The Essential On-Page SEO Checklist to Rank Higher on Google

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website pages for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Making site pages SEO-friendly is a must for all bloggers and businesses to rank higher on search engines and drive more organic traffic to the website. In this article, you will learn complete on-page SEO methods to make your pages visible on top of search results and attract more visitors.

1. Add Your Primary Keyword in the Title Tag

The on-page SEO starts with the title tag of your blog post or web page. Adding the primary or target keyword in your page title improves the visibility of your post on search engine results pages for that keyword. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword ' link building strategies' then include that term in the title of the page.

2. Place Your Primary Keyword in the First Paragraph

Placing primary keywords in the beginning paragraph of the content helps search engines to know what your content is about and improves relevancy. The relevance factor signals search engines to rank your page for that keyword on SERP.

3. Write LSI Keywords

Just focusing on primary keywords is not enough if you want to rank your content on top of search engines, you should also add LSI Keywords which help to enhance your topic relevancy and rankings. LSI or Latent semantic index is used by search engines like Google to identify your content relevancy and intent. Eg, you can use different LSI keywords like a photo, picture, and visual for the keyword 'image'.

4. Focus on Less Keyword Density

Keyword density is nothing but the number of times you mentioned the primary keyword in the content. Repeating the same keywords, again and again, will lead to keyword stuffing and it hurts your SEO a lot. For this reason, Google introduced the 'Hummingbird' algorithm in August 2013 to de-emphasize content with keyword stuffing. Always maintain your keyword density to 3-4% to avoid penalties from Google and fewer search engine rankings.

5. Write Long-Form Content

Publishing long and in-depth content naturally improves your website page SEO as Google and users love long and informative content. Also long-form content rewards you with more organic traffic by ranking your content for multiple search terms. Try to publish articles with more than 1000 words to increase your chances of ranking on search results.

6. Write Original Content

In February 2011, Google announced its 'Panda' algorithm in order to penalize duplicate content. After this algorithm, many websites and businesses lost more visitors and severely impacted overall monthly traffic. If you want to grow your business online and rank higher on search engines, write plagiarism-free content. You can use tools like Grammarly to check plagiarism and stay out of the penalty.

7. Include The Primary Keyword in Any H2 or H3 Subheading

When you add primary keywords in the H2 or H3 subheadings, you will get more opportunities to rank your content higher on Google. As keyword in subheadings is a strong SEO factor to attract search engines and improve search engine visibility.

8. Make Your Content Easy to Read

If your content is hard to read for readers, then your visitors bounce away from your website soon and this affects your SEO. When your visitors stay longer on your page, it signals engines that your content is highly useful and valuable and pulls your content to the top of the search results.

To make your content easy to scan, write short paragraphs, sentences, add bullet points, and check your content readability level using tools like YoastSeo and Hemingway.

9. Do Internal Linking

Internal linking is the process of adding links to your content by linking to another page on your website. Internal linking is a major SEO factor and plays a strong role in improving your search rankings. The best example for internal linking is Wikipedia where you can find its pages with numerous internal links.

10. Link to High Authority Websites

Like internal linking, external linking also contributes to improving on-page SEO. In external linking, you give links to third-party websites. To enhance on-page SEO, only link to websites that have higher domain ratings and popularity. Keep in mind that when your readers click on external links, they leave your website which means you lose your audience. But, you can even improve your search engine rankings without external links.

11. Add Images

Adding images or visuals to your content not only engages your readers but also expands your search rankings i.e, your images can rank on Google images which brings you extra traffic to your website. Always upload lightweight and compressed images in order to improve page speed which is a big SEO algorithm among search engines.

12. Add the Primary Keyword in the Image File

Add primary keyword in the image source file before uploading to your content or CMS. Doing this, improve your rankings in google image search results.

13. Add the Primary Keyword in the Image Title and Alt Tag

Search engines could not able to identify what your images are, unless you're adding image descriptions in the image title and alt tag. Adding primary keywords in these tags helps search engines crawl and index your images and it boosts your page rankings on search results.

14. Add the Keyword in the Slug

A slug is the part of the URL and short form of your post title. When writing a slug, use your target keyword and make it short compared to the post title. A slug should be short and easy to read, this helps search engines to easily identify your page and enhance your SEO.

15. Write a Good Meta Description

Post with meta description not only increases your Google rankings but also improves your click-through rates on search results. A meta description should contain both primary, LSI keywords and should persuade your target audience to generate clicks.

16. Implement Structured Data

Structured data helps to boost your page CTR on SERP by displaying rich results and also enhance your overall SEO. You can create structured data for your article or page by visiting Schema.org. For product pages, you can add structured data like the number of product ratings and reviews which will be shown on your snippets on SERP.