6 Actionable On-Page SEO Techniques for Better Search Ranking

One of your most important tasks as a content marketer is providing your readers and search engines crawlers with a better understanding of your content topic. The specific question each of your website pages provide answers to. To achieve this, there are certain on-page SEO techniques you’ll need to execute perfectly on your blog.

Unlike your blog readers, search engines crawlers can’t read text on the page. They followed

These conditions exist both on and off the required web page. In this article, I’m going to discuss 6 of those conditions that exist on the page and something you have absolute control over.

Base on this hint, the following 6 on-page SEO techniques (if done right) will help you achieve better search visibility. And possibly lead to higher search ranking, drive more qualified organic traffic, and increase revenue.

#1. Keyword Usage and placement

No doubt about it. Every successful online marketing campaign starts with knowing your audience and what they are looking for. If you don’t know exactly what your ideal customers are typing into the search engines to discover related information in your industry, you’re dead in the water. Effective keyword research is the starting point to a well SEO optimized pages.

Keywords usage and placement on the page is very important too. But this is not to be taken as keyword density. Or ensuring the focus keyword “MUST” appear on some prominent section in the content body. Focusing on this may lead to writing for search engines but not for your blog readers. Remember, humans are the one that reads, engage and buys from you and not search engines robot. So first, write your content for human, search engines spiders next.

The page title is one of the most important section your focus keyword should appear in, and in the meta description tag too. The meta description tag doesn’t hold much weight in ranking factors. But having your focus keyword placed in there help pre-sell the information to the reader and increase your chances of higher CTR.

#2. Heading Tags

Heading tags, especially H1 tag are part of your on-page SEO strategies. You shouldn’t ignore their importance for search ranking. Although their effectiveness or direct correlation to search ranking has been a subject of debates in recent times. But they still hold weight in overall rank signal and good for increasing on-page user experience too.

Proper implementation of H tags on a page improves user experience and break up the content into subsections that allow for skimming through to desired content part quickly. The most important being H1 tag. As with most WordPress theme developers, the page title is automatically wrap up in H1 tag so you don’t worry about editing this part each time you hit the publish button.

From both users and search engines point of view, proper implementation of H tags has a positive impact on your on-page SEO practices.

• Keywords included in H tags gives search engines spiders the signals to understand the consistency of keyword usage on a page with the rest of the content.
• Consider including your focus keyword in H1 tag (page title). This is very important for SEO benefits as search engines spiders pay utmost attention to this section on a page.
• Breaking up your content with heading tags give users a better experience as they can quickly scan through the content section by section.
• Looking at it from a user experience, the practice of using fancy font or styling H tags is not a good idea and one you should avoid.
• Stuffing keyword in H tags could result to Google penalizing your site for keyword stuffing. So be caution on how you use it.
• Headings tags should be clearly visible on a page. Hidden text in H tags is black hat SEO tactics and one you should avoid.

#3. Word Synonyms

With more emphasis on the needs for artificial intelligence and latent semantics indexing. There is an absolute needs to start using alternate words of your focus keyword within your content. The idea is to limit the mentions of your focus keyword to avoid keyword stuffing and for the better understanding of your blog topic.

For instance, if your focus keyword is ” best lawyer in Chicago”. You don’t have to use “best lawyer” all the time. Words like “outstanding attorney”, “top attorney” can be substituted for “best lawyer” and still drive home the same point.

Using synonyms of your target keyword is a good on-page SEO practice. Search engines spiders possess billions of synonyms of words to match users queries to better understand the intent behind the search phrase. Instead of repeating your target keyword throughout your content, use other related words that users may be typing to find exact information in your industry.

#4. Word Placement

Every web page is divided into different sections such as header, footer, body, sidebars, navigation, etc. Your most important information shouldn’t be placed in an area that is not easily visible to your human visitors e.g sidebars or navigation menus if you want them to rank or compete in the search engines.

The content area of your web page, in my opinion, is the only text area that should contain your most important words that matter most to your readers. Take for example, how many of your blog readers take note of those banner ads on your sidebar?

Few, right? I guess. This is because it does not matter most to them but maybe it does to matter to you. Due to the monetary reason behind it. So also search engines spiders take into consideration in a smaller amount the less important sections on your blog.

To get the most out of your on-page SEO techniques, I suggest you have your primary keyword in the first paragraph of your document or as early as possible and somewhere very close to the end of the document. Other variations of it may come anywhere in the content as far as they are used natural and not forced to fit in. But if your focus keyword will read awkward to your readers if forced into the first paragraph, please don’t force it in. You’re writing for humans and not the search engine.

#5. The depth of content

Studies show that the average content length of top 10 Google ranking is 2000 plus word count according to SERPIQ. However, the length or word count of any content itself in not a direct influence on organic ranking. Indirectly, content length or the depth of an article will influence search ranking because an article with more words will actually cover the wider breadth of the topic and gives room to fuse in your keywords and other synonyms of it.

At 1500 or more word on a page, a topic can be explored further, keywords fully utilized and occur at a good ratio to overall word count. There is enough room to fuse in other related search terms you may want to target within your content. Not really keyword density.

However, it’s important not to focus on longevity just because you’re targeting certain word count threshold. This may result in rambling too much, lots of redundant phrases, and repetition of words. Writing long form in-depth content will not only increase your chances of getting more organic traffic but also attract incoming links from other webmasters in your industry.

#6. Topical Targeting

Topical targeting is an on-page SEO tactics that allow you to target different related keywords within a single content without going off topic. You stay on track but provide your readers with a complete information that leaves nothing out of the whole subject. If done right, topical targeting is an excellent tactic to write long form in-depth content that other writers in your niche will relate to as the “ultimate guide to______(insert your title).

This is how it works.

Assuming you’re writing about “blog commenting”. You start with defining what blog commenting is in online marketing concept. The benefits and why is important to blog growth. From there you move to discuss how to do proper blog commenting to achieve your desired marketing goal.

After that, you discuss how to identify blogs in your niche where to leave a valuable comment on published post. In this section, you go further discussing the different between dofollow and nofollow blog commenting system. Why one is preferable than the other. You further discuss why one liner comment is not a good marketing practice. You go further discussing the various tools available online for scaling the blog commenting task.

If you examine the steps outlined above, you will discover we have covered a blog theme in whole and have lots of industry keywords going on there. Within one piece of content we have targets the following keywords:

• What is blog commenting?.
• Benefits of blog commenting.
• How to do blog commenting.
• Dofollow and Nofollow blog commenting system.
• Tools for blog commenting and more.

If done right, you should end up with a massive amount of information on a single page that your blog readers will find super useful for the intended purpose. Something like an ultimate guide to blog commenting. Some sort of information that leaves nothing out and gives no reason to search further on other webmasters blog for more information on the same subject. What you’re doing in essence, is covering a blog theme instead of just writing about a sub-section of it. And it helps greatly to drive more relevant organic traffic for even keywords you never target in your content.

Conclusion

If done right and consistently, these six (6) on-page SEO techniques will help in no small measure improve your site user experience, increase search visibility, and possibly drive more organic traffic to your website.

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