5 crucial tips for successful on-page SEO (for beginners)

seo
You’ve probably already included the parts that are absolutely essential to quickly get better positions on Google, get more people to click on your website or blog, and get more visitors to perform what you want it to perform (buy something, contact you sign up for a newsletter, etc.) These sections are titles, subpages, URLs and the text on the page. But to work with on- page optimization, it also requires a job base with clickthrough rate and basic conversion optimization.
Here are 5 crucial steps for an improved on-page SEO in order to ultimately skyrocket your site’s ranking to page one on Google.

1. Create an overview of the most important HTML elements and your URLs

First and foremost, it is important that you see each sub-page of your site as its own page. The search engines certainly look at the domain as a whole, but every page on your site ranks individually on Google.
Instead of manually trying to get a good overview of how your website looks today, you can use a so-called “Site crawler”, for example Xenu or Screaming Frog. What you want to get is how your titles, meta description and URLs look like in Google’s own eyes.

2. Structure the website with good and narrative URLs and subpages

Arrange your website in such a way that it is easy to read both for the visitor and the search engines. If your company provides different services or different products, you should have a page for each different product (categories). If you have a good CMS system, it’s easy to change all of this yourself without entering the code.
For example, freshflowers.com/potplants is where you would present pot plants, and if you would have summer flowers, you would have a URL which instead uses the word ”summer flowers”.
Make sure that each category and page have individual sub-pages so that they can rank well individually and tell Google and the user what the page is about throughout the URL.
For example, if you have a page about pots, you can create a sub-page on your site with the URL yourwebsite.com/pots. What happens now is that when a person searches for eg ”pots”, there’s a much greater chance that your page which includes that keyword will rank high on Google’s search results as opposed to if you have had a  sub-page with ”plants”where you entered 20 different potted plants.
Start by targeting up to two search phrases per page as the main keywords. If you go after too many keywords on one page, it will be harder to rank on Google.
If you change the URL, be sure to always insert a permanent redirect.
If a person has saved the old link and enters the bottom page, they will get redirected to the right page, and will not get a 404 error which harms the user experience and can harm your Google rankings as well.  Google’s number one goal is to provide their users a good user experience. In doing this, you also transfer some link juice if the old sub-page had links pointing to your site.
Another important thing about redirects: In modern CMS systems, one has initially chosen whether a website should use www or without www (yes it actually matters, Google sees this as two different domains, which is not good). You might, for example, use https://yoursite.com because you want as short address as possible and to make it feel more modern and fresher in search results. It also makes it easier to share blog posts in social media.
Before doing this, you should check which of the “strongest” subdomains in Google’s eyes has the most links. This can be done with different tools, like Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz.

3.Titles

It’s important that the title tag on the pages contains the words / keywords that you want to try to rank for on that particular page. As mentioned, you should only optimize the respective page for up to two keywords / search phrases. You also want to include your company name or the name of your site so that people clearly see which website or company they are visiting.
Google usually shows 65-69 characters. You can use a tool to see how your title will look in Google by searching for “SERP Snippet Optimization Tool”. If your title is too long, Google will automatically shorten it, which neither looks particularly good or nor helps to get your message – stay within the limit!
It is also important that you do not have the same titles on your various subpages. Each page is unique and therefore you should have a unique title.

4.Meta description – Make them selling!

This should not be mixed with meta keywords, which you do not need to worry about at all. Meta description is the text that appears under the title and under the address in Google search results. It’s simply a descriptive text for the bottom. Meta description is not important in terms of appearing high in search results, but on the other hand, they can increase your CTR (clickthrough rate), i.e. How large a proportion of searchers choose your search result. It’s not always that Google chooses to show the text you’ve chosen, but usually they’ll do it. Here you want something selling and would like to have a USP (Unique Selling Point) about what separates you from everyone else in the search results.
So if you sell red shirts and your USP is that you offer free shipping, free returns and you are the cheapest in the world, you want to present these as your unique selling points. For example: “Looking for red shirts? We have the cheapest in the world! In addition, free shipping and free returns! Welcome! “You can usually use 155 characters. You can use the same tools as when you check how many characters you have in the title to see how your meta description looks like. Remember to have a unique meta description for each underside.

5.Content on your website – write for your visitors!

Google is getting better and better at understanding content on a page. If you google today you will probably see that you start getting a lot of English results in country-specific/language-specific search phrases as well as results where synonyms of the word do not appear exactly as you were looking for.
We recommend that you write the text for your visitors first and foremost. The more text you have on sub-pages, the higher the chances are  to get a higher ranking on Google. But take into account, that the visitor would not be able to read a text with several thousand words, unless it’s an amazing educative guide.
For example, think of the user when writing, but it’s good if you can get 300-500 words minimum in product pages. You can also try to include your keywords and keyword phrases in the H1, i.e. the title on the bottom. Also, do not have any duplicate content on your site. Do not use the same text on several sub pages, but always have unique content everywhere.

About the author

Jens is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Veloce International marketing blog and the influencer marketing directory Veloce Network. He is a social media and marketing nut, sharing his passion for online marketing and business in his articles.

Rob Boirun
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