. When this is done, you can now go ahead and choose the keywords that will help you achieve these goals.

Now, let’s break this down a bit…

Supposing you want to be selling romantic novels on your website, your key goals would be to get people searching for romantic novels to land on your website. In order to achieve this, you will need to gather important search terms that people would type into the search engine, while searching for romantic novels online. After that, you can now put them together on strategic location throughout your website then begin the optimization.

Optimize your Meta Tags
If you can recall, I just mentioned that for your website to get a better ranking, you need to put your keywords in strategic locations on your website. With strategic locations here, I’m referring to the proper use of your post titles, meta description, H1, H2 and your meta tags generally.

Now, the following are ways you can optimize your tags properly…

Title Tags: While optimizing your web pages, try to make sure that your title tag describes the post properly with the right keywords you want to rank for.

Meta Description: Meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is all about. To get the best out of it, you want to make your meta description as brief and compelling as possible, with the right mix of keywords that are relevant to your post.

H1 and H2, H3… Tags: These are also referred to as header tags. They are HTML tags that indicates the headings in your post.

They are supposed to be used as headings and sub heading throughout a web page so as to give the page (or post) the right structural arrangement and good user experience.

To optimize your header tags properly, make sure they include the keywords related to your main Keywords.

[b]Optimize for Search Intent
[/b]In times past, it was easy come up with a content idea, find keywords, create content, post and go to bed. And then before you wake up it’s ranking well on the search engine.

Right now, a lot has changed. Beyond Keywords optimization, there’s still a lot you need to do. For instance, before writing your post you need to understand the user’s search intent for that particular post idea.

Again for example, if you want to write a post like: “how to make money online“., you cannot just do a keyword research and head over to write your post. You need to understand the user intent.

And by this I mean that you have to understand exactly what the user wants to see, when they type in the keywords; ” how to make money online”, into a search engine like Google.

To know this properly, you have to type in these keywords into the search engine and find out the web pages that are ranking for those keywords. Find out, is there any specific things you noticed about the structuring of the post, web pages, titles etc.?

In most cases, there are some topical ideas that users intend is to see whenever they make searches on the search engine. For instance, when searching for a keyword like “making money online“, a user might be prefer to see a “how-to article”. on the search result page.

If this is the case, Google will prefer to show up posts with a topic like “how to make money online” over other list posts like “5 ways to make money online.”

This same thing goes in other areas too. If the user intent for a particular search term prefers a more detailed post like “the complete guide on on-page SEO” and all you have is a short post like 5 easy ways to optimize on-page SEO, your post might not have a good ranking as compared to the other post that is more well detailed.

With situations like this, it can look rather difficult to rely on your Keywords alone. Knowing exactly what the user intent for a post is all about will save you the stress of writing posts that will be ignored by the search engine.

Install an SEO Plugin

Installation and setting up of an SEO plugin is very important when it comes to on page SEO.

Although with a WordPress website, you can still run some optimizations without a plugin, the use of an SEO plugin will help you to achieve much more. For instance, search engine optimization plugin like Yoast SEO, Rankmath, etc. Do have specific optimization options that are not available in your default WordPress installation.

They also have other technical SEO functionalities like the XML site maps function, among others. And with these plugins, you have a better leverage to optimize your website’s meta tags accurately.

Getting most of these options from the default WordPress installation is near impossible in most cases. This is why installing and using an SEO plugin to optimize your website will improve the overall visibility of your website.

Improve Your Website’s Speed

Over the years, web page speed has become an important website ranking factor for pages. In fact, the faster your website loads, the easier it becomes for a user to get across to the website.

Slow loading websites are bound to increase bounce rates and search engines like Google do penalize such websites. To get a better on-page SEO experience, you need to have a fast loading website.

If you’re on WordPress, you can begin the journey to increasing your loading page by putting in place major optimization plugins to get your website running faster. Talking about optimizations, there are a handful of caching plugins that can be very handy here.

Also, there are image optimization plugins SmushIt and others that can be helpful to your website speed when used properly. You need to get your hands on these plugins, test run and have them installed on your website then optimize them to get a faster loading experience for your users.

This in the long run will improve your on-page SEO to a very large extent.

Use a shorter Permalink Structure
A permalink is the the link to your blog post or web page.

Usually a lot of new website owners do not give a thought to the structure of their permalinks this until it becomes very late. Normally, it is important that you use the right permalink structure for your website. And by right I’m referring to a short, and descriptive permalink structure.

Reason this is necessary from the beginning is because changing your links after the website is live or after publishing several blog posts on the site can lead to a number of issues.

If you’re writing about a topic like; “how to create a blog, make money online and become a super rich billionaire “ for example and you choose a permalink structure that includes the month, day and title of your blog post, this is what your link will look like www.abc.com/how-to-create-a-blog-make-money-online-and-become-a-super-rich-billionaire/2020/10/17

Now, if you take a look at the above link, you’ll realize that it is rather too long and cumbersome. Instead of having your permalink structured this way, choose a structure that does not include the publishing date. After that, you also want to edit your URL links before clicking the publish button for any post.

PS: Note that if you’re publishing a website like a news blog that updates frequently, you may still want to keep a structure that included the date of publication. But either ways, you can still publish a news website without including the date and day of publication in your URL.

Optimize the Alt text for your images
Most amateur bloggers do not optimize their images at all. And this is not right because Images do rank on Google.

There’s a high chance that the image used in your post can rank very well on Google image search, if you optimize the them with the relevant keywords.

Instead of adding images to your post without changing or updating the data, it is very important you fix the Alt text for these images as they can also boost your on page SEO and drive direct traffic to your post.

Create Content that is simple and Relevant
After following through the above listed steps, one of the biggest steps that will improve your on page SEO optimization is going to be your content.

I will want to refer to this step as the mother of all steps because without content that s well written and optimized for the search engine, 60% of all your on page SEO Optimization is almost useless.

Content is the the most important part of Search Engine Optimization and for things to work out right, you must get your content right.

Putting the above listed steps into consideration, you need to research and create a timely and high quality content that is relevant to your audience’s needs.

Ensure you use smart SEO and Content Marketing Strategy to create content in a simple and straight forward way that will be easily appreciated by your audience and optimized enough to rank on the search engine.

Final Words
Optimizing your on Page SEO can be a bit technical but you can still get it right if you follow through the steps properly. You can also get our SEO experts to optimize your web pages and get more visibility for your website, if you find things too difficult.

In conclusion, whether you’re building a new website or optimizing an existing website, if you follow through these steps, and set up a better On-Page SEO for your website, you’re going to get results that will drive meaningful outcomes for you and your business.

PS: Beyond the strategies I’ve listed here, there are other things you could do to optimize your website and get an even bigger visibility for your small business. And I will be sharing most of these in subsequent posts.

Now, it’s over to you. What steps have you taken to get more visibility for your website?
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