As the name suggests, on-page SEO (search engine optimization) basically relates to the optimization process and factors affecting it on your web page with the purpose of improving ranking on search engines.
Importance of On-Page Ranking Factors for SEO process
As the most important objective of applying the SEO process to your web page is to get a top ranking on the search engine, it will be useful to think from the search engine’s perspective. As Google is the most popular search engine, think from Google’s perspective, what do they want? What do they look for when they rank web pages?
In technical terms, an optimized page informs Google about what that content is all about, with the help of keywords and tagged titles which are captured by Google algorithms. That is why, optimizing a web page efficiently is very important as ranking of that web page majorly depends on it.
Better ranking, means more visibility of that web page on the search engine i.e. as soon as the user hits the search button, your web page should appear in the top 3 to 5 search results because beyond that nobody usually checks these days.
Also, better ranking and hence better visibility ensures good conversions and better earnings for the services related to that web page. So, let’s see what are the factors which affect the on-page ranking for optimizing a web page or a website, these are mentioned below.
Content of your Website Page
Aim of every good web content page is to ensure that a great interest is generated among the readers to read their content. Ultimately, it is the quality of your content which attracts the traffic to your web page because the ‘Content is the King’ and hence it will be one of the biggest factors in getting the better ranking for your web page.
Also, great meaningful content will not only engage your prospective readers (which are your direct or indirect customers as well) but it will also educate the readers about what you want to convey.
For ensuring that you are presenting good content on your web page, understand the pulse of your target audience i.e. what does your target audience want to know. Don’t go overboard explaining a certain topic, apply the kiss formula which is keeping it short and simple.
Formatting your content in the right and impactful way is also very important as it will grab the attention of the reader in a way you want. To ensure that your content is appropriate and meaningful, you can revise it many times and remove the unnecessary or repetitive texts from it.
Title Tag
It is very important to know why we use titles. In this context of a web content, when you put a title tag in your web content, it means that you are adding an HTML element to your title of the content. It will appear as a clickable headline of the search snippet on a search engine results page (SERP).
Title tag is the introduction of your web content to search engines like Google which tells the search engines about what your content is all about. Tagging is done by using a mark-up language called HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language).
Majority of times, it is the first thing Google or any other search engine algorithm looks for in a web content, so it is very important to be appropriate. If the user who is searching a particular topic on a search engine, for example on Google, if it finds a perfect match (or the nearest match if there are no web contents with a perfect match) with what you are presenting, it will show your content to that user.
You would agree that when you search about a topic on Google, you see a lot of titles of various web pages or websites listed there and nearly always, just by going through the titles itself, you decide whether you want to read the full content inside it by clicking on it.
This is because every person these days has lots of choices in terms of the number of contents available for each topic and everyone wants to get as much meaningful content as possible within the shortest time.
URL
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is like an address of your web content which tells the search engines about the location of your web content i.e. where exactly your web page is on the huge web of the internet. It follows a certain set of protocols which you would have seen written as HTTP, HTTPS, etc. on the address bar of the web page.
Technically, once you put the URL in the address bar of any browser, the browser searches the IP (Internet Protocol) address of that URL which is hosting that web page. Now here, IP address is the address of the domain (on which your web page is registered) in the DNS (Domain Name Server).
Image Alt Text (Alt is short form for alternate)
As the name suggests, it is an alternative written text in place of an image if due to some connectivity or other issue, the image fails to upload on the web page. In that case, the user can read the description of the image (photo or a graphic) and know what that image was all about, however, it is more important for the visually impaired readers as the text to speech software/tool can read that text to them.
This additional feature also ensures that readers do not get confused if they do not see the image. In the same way, it also provides the visibility to the search engines as well to read about that image which was not visible. In these ways, this feature helps in getting a better rank for your page on the search engines ranking system.
These days there are various methods like surveys and analytics software, which you can use to gauge whether your target audience liked your content or not and then you can decide in a better way about which SEO tool you should apply along with the ways to implement those SEO tools to make your web content the top ranked on the search engines.