On-page SEO is about creating SEO-optimized content and resolving the website’s technical issues to ensure the best user experience. The website structure and content are important to search engine ranking factors. Ensuring that the best on-page SEO practices are followed is important for the success of Off-Page SEO strategies.
15 To dos for On-Page SEO
1) Site Verification- Google, Bing, and Yandex
Get your site verified in all three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yandex. The verification process is easy. You just need to place an HTML tag on your website homepage. Verifying your sites on these search engine webmasters will help you get your website indexed faster in the search result. The webmaster tools will also provide you with important information regarding your website technical issues, recommendations for SEO improvements and enable you to target a specific country.
*** Pro Tip- Set rel-canonical on your homepage.
Homepage duplicates are very common, and that people might link to your homepage in many ways (example.com, www.example, http example, https Example). You need a canonical tag on our homepage to get the desired benefits of backlinks.
List of To dos- Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster, and Yandex Webmaster
1) Submit XML sitemap.
2) Set international targeting in google search console. Set the country whose users you want to target the most.
3) Use data highlighter in google search console for better SERP results.
4) Check for HTML improvements/SEO recommendations in webmaster tools, for example, duplicate meta tags, SEO unfriendly URLs, etc.
5) Check the number of website pages indexed.
6) Check for crawl errors and ensure the robot.txt file is working.
7) Remove unwanted/spam/low-quality backlinks using disavow link feature.
8) Check website statistics like the number of impressions, clicks, search queries, sites linking to you, etc.
9) Submit Urls for indexing.
10) Check Site speed, mobile-friendliness, and Core Web Vitals.
***Pro Tip – Keyword Research from Google Search Console
The performance tab in Google Search Console is the best tool you have to optimize and maintain your search rankings. Regularly check your top keywords and pages. Make sure to include the keywords that bring you maximum traffic in Meta title and H tags.
Top performing keywords and pages will give you a good indication of the type of content users look for and enjoy reading. Create more content based on the top search queries. Generate new content and optimize the existing pages to accurately provide the solution to users’ search queries. This will bring more traffic to your website and increase the engagement rate on the page, which in turn will further boost your website ranking. Your SEO efforts would show results because the optimized content will attract quality backlinks. After all, it accurately fulfills user needs. ***
2) Google Analytics Account-
Set up a Google Analytics account to understand the customer demographics, customer behavior, and marketing channel performance. Google Analytics gives you a clear picture of who your customers are, where they are coming from, what keywords they are using to find you, which content they like the most, and the best landing pages. You can also monitor your organic, paid, referral, and social media marketing channels. Google Analytics gives you the ammunition to optimize your website content and marketing strategies. It is the most reliable way of measuring your website performance and SEO efforts. It is best to link your google analytics account with Google Search Console to gain better insights for search engine optimization.
***Pro Tip – Create multiple Google Analytics dashboards
Craft multiple dashboards under customization, for example, New-Return customer dashboard with widgets relating to statistics of new and repeat customers, SEO dashboard, State-Wise sales dashboard, Engagement and Loyalty dashboard, Sales and Revenue dashboard, Mobile eCommerce dashboard, Customer demographic dashboard, etc. for business or client presentations and to get quick view of your important business statistics.***
3) Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions-
Meta Titles is one of the most important On-Page SEO factors. Each page of your website must have a unique Meta title of up to 60 characters. Meta titles help search engines understand the topic of the page. Include the most important keywords in the Meta title. The Meta Tiles also appear in the search results. It is best practice to include a call to action in the Meta title for better CTR (Click through rates).
Search engine users see the Meta description below the Meta tiles in search results. Meta descriptions are no longer ranking factors, but a descriptive and unique Meta description of up to 150 characters for each webpage makes the search result easy to understand for the users and makes the search results more clickable.
***Pro Tip – Include Keywords from Top Ad Copies
You can use phrases and keywords that appear in Ad copies on the SERP for relevant search queries. This will make your search snippet attractive and enable your website to appear on highly relevant search results. ***
4) H1, H2, H3 tags-
Proper page formatting is crucial for on-page SEO. You need to provide proper headings tags with keywords, such as the main heading (h1 tag) and subheadings (h2). Use the size font (at least 12px) for H1 tag and (at least 9px) for H2 tags. Split the text between two consecutive headings into small paragraphs of a minimum of 4 to 5 lines. Bullet points and numberings should be preferred over long paragraphs for enhanced user readability.
***Pro Tip – Have search intent-based H tags
Match your Title tag and H tags to reflect the customers’ search intent. Have H tags in questions format, which can appear in the ‘people also ask’ segment of SERP. ***
5) XML Sitemap-
Create and submit XML sitemap on all major webmaster tools, namely Google search console, Bing Webmaster and Yandex Webmaster. In simple terms, the XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap is the blueprint of your website structure and content. It contains the list of your website urls. The XML sitemap makes the search engine crawlers easily find your website urls and index them quickly in search results. An XML sitemap tells search engines the nature of the content on your website, importance of content, content updates frequency, and location of dynamically generated content. XML sitemap mitigates the effects of weak internal linking and strong backlinks.
If your website is on WordPress, I would recommend Yoast SEO plugin for XML Sitemap generation. You can also use 3rd party tools for XML sitemap creation.
**Pro Tip- Consider creating an image sitemap to make it easier for Google to find and index images on your website
6) Robots.txt Exclusions-
The robots.txt protocol instructs webmasters about the pages and directories on your websites that Googlebot and other web crawlers should not access. When a page is blocked using a robots.txt file, the search engines don’t index the contents and links of that page. Therefore any inbound link to the blocked page will not pass on SEO juice to other pages. Any exclusion via robot.txt should be well thought out.
You can access the Robots.txt, a plain-text and case-sensitive file found in the root of a domain of any website, by just adding /robots.txt at the end of the domain name (e.g., www.example.com/robots.txt). Since the robots.txt is publicly available for all domains (which have robots.txt file), it doesn’t make sense to hide secret files or private user information.
Also, each subdomain on a root domain must use separate robots.txt files. For example, news.example.com and example.com should have separate robots.txt files (news.example.com/robots.txt and example.com/robots.txt). For robots.txt file to be found and function well, they must be placed in a website’s top-level directory.
The basic format of robots.txt is-
User-agent: [user-agent name]
Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]
Example usage-
1) Using the below syntax in a robots.txt file instructs web crawlers not to crawl any pages on the website, including the homepage.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
2) Using the below syntax in a robots.txt file instructs web crawlers to crawl all pages on the website, including the homepage.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
3) To disallow any page, you need to give the root URL of the particular file or folder.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /info_test.php (To disallow bots from crawling the test page in the root folder)
Disallow: /info/test_info.html (To disallow test_info.html under the folder ‘info’)
Disallow: /info/ (To disallow the whole info folder from crawling)
7) SSL Certificate-
SSL certificates are used to secure payment transactions, customer data, and login details. Is SSL good for SEO? The simple answer is yes. According to Google, HTTPS is one of the ranking factors. Search engines like google incentivize HTTPS adoption for customer data security. HTTPS is crucial for the website that plans to advertise its products on Google Ads or Bing Ads.
HTTPS provides users with confidence that the website is secure and safe to use. Though HTTPS is a small ranking signal and won’t boost the ranking on highly competitive keywords, in cases where the SEO score of both websites is similar, HTTPS can help you outrank other websites.
***Pro Tip – Increase website trustworthiness
Display banners or Titles that say ‘Safe Secure Easy Shopping.’ Prominently display security seals and badges to increase customer confidence, especially on the homepage, cart page, and checkout page. ***
