On-page search engine optimization (SEO) is much more in-depth than placing a keyword or phrase in your website content, meta descriptions and page titles. As you may know, organic SEO is a long-term strategy, and with it being as competitive as it is, you need to optimize everywhere you can. If you want a particular web page or blog to rank high on a search engine, there are other techniques and strategies you’ll need to remember.

Here is the shortlist of the top eight missed techniques for on-page SEO.

H1, H2 and H3 Headings

The H1 tags are often used as headlines for your page. If you use WordPress, it’s easy to mark what content you want to live within an H1 tag, and many sites use the page title within an H1 toward the top of a web page. No matter the case, make sure your primary keyword is within one of these tags.

H2 and H3 tags are your page’s subheading; and just because they’re not as prominent as H1 tags, they should not be overlooked. Add your keyword or phrase in at least one of these. You’ll notice on this post that the title at the top is an H1, and the heading for this section is an H2.

URL Optimization

Studies have proven that shorter URLs rank better in search engines, especially when a targeted keyword is within it. Avoid ugly, long URLs such as “yoursite.com/blog/2-1-19/category/article-title/.” Make sure you include your keyword in a shortened URL, which could be “yoursite.com/your-keyword.” While it might be difficult to make them this short, aim to make them less than 255 characters and use hyphens to separate the words.

Word Count

Today, longer-formed content seems to rank higher than shorter content. Long content will help your site rank better for your target keyword and bring in more long-tail traffic. If you can get more than 1,000 words on a page, this will boost your efforts.

Remember, the quality of your content matters the most; adding 1000 words of garbage when the real message only needs 200 words won’t help your efforts at all. When in doubt, always write to educate and offer value.

Outbound Links

Adding internal links to other pages and posts within your website is a common link building strategy and best practice people use to optimize their content, but many of them forget the power of outbound links to other sites. Outbound links are used to help search engines relate your page’s topic with other websites, and studies show that content with outbound links have a higher ranking than pages that don’t. Make sure to include at least one in your text.

Page Speed

It’s no secret that page speed has become a significant ranking factor with Google, and as much as 75% of users will not come back to a site if it takes more than four seconds to load. This kind of stat can kill your bounce rate and SEO efforts, so make sure your site is as fast as possible. You can do things such as compress images and switch to a faster host (we love Flywheel).

LSI Keywords

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique in natural language processing, and these keywords are synonyms that search engines use to determine a page’s relevancy. For example, if your primary keyword is “chocolate donuts,” an LSI keyword would be “chocolate frosted donut” or “chocolate glazed donut.” Sprinkle these kinds of keywords into your posts to improve your page quality.

Social Sharing

Social signals in posts and pages don’t necessarily have a direct role in boosting your SEO, but if you give visitors the option to share something from your website, it could increase your engagement and exposure, which can translate into improved rankings. Give your site a chance to increase its exposure by adding social sharing buttons either at the top or bottom of your content.

Mobile Responsiveness

At the end of the day, SEO is all about ranking the sites that meet the needs for the searchers’ intent. Not only does this include sharing the most valuable, related content in search engine results pages (SERPs), but it also considers the user experience. In case you didn’t hear, mobile-first indexing was rolled out by Google early last year, where Google will build its search results and rankings based on a website’s mobile version of content. If your site isn’t mobile responsive, this needs to be a priority if you want to be competitive on search engines.

On-page SEO can be a lot of work, but it certainly pays off when executed correctly.

To learn more about on-page SEO, contact the GreenMellen team today!