If you’re hoping to achieve a top search ranking for your business’s website, you’ll need to perform on-page and off-page SEO. While most tech-savvy business owners are familiar with off-page SEO — building backlinks and creating brand mentions on other websites — on-page SEO is a different story. Unfortunately, this minimizes the effectiveness of their digital marketing strategy, resulting in lower search rankings. So, consider the following on-page SEO tips to boost your site’s visibility in the search results.
Title Tags
Anytime you publish a new page on your website, you should create a unique title tag for it. This HTML attribute is used by Google, Bing and other search engines to create titles for their website listings. Most importantly, though, it’s a key ranking signal used by all major search engines. If you want to rank for a specific word or phrase, include in the respective page’s title tag.
Meta Descriptions
Although it holds less weight than the title tag, a web page’s meta description will still influence its search rankings. While search engines use the title tag for the titles of their website listings, they use the meta description to create the longer and more detailed description for those listings. In any case, you should give each page a unique and meaningful meta description that explains what the page is about. Google had originally only displayed 160 characters for the meta description. Last year, though, it increased this number to 300. Take full advantage of this digital real estate by creating long descriptions of 250 to 300 characters for your site’s pages.
Permalinks
Setting up permalinks is another essential step in on-page SEO. Basically, a permalink is the unique, static URL associated with a web page. Depending on which content management system (CMS) your website uses, it may create generic permalinks that consist of random numbers and characters. A better, more SEO-friendly approach is to use keyword-rich permalinks that reflect the page’s content.
Speed
Don’t overlook speed when optimizing your website. All major search engines prioritize fast-loading websites over their slow-loading counterparts. If your site takes forever to load, it probably won’t rank high in the search results for its target keywords. The good news is that you can speed up your website in several ways. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), for example, will “distribute” your site’s files from multiple services, thereby creating faster load times. Shrinking your images and running them through a lossless optimization tool can also speed up your website.
These are just a few steps to get started with on-page SEO.
