What is On-Page SEO

Why You Need On-Page SEO
If you want to grow your website or business then having an SEO optimized website pages is a necessity.
Google is very picky about the results it shows to its users and if your website doesn’t adhere to best practices, it may get lost in the abyss of the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Having a website that adheres to on-page SEO best practices will help increase rankings for your main keywords, resulting in more exposure online, more traffic, and more business.

On-Page SEO Basics
There are a number of on-page SEO factors that you should optimize your website for in order to get maximum rankings.Meta Title Tags
The title tag is an HTML code used by browsers and search engines to display to users what the page is. Meta title tags should be between 50-60 characters so that the entire tag fits inside Google’s recommended title tag length. The title is often used by Google to display the link to a webpage in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
<title>Ninja Reports SEO Analysis Tool | Ninja Reports</title>
Meta Description Tags
The description attribute provides a concise summary of what each web page is about. Google doesn’t use meta descriptions as a ranking factor, but CTR is a ranking factor, and having a good meta description can give your web page a higher CTR. The reason you can get a higher CTR is because Google highlights any text in the meta description matching the search term like below:
<meta name="description" content="Ninja Report's is the #1 SEO analayze and reporting tool online. Sign up for our free trial today and grow your rankings!">
SEO Friendly URLs
The URL if your web pages has a strong influence on your rankings in search engines. Matt Cutts says the first 3-5 words in a URL are the most important and are given more weight so keep your URLs short, sweet and descriptive. Having your main keyword in the URL can also increase the CTR of your pages because, like the meta description, URLs with matching search keywords will be highlighted in the SERPs. Here is a great infographic by Moz about the anatomy of a URL:
- Case sensitivity: Watch out for URLs with different cases. Try and be consistent whether its all lower case or camel case.
- Use hyphens: Hyphens are the recommend separator for keywords.
- Don’t stuff keywords: Stuffing a ton of keywords in your URL will hurt your rankings more than helping them.
- Short the Better: Shorter URLs provide a better user experience and more weight.
- Dynamic Parameters: Remove any dynamic parameters like hashes and query strings
- Match Page Title: Use the main keywords of your page title to create a short/keyword rich URL.
- Remove Stop Words: When creating your URL, remove any stop words like and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.
- Punctuation: Take them out of your URLs! Try and use only alphanumeric characters.
Heading Tags
HTML heading tags are used (by both users and search engines) to determine a web pages topic or content. These tags are published in the HTML body and range from h1 to h6, h1 being the most important heading and h6 being the least important heading. The <h1> tag is the most important heading tag and should be used on every web page only once. It is often the page or post title and describes the page content to search engines and users. I like to think of h1 tags as chapters of a book that easily allow a reader to scan the content and look for the section they are interested in. Example:<h1>On Page SEO</h1> <h2>Meta Tags</h2> <h3>Title Tags</h3> <h4>How to Use Title Tags</h4>
Thin Content
Content will always be king when it comes to SEO. The content on a web page is crucial to ranking well in search engines. Here are some popular types of content that you can build on your website and off:- Text
- Images
- Videos
- Diagrams
- Graphs
- Podcasts
- Case studies
- Infographics

Canonical Tags
The canonical URL is a link element that tells search engines the preferred version (or URL) of a certain web page so you can avoid duplicate content issues. This meta tag should be added in the <head> section of your website pages. Canonical URLs can help search engines decipher the right web page to use for:- E-commerce sites with product variants
- Blogs with paging
- Large websites with possible duplicate content issues
- Websites with both HTTP and HTTPS versions
- Websites that use query strings
<link rel="canonical" href="http://ninjareports.com/blog/on-page-seo-guide/">
Internal Linking
Internal linking is an important part of your website’s structure because it allows bots to better find and crawl your pages. An internal link is a link that connects one page of a website to another page on the same website.Why use internal linking?
- Helps with website navigation and user experience
- Passes link juice from one page to another
- Defines the structure and architecture of the website
- Improve rankings for certain keywords
Build a lot of great content
In order to have a good amount of internal links on your website, you have to have a lot of content to link together. Creating high-quality content that links to other pieces of great content on your website provides brand value and allows search engine bots to crawl your site and all its great content.Use anchor text in your links
Anchor text is the visible text of a link that is often underlined.
Mobile Friendliness
Did you know that having a mobile-friendly website can boost your rankings on mobile search? Google prefers responsive web design out of the handful of techniques and gives priority to websites that are responsive to all devices. Not to mention that:48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.To test if your website is mobile-friendly just use the Google Webmasters Mobile-Friendly Test to analyze your web pages.

Website Speed
Having a fast loading website is a key part of good user experience.40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. — EconsultancyA fast loading website not only keeps people from leaving your site, but it also allows bots to crawl it faster. But how do you know your websites speed? We use this great tool by Pingdom that tests your website page’s speed and gives you some insights on what you can do to speed things up.

SEO Image Optimization
Based on a study by Raven Tools, 78% of all on-page SEO issues are related to images. With that kind of high percentage, it’s likely that with a little image optimization you can fly by your competitors in the search engines. Here are some tips to optimize your images for SEO:Images and User Experience
Using images that relate to the content is important for a better user experience (which increases SEO). If your article or post is about dogs then you shouldn’t have pictures of cats on the page. Images should be good quality, un-pixelated and large enough to be visible across all devices. The best type of images to use are images you create yourself…Filename
The naming convention of your files is very important when optimizing your images. Your filename should include descriptive, content rich keywords about the image itself. Google even says that:The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image.So make sure that every image you upload has a keyword focused description that explains the image and content.
Title Attribute
The title attribute does not have any potential SEO benefits but it provides a good user experience by providing a text description of a image when you hover over it. For maximum rankings increases, all of your image should include the title tag. For maximum rankings increases, all of your image should include the title tag.CLICK TO TWEET If you are using WordPress then the title attribute will be automatically populated with the name of the image (minus the image extension).
Alt Text
The most important tag on the image element is the alt tag. The alt tag stands for alternative text and is the text description of the image. Search engines use this information to figure out what images are about on web pages since the crawlers are text-based and can’t see the images. This is a great opportunity to use your page or post keywords to describe your image. Alt text should be descriptive, concise, and to the point but not spammy. Do not stuff a bunch of random keywords in your alt-text or you may get dinged by Google.
SSL
HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure and is the web standard for secure communication between your browser and any server. In 2014, Google announced that they are now using HTTPS as a ranking signal which gives a small ranking benefit to sites with secure SSL connections. Google provides the following tips to get started with HTTPS:- Use 2048-bit key certificates.
- Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate.
- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain.
- Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address.
- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains.
- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt.
- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
Schema Tags
Google says, “Structured data refers to kinds of data with a high level of organization, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways.”What is Schema?
Schema markup is a code snippet that you add in your HTML web pages to help search engines consume your data and display this data to searchers. Here is an example of the results of including schema on your web page:
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets are detailed pieces of information added to search engine results to help users with specific queries.
- Articles
- Local Businesses
- Music
- Recipes
- Reviews
- TV & Movies
- Videos