Discovering the real unfiltered on-page SEO strategies that the “experts” don’t tell you. We cover everything you need to know about on page SEO to skyrocket the results of your website.
On-page SEO is one of the essential elements to ranking in organic search results, and it’s a known fact that without completing this step, you may not have a website.
Search Engine Optimisation comprises many moving parts and variables that count towards your website growth.
Get StartedOur comprehensive list of on-page SEO improvements we actively do on your website. Our custom-built management software informs us of onsite improvements, outdated content, and new ideas to stay ahead of the competition.
Carefully constructed content based on keyword and buyer intentions to help build new relevant pages by high-quality writers.
Old content always falls in search engines. We keep all pages fresh, relevant and up-to-date by actively monitoring content.
Complete keyword analysis and research help us identify new keywords that could potentially bring new customers to your business.
Optimising your meta tags helps increase your CTR, keyword density and organic positions. We’ll actively optimise your titles and descriptions.
Internal linking to relevant pages on your website can help guide search engines and traffic and thus improve conversions and rankings.
Proper optimisation of images, videos, and PDFs can help increase performance and relevance and target relevant keywords with optimised title tags.
Page URLs play a considerable part in rankings; we optimise all existing page URLs and redirect the old ones to the new ones to maintain current positions.
Linking to relevant external links from highly authoritative sources of information can build page credibility.
Performance optimisation can help user behaviours on-site, which lowers dwell time, an official ranking factor.
Proper industry-specific schema markup will help get star ratings, FAQs, product markup and other structured data in results.
Social proof and expected user behaviours part of the rank brain update can improve results by optimising on-page.
On-page SEO is one of the most important elements to ranking in organic search results, and it’s a known fact that without completing this step, you may as well not have a website. Search Engine Optimisation comprises many moving parts and variables that count towards your website growth.
On-Page is typically the very first aspect of optimisation that takes place upon web development. If done correctly can provide the fastest increase in rankings for the least effort. In other words, It’s the low-hanging fruit.
With hundreds of ranking factors, it’s no wonder we recommend getting it done correctly. Ask your web design agency, or look for an agency specialising in on-page SEO services.
Whether you’re a local business, national or multinational corporation, understanding the fundamentals of on-page optimisations will guide you, give you a better understanding of the fundamentals, and give you the ability to bring it up with whoever is taking on the task.
Search engines are platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo and question-based sites like Quora, Reddit, and Ask.com. They’re all designed around the same core values. They want to answer your question or “query”.
You have a question, and you expect an answer. It’s pretty simple. Whether you’re asking “Electrician Near Me”, “How to remove paint”, or “What time does Woolworths close”. They’re all questions.
The search engine’s job is to answer your question as quickly as possible with the best possible answer. Your job is to answer the search query with the best possible answer. Anyone can create beautifully appealing websites and stunning graphics. Few can create engaging content that answers the question, and It’s rare to find someone who can do it all.
Good agencies consider buyer intent, who the customers are, and what they’re looking for. Going in with a game plan with search engine intent in mind can set your website up for success.
Meta tags are by far the easiest thing to optimise. With limited to no coding knowledge, tags like Titles and Description tags can be modified in any good CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Joomla, Shopify or Drupal.
Your title tag appears in search engines and within the browser tab. Your title tag needs to be below 60 characters in length. The tag is calculated on a 600px container. Moz has a great tool for checking title lengths.
Ensuring your target keyword and a call-to-action is within the title and your brand name.
We use brackets to help increase our CTR (Click through rate), ultimately improving your rankings.
The description tag fits within the same category as the title; it’s easy to change and optimise and provides enormous value. Like the title tag, you want to keep it below the character restrictions of 160 characters.
Your description tag can make or break your CTR. An unoptimised description can decrease your click-through rate and organic positioning within the SERPs and make your listing look less appealing.
Explaining exactly what the page offers and how it values the searcher whilst including relative keywords can make all the difference.
There are two main social media platforms to focus on when optimising your meta tags. They’re Facebook and Twitter. Other platforms typically use one or the other. Facebook uses the Open Graph Protocol, and Twitter uses its own Twitter Card. They’re similar, but it’s important to focus on optimising both.
Schema is getting more into the technical, advanced level of on-page SEO that separates the experts from the novice. We have all seen the power of schema, whether you understand it technically or you’ve never heard of it before. You have seen it in your Google Search results.
Schema markup is designed to help Google understand the website, page, and contents. It’s so much more than making your content look good; it’s about helping create a better internet.
People don’t determine Google’s search, and it’s a machine-learning algorithm that learns from their structured data. It knows a lot but understands far less.
Marking up your content with schema helps educate Google with key data they otherwise would have struggled to obtain.
By providing this, you’re essentially helping complete their knowledge of your business, content, and intent.
There are three widely accepted schema languages to choose from, they are:
The preferred method is JSON-LD. The main reason is that it’s quick to process in one place and contains all the information necessary to make sense of what’s on your page. JSON-LD allows for more data points and cross-linking of data for quicker-wider understanding.
Google uses Schema.org to format what data to consider.
Depending on what your website is about, whether it’s a business, corporation or informative blog, changes what markup you use. To go more in-depth, depending on what page of your website can change what mark up used, what is put in the markup and how it connects.
This must be done correctly, or Google will flag it as an error within Google Search Console. The standard structure for nearly 100% of websites is as follows:
Then we go into another popular mark up such as:
There are many more; however, these are the essentials for the vast majority of the internet.
We are more sustainable now and excited to see where sitecentre and the team can help take us. They’re hard-working and can add value from the get-go. You will not be disappointed.Cuen Bibb — Prime Medical Supplies
Optimising your website’s performance is fast becoming one of the biggest headaches for webmasters. It’s reported that 53% of mobile users will leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Optimising load speed for SEO is no easy task.
Choose a website host that has servers within your target demographic location. Here in Australia, you can either choose from Melbourne or Sydney. Selecting the nearest to your target demographic is essential.
When a visitor visits your website, it’s not just loading your website; a series of events happen, which could see your traffic being routed overseas or in a chain of countries before ending up at your server.
Pingdom’s State of the Internet page is an excellent resource for what’s happening online. Or the submarine map shows internet cables joining nations together. Kaspersky also has a perfect tool for threats; although it relates less to internet routing, it does show routing directions.
This delay can make up for most of your available dwell time; eliminating this is a must.
Believe it or not, not all servers are made equally. The difference is massive; from shared hosting to a VPS or Dedicated Servers can impact how fast your website’s code is processed to deliver optimal results.
Each of those server configurations then splits into hardware configurations and what we like to call “greed”. If you’re a small business, you’re most likely using shared hosting. Shared hosting can have various hardware configurations and settings, which can throttle performance based on what “package” you’re on.
Shared hosting also can run on slower hardware and poorly configured software because it’s shared. You could be sharing resources with five people or 200. That’s where greed comes in.
Cheaper hosting providers lower costs by reducing hardware costs and allowing more websites to share single server resources. The same can apply to a VPS or dedicated server because although you’re not sharing, you can still be limited by lower-quality hardware and software configurations.
Take the time to choose a quality provider who is transparent with what you’re paying for.
Multimedia like Images, Videos, and Podcasts can significantly impact your load times. It’s the most accessible optimisation with the most significant impact. There are hundreds of tools for these tasks; images alone can increase your website’s speed by 30-70%.
The best tools for optimising images:
Using the ImageKit testing tool, you can identify possible improvements. We combine in-house coded scripts and the tools above to compress images to their absolute smallest before serving online. Not only will you save on bandwidth, but you will also improve speed.
Taking things to the next level, serving images in next-generation formats such as WebP can significantly increase speeds for mobile and tablet devices. This new image format can dynamically provide a 25-34% decrease in file size.
Whether your website is custom-coded, made using WordPress or a framework like angular or Laravel, it’s important to ensure it’s optimised correctly. This comes down to minor details like script placement, compression and not loading unused assets.
Getting more technical, stopping render-blocking assets and serving assets from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Cloudflare or MaxCDN.
It’s common for a theme or poorly optimised website to contain every script under the sun for maximum compatibility and support. Loading scripts that don’t get used is a waste of resources, load time and bandwidth.
Before downloading a “theme” or going with the cheapest web designer on the market, consider their coding knowledge around performance optimisation.
Testing is fortunately straightforward. There are plenty of free tools to help diagnose and find issues with load time.
Here is a list of tools we use:
Once you have diagnosed what and why passing these on to your developer is simple. Any good developer will be able to make these adjustments without any issues. On-page optimisation in SEO doesn’t need to be hard, and these are some of the most simple to apply changes.
Each tool has its unique suggestions, and hundreds of them are out there; I’ve included the ones above because they provide unique suggestions that are not similar to every other tool.
Geotagging is one of the most missed strategies by SEO agencies. It’s a strategy that is most definitely advanced and quite technical. Geotagging is a method in which an image is embedded in its local metadata data, which signifies the image or photo used was local. This strategy is only beneficial for on-page SEO for local businesses.
Newer model phones are capable of turning on the geotagging feature by simply turning it on by following the instructions below:
If you’re looking to modify photos, you have purchased a stock photo for you on a DSLR, or even a graphic. You can use a tool like GeoImage, which allows you to upload an image, select the location, name, and description and embed the tag.
Suppose you want to get tricky; download Adobe Bridge and geotag using Bridge. It’s far more powerful but much harder to use.
Ranking local businesses isn’t like it once was. Search engines rely on signals to verify authenticity. Photos taken within the local area are an excellent way for machine learning algorithms used by search engines to verify your business’s physical location.
Ensuring your web design is thought out correctly is very important. Providing content that is above the fold is optimised for conversions and SEO. Not only capturing the end-users attention but engaging them to continue reading. If your header, banner, and data are pushed too far down the viewable fold, your risk of losing interest and clicking the back button significantly increases.
It’s rare but every now and then you are fortunate enough to experience service that goes beyond your expectations. The end result was a clean fresh, modern and reliable website.Brett Gillett — Interview Academy
“Content is key” is one of the most used terms in online digital marketing. Creating high-quality, relatable content is the absolute most important ranking factor for ranking well.
Search engines put more emphasis on content visible with no user engagement.
This goes for all screen resolutions right through to mobile. Having your page title, description, and the start of your content visible at all times is the bare basics.
Make sure your web designer is aware of SEO fundamentals within Web design. If they aren’t mindful of designing for search engine optimisation, let alone conversion rate optimisation, you should consider looking elsewhere.
Tools like this allow you to visually see content above the fold on various devices before rolling out a new design.
Tools like the SEO Browser allow you to see how search engines see your website; by emulating this experience, you can better understand whether your content is actually above the fold.
Every page on your website should be content-rich from the home page to the contact page. Content doesn’t need to be focused entirely on conversions, and it’s just as important to write to rank. Without content to produce rankings, you have no one to convert.
In 2016 Brian Dean’s SEO mastermind analysed 1 million search result pages and found unbelievable findings. One of the findings was the average word count of the top-ranking pages.
The exact word count for first position rankings was 1,890. Local businesses are typically below 600. It became very clear that long-form content was key.
Long-form content is typically well-researched, well presented and thorough. The more in-depth the content is, the more likely the end-user will find the answer they were seeking.
The study also found that using at least one image was a bare minimum for first-page rankings.
Keyword density in SEO refers to how often your target keyword appears within the page’s contents. No more than 3% is a safe industry standard density for long-form content or 2% for short-form.
Using LSI keywords to diversify the usage of exact-match search terms is essential.
There are plenty of available tools that help identify keyword density.
If you’re using freelancers or paid writers who advertise “SEO Content Writing”, be wary, it’s often 5–10% of the article. It’s essential to be very clear on this when outsourcing content.
Write natural content, and don’t over-optimise your content. You’ll likely find the article either won’t rank or you’ll struggle to gain traction.
Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place.
It’s a common misconception that long text footers, testimonials appearing site-wide, and disclaimers are duplicate content. This is false.
“Duplicate content is where multiple pages on your website are either closely matching, exactly matching or targeting the same keyword.”
It can also refer to content copied from another source like Wikipedia, a competitor website or somewhere online.
Duplicate content is widespread in eCommerce, where product content is copied from the supplier’s website and pasted onto yours and 30 others of your direct competition.
Other than optimising your images for local SEO by geotagging them, you can help identify to search engines what your images are using alt tags, alt tags, and image naming. However, search engines do technically understand what items are in images. It’s machine learning; it’s subject to incorrect tagging and only knows basic objects.
Using alt text (alternative text) tags are used to identify what image is used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. The title tag of an image, on the other hand, is used briefly to identify the image or contents of the image.
Here is an example of a well-written image HTML:
The third thing to optimise for an image is its physical name. Calling an image 452-GF-1000x1000.jpg doesn’t identify the image; naming the image bus-driving-down-road.jpg helps machine learning identify what’s inside the image.
When optimising images, it’s crucial to name the image helpful and include keywords for ranking.
A good website structure, domain, and structured naming will significantly improve your rankings.
Choosing the right domain name for your business or brand can be difficult, but it’s essential to correct it.
Keyword-heavy domain names, exact-match domain names, and country extensions can help ensure your success on Google.
Including keywords within internal pages is important, but it’s not everything. Short URLs rank best, be sure not to stuff keywords within URLs—properly layout your website’s sitemap to help your web design agency code your website.
After your website is laid out, it’s live, and you’re happy. A sitemap.xml file needs to be created. This informs search engines of the pages on your site, when they were last modified and how much importance each page has.
Using a template or properly creating a sitemap is hard. However, it’s important to get it perfect, test it and inform Search Engines of its existence.
In July 2018, Google Announced its movement to a safer internet. If your website does not have SSL, you’re missing out. Your website won’t rank as well, it won’t appear as well, and it’s struggling to gain traction.
Without HTTPS, you’re not only losing out on easy Google organic rankings, but as the graphic above suggests, you’re losing out everywhere.
SSL is affordable, and if your web designer, SEO, Marketing Manager or PPC account manager hasn’t informed you to upgrade yet, your customers might.
Chrome started displaying this:
Speak to your hosting company to discuss upgrading your website to the latest security technology.
Internal linking is an easy, actionable strategy anyone can do. Linking to relative and useful pages within your website helps structure and link information. Internal linking should never be done for SEO purposes, though.
Internal linking should be valuable to the end reader to assist in navigating your website with ease by using useful anchor texts to push the reader in the right direction.
Running regular checks over your internal linking using tools like Screaming Frog Crawler can help identify missed opportunities or identify broken links.
Broken links can cripple your website and lead your traffic to dead ends, causing frustration.
External linking is linking out to other valuable resources online to provide value to the reader to either verify your facts and statistics or to reference something you’re talking about.
Sites like Wikipedia have increased and become so credible due to its proper linking resources and providing valid “citations”.
It’s known that anyone can edit a page on Wikipedia, but it’s less known that to get something to stay, you must provide a valid cite to a resource that backs your changes.
Whilst search engines crawl the internet, find interesting facts, and validate your findings, it adds credibility to the content of your pages by referencing information.
By doing this, your content becomes more authoritative and provides more value.
This, in turn, increases rankings and drives better search engine results.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you may as well not have a website. That’s a statistical fact. 48% of the internet traffic is now on mobile, and the growth rate is incredible.
It’s one thing to make your website look nice, get the content correct, and optimise its speed and performance, but if the online experience is poor, you’re going to run into a struggling street.
“Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search).”
Test your website on your phone, your tablet and your computer. The experience should be similar, the call-to-action should be well-placed, and the value provided should be equal from device to device.
You’ve spent thousands on your new shiny website, and you paid the best of the best to come up with the perfect branding that represents your business but doesn’t get traffic.
Traffic doesn’t just appear; having everything in the line is tricky and usually not a part of your web designer’s “standard” scope of work.
With the knowledge and understanding of the steps above, you can push back at your marketing agency and get it right.
The key things that’ll improve your site’s rankings as quickly as next week are:
If you’re still struggling, your designer or marketing agency doesn’t have the technical skills, or you’re looking for an agency to handle everything for you, then sitecentre® has you covered.
Having optimised hundreds of sites, produced flawless on-page optimisations and gotten site performance to record speeds, our team is more than capable of doing everything above with complete documentation.
Providing you with results is what makes us unique. Offering a complete turn-key solution that will drive real results and bring paying leads and sales into your website via organic search.
Please contact us today, book a free consultation and see how sitecentre® can improve your business.
We would love to hear from you, whether it’s asking us a question or you’re ready to grow your business. Our friendly team are here for you.
Sippy Downs, Queensland 4556
