What are the Crucial On-page SEO Elements?

We all want higher search engine rankings and more traffic, right?
But this can be pretty elusive when you're not sure what you need to improve.
What's good, guys? It's Ben here from Neighbourhood,
where we help businesses find, sell and keep their people.
Today, I'm going to run you through what on-page SEO actually is,
why you need to take it seriously, and how to improve your ranking
using the ten essential on-page SEO elements.
These elements are the parts of your website that Google uses to rank it.
Get them right and you can improve your
search rankings and drive a tonne of organic traffic to the site.
First things first.
If you've made it this far and you're still thinking "what even is on-page SEO?"
Don't worry, I've got your back.
On-page SEO is anything that involves
optimising the parts of your website that will boost your search engine ranking.
Search engines, like Google, need to crawl
and understand your page so they can index and rank it.
On-page SEO elements are the various things that a search engine looks at to do
this job, but they've got lots of pages to rank.
To optimise this process,
they crawl through web pages like a fleet of terrifying digital spiders,
looking at many different factors including headlines, content,
internal and external links, site speed and mobile friendliness.
If you want to improve your on-page SEO
strategy, you're going to have to get your website up to speed on these factors.
This will make sure that Google can read and understand your website.
But don't stop there.
If you want to be an on-page SEO expert, we'll need to go further.
Keep on watching this video if you want to master the ten Essential on-page SEO
elements and drive that sweet, sweet organic traffic to your page.
Firstly, we have EAT. Google's EAT first appeared in Google's 2014
Search Quality Guidelines, and it's only grown in importance since then.
What's interesting about Eat is that it's
done by humans and not machines who review web pages and report on their quality.
Eat stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
But what do these terms mean
in the context of Google's search engine results?
Expertise looks at the content of an individual page, not the whole website.
Google isn't very clear on the criteria that it uses to judge expertise,
but it seems to favour expert authors and opinions.
Authoritativeness judges the website
on two things the authority of the content and the domain authority.
High domain authority is given to more prominent and well known organisations
like national broadcasters and government websites.
Links from other websites or social media mentions boost your authority as well.
Trustworthiness focuses on the author,
the types of content and the website, and evaluates the integrity of all three.
The idea here is to keep the misleading
and dubious information from ranking highly.
Want a summary?
Basically, Google prioritises high quality website that uses original,
fresh reporting, is well written and provides value compared to other pages.
On the other hand, Google penalises poor quality content that uses misleading or
clickbaity headlines or contains misleading facts or errors.
Each page on your website has some HTML code known as a title tag.
This is the title that appears on all websites displayed on the Google results
page, so it's one of the first pieces of information that users and search
engines get to see about what the link is actually about.
Title tags shouldn't let them know what they're about to click.
Overall, title tags aren't the biggest onpage SEO element,
but if you get them wrong, they can really hurt your search rankings.
To optimise your title tag, you should stick to 50 to 60 characters so
it's not cut short, and you should use different tags on different pages.
You should also include keywords that you're trying to rank for.
You need to get the titles right if you
want to increase click through rates and drive traffic to your website.
Meta descriptions sound a bit complex, but they really aren't.
It's just a fancy name for the text
that appears right below your title tag on the search engine results page.
You can have a meta description of any
size, but Google cuts them off at around 160 characters, which is just long enough
to sell your visitors on the web page or article.
Google has said that meta descriptions
aren't a huge ranking factor, but they're very important to users.
When a search engine spits back hundreds of results at you,
a well written and descriptive meta description will really stand out.
Heading tags are one of the more critical on-page SEO elements.
They allow both users and search engines
to understand what's on the page they are broken up into h1, h2, h3, etc.
H1 is the main headline,
with h2 and h3 and h4 being subheadlines below that.
They are a great way to break up content
and make it easily digestible for the reader, but they also help search
engines to understand the structure of a page.
URLs are another one of the on-page SEO elements that deserve your attention.
A URL or a web address helps users
and search engines understand what a web page is about.
Just like title tags, the aim here is to keep them tight
and punchy and make sure they contain your primary keywords.
Like the other on-page SEO elements mentioned, clarity is key.
If it's easy for a user to understand, it's going to be easy for Google as well.
Keywords are the words, topics or phrases that people type
into a search engine to find what they are looking for.
Using keywords to rank should not be
dramatic or new information for anyone, but if you're trying to improve your
on-page SEO, you'll need to dive a bit deeper.
Choosing the right keywords is essential, but it can take a bit of research.
Make sure that the keywords are relevant and bring in enough traffic,
but they don't have too much competition, or else it might be too hard to rank.
Another thing to be aware of is keyword cannibalization.
While you might think that having several
pages targeting the same keyword is a good idea, unfortunately it's really not.
When Google indexes your website,
pages targeting the same keyword end up competing with each other,
this can cause them all to rank lower on the search engine results page.
The next factor you need to consider is image alt tags.
You've probably heard how important it is
to use photos, videos and other media in your content.
For users, it helps to break up
the content and provide a little variety, so adding media is a great thing to do.
But there's one problem.
Search engines can read text,
but their ability to interpret images is limited, so you need to help them out.
And that's where alt tags come in.
Each piece of multimedia that you use
on your website should have an alt tag, and here's three reasons why.
Firstly is accessibility.
Alt tags mean that users with visual impairment can understand the content,
as they often use screen readers to access it.
It's important to accommodate all
demographics, and Google will reward you for making your site more accessible.
Secondly is user experience.
Alt text help your audiences have a better user experience.
This is because people with low internet connection or bad smartphone reception
often will face a broken link icon where an image should be.
If they have an alt tag, they'll be able to see what the image was meant to show.
Third, image traffic.
Image traffic is one of the least exploited on-page SEO elements.
Alt tags can turn images into search results that appear on Google Images.
This is a great way to drive more organic visitors to your website.
If you're looking for some quick and easy fixes on how to improve on-page SEO,
then look no further than internal link building.
It can really provide some quick wins.
Internal linking refers to the hyperlink
that goes from one page of your website to another.
They help search engine crawlers to find content that is related to each web page.
By understanding your pages in context with each other, the search engine can
have a deeper understanding of the focus of your website.
You might have noticed a pattern here.
Making things easier for users on your web
page is also going to make them easier for search engines.
Mobile phones account for 55% of online searches, and Google knows this.
As a result, pages that are optimised
for mobile devices are seen as more helpful to users.
In fact, Google now ranks websites first based on mobile rather than desktop phone.
Mobile phones have smaller screens,
and they often rely on a phone network instead of high speed broadband.
So if you want a mobile friendly page.
Then there's a few factors that you need to consider.
The first thing is page speed.
They need to have a short loading time.
If mobile phone users don't get the info
soon, your bounce rate might shoot up and nobody wants that.
Next is responsive design.
This helps your website adapt to whichever device is requesting the webpage.
Using a desktop version of a website on a smartphone is never a good experience.
Another thing to consider is mobile user experience.
There are a lot of elements that go into mobile-friendly SEO design.
These include having a thumbfriendly design that accommodates even
the clumsiest of users, having font sizes that are easy to read
on a small screen, and having compelling content that's easy to navigate through.
Finally, you need to think about local search.
A lot of people on their phones will be out and about trying to buy products,
find bars and restaurants, or find other services.
If you run a bike repair shop, you might need to target keywords like
bike repair near me or Bike repair store Brisbane.
This will allow you to show up in local queries.
Page speed or load time is one of the most important on-page SEO elements.
It's an absolutely huge factor influencing Google rankings.
Around one in four visitors bounce
from a web page that takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Additionally, statistics show that almost
half of users won't return to a poorly performing website.
No one can afford to ignore these statistics.
Here are a few suggestions that are going to add a bit of zip to your website.
Firstly, you need to consider server speed.
Most websites don't have their own
servers, so it's not a problem that you can fix yourself.
But you can prevent having this problem
in the first place by choosing a good server.
Using a well ranked and reputable hosting server is a great place to start.
But then you also need to think about location.
Make sure to choose a data centre location that's near to your customers.
Basically, shorter distance equals faster speeds.
Next, you need to utilise image compression.
Image are one of the most common things that cause a slow page speed.
People love visual content and they're great for SEO.
But it can also seriously drop your page speed.
Make sure to take advantage of image
compression so that even the most image heavy pages can load quickly.
Additionally, there are tonnes of plugins that help you to defer images.
That means that they'll only load as
the viewer scrolls down the page when they really need them.
Next, you need to put in place a good cache policy.
This can increase page speed as cache
stores your images and logos on the user's device.
This means that when they come back to the page, it will load faster.
You also need to implement lean themes and plugins.
When you set up a website,
it can be really tempting to load it up with all the cool and complex themes.
But if your service is slow, this isn't a luxury that you can afford.
Some of the best websites are streamlined
and focused on delivering outstanding performance.
Sliders animations and other functions are absolutely useless if users keep bouncing
from your site because of terrible performance.
So that's everything.
These are the on-page SEO elements that affect your search engine ranking.
It is vital to get these fundamentals
right if you want to have pages that people actually find.
Of course, technical and off page SEO elements need some love too.
Everything needs to work in harmony to give you top class performance.
If you put in the work with these SEO
elements, you're going to reap the benefits.
Remember, Google rewards websites
that deliver great, helpful and relevant content to users when they need it.
So check off these items and you can not only drive more traffic to your site,
but also provide customers with a better experience all around.
If you still think you need some extra
help with your off page SEO strategy, then don't hesitate to reach out.
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That's it from me, guys.
Happy marketing.