On Page SEO Techniques: Indexing and Key Word Placement

On-page SEO (sometimes referred to as ‘on-site SEO’), is the process of optimizing the content of a webpage for search engines. The ultimate goal of on-page SEO is to speak the ‘search engines’ language’ and help search engine crawlers understand the meaning and context of your pages.

Proper keyword placement is when keywords are placed strategically throughout the content of your website so that the search engines can properly index your site for those relevant keywords. Also, it entices searchers to visit your page and visitors to stay on your page.

When keyword placement is done right, you are able to rank better for your chosen keywords in the SERPs. Choosing the right keywords and putting them in the right places is a necessary element of SEO. This brings people with relevant search queries to your site. Remember, though: it’s the content that makes a visitor stay.

One of the most important places for users is the title tag. This is the hyperlink which appears on the SERPs. It is what visitors will click on to visit your site. The title tag defines what your page will be about for both search engines and visitors. You should focus on making your title tag optimized and compelling.

While this is not a ranking factor per se, it does help the user experience (UX) by helping visitors understand what the page is about before going in. If the title tag is clear, they are more likely to stay on your site for a longer period of time; thus reducing the bounce rate. The user experience is crucial to your website’s SEO performance.

You should add keywords and their synonyms to your heading tags (headers). Headers and sub-headers are the “titles” which appear in your content. Headers have a different HTML markup than the rest of the body of your content. You ought to focus on making headers clear, concise, and easy to read as this will help increase the UX and it will increase the crawlability of your site.

Your content should always include a main body section that elaborates on what’s in the headers. You should include your keywords and keyword synonyms naturally throughout the body. Therefore, you will rank for the keywords you’d like to rank for and similar ones. Remember to always build your content for people, not search engines. You can always learn more about making content easy to scan by checking out some helpful HTML tips.

Within the content, you can also enhance UX with videos and photos. These make visitors more engaged; a study by Quicksprout show that articles with images get 94% more views and significantly more likes and retweets than those which do not have images. Images bring more traffic and reduce the bounce rate. To rank for those articles with photos and videos, make sure that you include the proper descriptions and tags. To increase the ranking probability for that content, describe photos with ALT attributes, and embedded videos with transcripts.

A good internal linking strategy is also a key point to giving keywords more substance within the content. Using words that can easily be identified gives search engines and people a better idea of what the page is about. For example: don’t write “click here to learn more about the coding of an internal linking” with “here” being the anchor text, because search engines won’t index that properly. Instead, write “internal linking has its own coding which ought to be followed to be indexed more properly”, and make “internal linking” the anchor text.

Last on the list is the meta description. While this is not a ranking factor per se, it will help with the human element side of SEO. A meta description tells viewers what the page is about before they even click on the page. This will appear below your meta tag on the SERPs. You can build your own meta description and place it under your page’s heading. You want the meta description to be compelling and bring visitors into your site.

All on-page SEO techniques:

• Publish high-quality content
• Optimize page titles and meta descriptions
• Optimize page content
• Headings and content formatting
• SEO Images and other multimedia elements
• URL optimization
• Internal links
• External links
• Page loading speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Comments and on-page SEO