Use On-Page SEO to Maximize Your Web Page Rankings
Sometimes you need to take matters into your own hands. On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do on your website to help you rank higher with search engines. These include: optimizing page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, and more.
Here is a simplified guide to On-Page SEO tricks you can use to increase your page rankings on search engines.
Page Titles
The title of your pages are not only important to entice readers, they are one of the most important SEO elements on your website. Google uses these titles to determine what a page is about, so each of your pages should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page. Be sure that the target keyword you are trying to rank is in the title and for maximum effect place it at the beginning of the title because this tends to help with rankings.
H1 Headings
Headings are pieces of HTML code that allow you to make certain words stand out on a page and allows readers of your website to see what the page is about immediately, and determine whether or not they want to read it. It also helps tell search engines what your page is about, and when used in conjunction with page title, META description, keywords and keyword targeted content, helps improve search engine ranking for specific keywords and phrases. There should only be one H1 heading per page and that one should of course be wrapped around the title.
Meta Descriptions
You must be aware of the meta descriptions for your pages. Many people neglect them and that is a mistake. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML elements that provide structured Metadata about a web page, placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document, and specify page descriptions, keywords and other metadata that is not provided in the other head elements. For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content.
Keyword Density
Keyword placements and recurrence within your pages are very important factors in search engine optimization. Search engines will notice your keywords and your web page will come up whenever a web surfer searches for your keyword or keyword phrase.
The natural reaction of wanting to add more keywords, is not the answer. Over-repetition of your keywords will send an alert that will cause the search engine to think that you are trying to deceive it into giving you a high ranking for your page. Once a search engine marks your article as penalized, this could have an adverse on your web site’s ranking. Aim to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%.
As a final note, write longer articles (500+ words tend to go viral more), make sure that you mention your keyword in your url, and use visual media that you name with keywords. These will help improve your On-Page SEO.
