How To Do SEO in 2024 – On-Page SEO

August 26, 2024 3:04 pm Published by admin

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to anything you do directly on a webpage to improve the rankings.

If you haven’t already, download an SEO plugin for on-page optimizations. If you have a WordPress website, I recommend Yoast SEO. They even have a Yoast WooCommerce plugin so you can optimize the product pages of your online store. If you have a Joomla website, I recommend Route 66. If you don’t use either of these platforms, take a look at SEO plugins in your CMS. Look for one that optimizes for keywords, has good reviews, and supports your version of the CMS.

For the rest of this blog, I will be using Yoast SEO as my plugin tool. Route 66 for Joomla operates pretty similarly.

Dominate your SEO game using our free checklist below!

Keyword Optimize Each Page

All right, time to pull out your keyword map. If that doesn’t ring a bell, make sure you read through the keyword research section of this guide.

Keyword optimizing your webpages clues Google in on the intent of your page so that it can be matched to relevant searches.

First things first, your webpage should contain valuable content that aligns with search intent. If your content is confusing, poorly written, or not related to your keyword, it will be difficult to rank.

On a regular webpage, you should strive for a minimum of 300 words. If you’ve already written your content, try to naturally work your keyword into the text a few times. If you haven’t written the content for the page yet, you can write it with your keyword and the search intent in mind (remember you can take a look at the top results on the SERP to determine search intent).

You should include your keyword in the following places on a webpage:

2-3 times in the content itself. If your page has more than 300 words, you can use it more. Remember you should have a keyword density of 1-2%. Your keyword should be distributed evenly throughout the content. If you only use it a few times, mention it in your heading, first paragraph, and last paragraph.
H1 and H2’s. H1’s are the main header or title on your webpage. You should only use one per page. After your main heading, you can use H2’s all the way through H6’s to structure your content. This is good for user experience and for signaling to Google what the main points of your content are.

URL slug. This is the exact address for each page. You should try to incorporate your keyword into your URL while keeping it short and maintaining a good URL structure (covered above in technical optimizations). However, remember that changing your URLs can cause some linking issues that you’ll need to look out for and update.
Image alternative-text. Alternative-text is what is shown if your image cannot be loaded, or if someone is using screen reader software. You can edit your images alt-text when you upload the image, or through the media manager on the backend of your website. While you should strive to add your keyword here, the main focus should be to describe the image for someone who’s unable to view it.
Image file names. Image file names are what the image is saved as on your device when you upload it to your website. Describing your image in the file name helps search engines decipher it. A picture of a dog that’s named “browndog.jpg” is much more helpful to search engines than “YC7F8.jpg.” Before you upload your image, you should rename it to include your keyword. If your website is already up and running, changing the name of each image and reuploading it would be a huge headache. Thankfully, there are some plugins that can do this for you. My preferred plugin is Phoenix Media Rename. It is free and allows you to change the image name with ease.
Title tag and meta description. I’ll go over optimizing these elements after the next section.

Optimize Your Content

While you are keyword optimizing each page, this is a good time to optimize your content.

Here are a couple of optimizations you can make:

Audit Content. Look through your content for any opportunities for improvement. Well-written, valuable content is essential to SEO success. Make sure your content aligns with the search intent of your target keyword and is engaging enough that if you were the website visitor, you would want to stay on that page longer than just a few seconds. Look for opportunities for images, videos, or visuals, as these improve engagement.
Add Images. You should strive to have at least one image on each page of your website. As mentioned above, this improves engagement. This also presents opportunities for a rich snippet where Google’s algorithm will choose to show a thumbnail of the webpage’s image in the search results.

This helps your website stand out and improves the chance of someone clicking onto your site. Make sure you are optimizing these images for keywords and compressing them for speed.

Add Internal and Outbound Links. Internal links are links to other pages of your website. Outbound links are links to other websites. SEO best practices recommend adding at least 1 internal and 1 outbound link to each page of your website. You can add links through words (known as “anchor-text”) in your content. For internal links, you should strive to use the keyword of the page you are linking to as the anchor text. For example, using women’s running shoes as the anchor text to link to your page where your keyword is “women’s running shoes.” Internal links present a great opportunity to drive traffic to less-visited pages of your website. For external links, try to avoid linking to any low quality or spammy content. The link should add value to your content for the reader. If you’re struggling to determine a good outbound link, adding links to your social media pages is always a safe bet.
Find and Fix Orphan Pages. Orphan pages are those that have no internal links to them. This means you can only access these pages if you happen to know the specific URL to enter into the search bar. Orphan pages are a problem for SEO because search engines and website visitors have a hard time discovering these pages. This makes them much less likely to appear in organic search results. Every page on your site should have a link from another page. If you have orphan pages on your website, they will be indicated in the site audit you ran through your preferred SEO software. To fix these, simply link to them from another relevant page on your site.
Update Content. Keeping your content up-to-date and fresh is good for your readers and sends positive signals to search engines about how active you are on your website. As you’re making keyword optimizations, update any statistics, products/services, policies, accolades, etc. that are out-dated. Make sure to circle back to this periodically in your long-term SEO efforts, even if you’re not changing any keywords.

Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags are HTML elements that give webpages a title on browsers and search engines. Chances are, you’ve read hundreds of these titles. Below in the red rectangle is an example.

Before we optimize title tags, check to make sure they aren’t enabled in another plugin or your theme. A lot of themes have an SEO component that can override the plugin’s data. Also, you or your web developer may have previously downloaded an SEO plugin that could counteract Yoast.

Meta descriptions are HTML elements that summarize the contents of a page on browsers and search engines. Below in the red rectangle is an example of a meta description.

To optimize title tags and meta descriptions, go to the Yoast section below your webpage’s content in WordPress. You should’ve already entered your focus keyphrase when you did the content optimizations above. Now, type out a compelling, descriptive SEO title and Meta description with your keyword in the beginning of the text. Yoast will show you a colored bar to indicate the text length, you want to be in the “green”, which is the desired length.

You can preview your title and description in both mobile and desktop view. I would prioritize the mobile view, as Google favors this format.

Create New Content

Hopefully the work you’ve done by now has given you inspiration for new content.

For example, let’s say you found a really great keyword that’s related to your business, but you don’t have a good page to target it. You could create a new service/product page on your website, or even write a keyword optimized blog post depending on the search intent.

Or, maybe you realized you have a dense page on your website that you could break down into multiple pages. This is a good idea especially if you discovered multiple unrelated keywords that you can’t target within one page.

Analyzing your competitors is another great way to find gaps in your content and inspiration for new content.

That wraps up the On-Page SEO section of this guide. For the last section on Off-Page SEO, click here.

Up next: Off-Page SEO

Categorised in: Search Engine Optimization

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