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On-Page SEO: Your Guide To Strategic On-Page Optimisation
On-Page SEO Is Half The Battle In Ranking. Here’s How To Develop Your On-Page SEO Strategy.
Even amongst business owners who are completely new to search engine optimisation, the topic of SEO likely evokes memory of a few key terms such as “keywords” and “content creation”. If this is something that you can relate to, you may already have some knowledge regarding and insight into on-page SEO.
That being said, on-page SEO can be a bit more complex and encompass more than just the key terms above. Understanding and developing the right on-page SEO strategy is critical to rising to the top of SERPs and getting the organic traffic and online visibility that your business needs.
If you’ve been looking for an on-page SEO checklist that covers some of the most critical on-page SEO elements and helps you better understand what this type of SEO involves, dive into the guide below to get started!
What Is On-Page SEO?
So, what exactly is on-page SEO? As the name suggests, on-page SEO focuses solely on the optimisation strategies that you employ on the various pages of your website. For every business, this means focusing on both the content and the HTML code of your webpages and any of the content that you post via your blog.
As we’ve covered in another blog, there are three types of SEO that are going to play a critical role in your overall SEO strategy: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
This form of SEO is often one of the simplest to begin with, which makes it the perfect place to get started if you’ve just launched a website and are new to SEO altogether. Of course, if you struggle at any point to improve your SEO strategy, you can always search for “SEO agency Sydney” to find a company that specialises in on-page SEO!
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
Imagine this: you’ve spent countless hours perfecting a product or service that you know people are going to love. You’ve dedicated yourself to building your very own website, you’ve made sure that everything’s in its place, and…no one is coming to buy any of your products or services.
In a digital age, making sure that your business is visible to others is essential to tapping into free organic traffic and building greater brand awareness. An on-page SEO strategy helps you achieve this by optimising your website’s content in a way that gets it noticed and indexed by search engines like Google.
With the right on-page SEO best practices, you can gradually build up your Domain Authority (DA) and increase your exposure on SERPs to ensure that those making relevant search queries are seeing your content or website pop up as one of the first options to click on. No matter where you are in your business, SEO is always important.
On-Page Vs Off-Page SEO
When you see terms like on-page and off-page, it can get confusing trying to keep track of all the different types of SEO strategies you encounter along the way. So, what’s the difference between the two?
- On-page SEO focuses solely on the content that you publish on your web pages. This refers to items like the keywords you implement, the formatting of your content, internal linking, and metadata. We’ll dive deeper into some of the SEO best practices in the sections below.
- Off-page SEO refers to the optimisation strategies that take place outside of your website but still impact your ranking. For example, making sure that you’re having websites with high DA link back to your website is one of the most critical activities that take place in an off-page SEO strategy.
Put simply, if the work takes place on the pages of your website, it’s on-page. If it happens outside of your website and is designed to boost your rankings, it’s off-page SEO.
Keyword Research
Keyword research lies at the centre of your on-page SEO strategy. Why? It all has to do with how Google responds to search queries.
Think back to the last time that you Googled something. If you input, “how do I fix my kitchen sink?”, you’re not going to receive SERPs that are giving you directions on how to drive a car or how to dress for an interview. Google is going to show you results that are relevant to your specific query.
Conducting keyword research shows you which keywords are relevant to your niche, how many people are searching for them monthly, and what type of Domain Authority you need to rank for the keywords that you want to build website copy or content around.
The right keywords and the proper formatting will help you build a broader content strategy and SEO strategy that will allow you to slowly rise up the SERPs and garner more clicks when your pages appear in relevant search queries.
Without keywords, Google won’t be able to properly crawl and index your pages to show them to individuals who are making relevant searches.
Include Keywords Strategically In Your Content
On-page SEO requires you to be smart with how and where you place the keywords that you research and wish to incorporate into copy and content. But what might this look like when you start building out content with all of your keyword research? Here are a few tips to illustrate the process of strategic keyword placement.
- Always include your target keyword in the first paragraph of your content.
- Place keywords naturally and where they make sense throughout your content. Keyword stuffing is very much a thing, and Google will penalise you if you’re putting too much of the same keyword or too many keyword variations into your content.
- Make sure that you’re optimising your subheadings, title tags, meta descriptions, and images with your target keyword.
This is a very broad overview of how to implement keywords into your content, and it excludes some of the more technical SEO practices that you will need to pay attention to when you’re working on your on-page SEO strategy. However, the above should give you a better look into how and where to apply your target keywords.
High-Quality SEO Content
Google might just be technology, but the user experience plays a surprisingly big role in how well your content ranks. This is an important lesson for the business owner that may be focused predominantly on hitting every single SEO requirement they can find online.
When you’re writing content or copy, you’re creating it for two readers: the search engine and the customer. Implementing your keywords and formatting your content correctly only goes so far. If your live readers aren’t enjoying your content, no amount of SEO will be able to fix that.
It’s not just about SEO, but rather creating high-quality SEO content. This means creating content that’s visually appealing, informative, knowledgeable, engaging, and fun to read. Always read your content before publishing it and ask yourself, would I enjoy reading this if this showed up on my SERPs? Would it give me what I was looking for?
If the answer to any of these questions is a resounding no, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on making high-quality content first before you begin implementing on-page SEO best practices.
Begin Your On-Page SEO Journey With Sydney Digital Marketing
Need some support with your on-page SEO goals and want to work with an SEO agency in Sydney you can trust to get the job done right? Sydney Digital Marketing is here to help! We’re a full-scale digital marketing agency dedicated to providing you with on-page SEO support and beyond.
Reach out to the team at Sydney Digital Marketing. Contact us today!
Article by
Simon Gould
CEO / Founder / Dad
Founder and leader, Simon established SDM back in 2012. Since then, he has helped 150 clients (and counting) to achieve their digital goals.[…]