On-Page SEO: Detailed Checklist for Professionals!

On-Page SEO is the optimization process of a website considering the tiniest details and structure and equipping it with SEO-friendly content. The main purpose of all on-page SEO work is to create a high-quality and optimized website, increasing users and business potential. With On-Page SEO, it is aimed to increase the organic traffic of a website through keywords based on the target audience in the sector your website belongs to. Thus, this site, which has an increasing number of organic visitors, will skyrocket search engine rankings instead of fluctuating.

In addition, there is another indirect advantage of on-page SEO studies. It will increase the effectiveness of other SEO requirements that you will carry out in order to reach your work to wider audiences. In short, a well-optimized website will naturally rank higher in search engines; so, your potential customers will see you more easily in the search results and will be able to reach your services more easily.

Things To Consider For On-Page SEO

As everyone knows, both the content and technical infrastructure of a website are very important in on-page SEO studies. But before we move on to why it’s important, first of all, as Screpy experts, we would like to explain how search engines work and how you should deal with them.

First of all, before you start your on-page SEO study, you need to evaluate three important factors that you need to know about your website.

1. The first factor is the source codes of the web page you own. Source codes are important since search engine bots can analyze information about your site through these codes. They act as a kind of computer-speaking translator for you to explain yourself to search engines, like who you are and what services you provide to people.
2. The second factor is the interface of your site. Although it does not have significant importance for artificial intelligence, it is an issue that will be evaluated by the users who will visit your site. You will be embraced by users if your website’s interface is easy to use and has harmonious colors and smooth navigation. However, otherwise, a user-unfriendly interface will cause many visitors to run away from you within seconds.
3. The last factor is the loading speed of your website. In 2021, the maximum time internet users will wait for a website to open in seconds. For this reason, the speed of the site is considered an important factor when you carry out on-page SEO studies.

Test Your Website Issues

You can quickly analyze your site

Analyze!

The Importance Of On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is essentially an SEO work that strengthens the communication between users and search engine bots. By doing that, you can increase the quality of content for users while putting your website in a line that will follow the rules specified by search engines. Therefore, On-page SEO is a vital point for every website desiring to acquire organic traffic, regardless of the sector of the website.

As Screpy experts, we need to state that any website, which successfully has done On-Page-SEO studies, becomes compatible with the search engines’ terms and ranks higher in the search queries. Besides, since it contributes positively to organic traffic, properly performing these on-page SEO studies helps increase conversion rates, especially for e-commerce companies.

SERP And On-Page SEO Relationship

We need to clarify one factor to understand better the increase in user traffic and the importance of on-page SEO: SERP. SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the results page that search engines display to users as a result of a query. To appear at the top of these SERP rankings and leave your competitors behind, it is a must to do on-page SEO studies. For example, when you google something like “car prices in the USA,” a SERP page will be displayed with the best-quality server placed at the top. It is because the higher you rank in the SERP, the higher you are perceived as a quality page according to search engines, resulting in more users flowing to your website.

Do you want to increase your website traffic?

Try for free to boost your website traffic!

Register Now

Text Contents and On-Page SEO Relationship

We want to explain the importance of content quality and on-page SEO, just as we explained the SERP/on-page SEO relationship. Text content is one of the most important building blocks of on-site SEO work because both the title tags and the content itself are very important to the readers. Users decide to spend time on your site based on the quality of these text contents. For this reason, any text content should cause shakings and be of a quality that will increase the conversion rate.

In short, your text content should be original, informative, enjoyable to read and meet the visitor’s needs. On top of that, this is the same whether you own a blog site or promote a product in an online store. Visitors should not be confused when they look at your content and should be able to read what is written smoothly.

Things You Can Do To Improve On-Page SEO

From now on, we will be listing some techniques and tips that you can utilize for your website’s on-page SEO.

Remove Redundant Items To Have Higher Loading Speed

High website loading speed means higher SEO rankings. Considering this, increasing the loading speed of your site should be among your top priorities. Therefore, you should remove web elements that have a negative effect on loading speed. This is because a slow-loading site means that the site can be problematic according to search engines, and slow sites will rank lower in search queries.

Especially the constant enhancement of internet speed over the years and the continuous improvement of the user experience have significantly increased the importance of loading speed. Thus, search engines have adapted themselves to this trend, aiming to provide the best experience to their users and evaluate the SEO ranking with internet speed. As a result, pages with a high loading speed have become to be displayed to users instead of slow-loading pages.

Site Loading Speed

As Screpy experts, we have a few more things to say about site speed. After removing the unnecessary/ redundant items to increase the speed of your site, you should check how fast your site loads using the Page Insight tool provided by Google or our Screpy SEO tool. In this way, you can measure site speed, which is an important criterion for search results ranking.

Remember, no internet user likes slow-loading sites. Every search engine is aware of users’ attitudes and considers sites’ loading speed as a ranking criterion for SEO.

If you have an upload speed score of over 90, you can be relieved. However, if you are getting lower scores, you need to make additional adjustments to your site besides removing unnecessary elements. At this point, you may need to make some JavaScript or WordPress edits while perhaps the issue can be resolved via the HTACCESS file.

Meta Description

The meta title is one of the important on-page SEO factors. Since the meta title will appear as the title of a result in search engines’ results pages, it must be compatible with the page’s content. An interesting, optimized, and original description will result in more clicks, and more clicks will result in higher traffic and higher page value at the end of the day.

So, how to create a meta description that will add points to your SEO ranking? Creating a meta description, including the keyword (or keyword phrase) of the content, is one of the most effective on-page SEO tactics. However, there is something you should pay attention to here. Repeating the keyword more than once in the meta description may do more harm than good and can push your SEO rankings back. Also, keeping the length short (less than 140 characters on average) would be a logical move.

Importance Of Meta Title

Thanks to the meta title tags, search engines can understand what information your page is serving. For users, it creates the first impression about your site on the results page after searching.

Page Heading and Sub Heading

For SEO-friendly content that will familiarize your content to search engines, the pages on your website should contain a page heading. Search engine bots index pages mostly by examining pages’ headings so they can have an idea of ​​what a page is about. For this reason, page headings should be prepared in a way that is relevant to the content in order not to mislead the search engines.

Page headings show the main title of your content and inform both the reader and search engines. In cases where a web page does not contain H1, search engines cannot properly index the page, which can negatively affect your SEO ranking.

Also, you can use “H2, H3, H4, and so on” subheadings while performing your on-page SEO work. While using more than one H1 can damage your SEO ranking, you can use subheadings as much as you want. To give a hint based on our Screpy expertise, pay attention to use subheadings in a hierarchical order.

Content Optimization

The first thing to say about content optimization is that each title should not exceed the 300-word limit. The 300-word standard is set by Google, and breaking the rules will negatively affect your SEO ranking. In addition, according to many experts, the 300-word limit is a standard for an article to be consumed more smoothly by the reader.

In general, when it comes to whether the content should be long or short, long content that is not unnecessarily extended is always more advantageous in terms of both information richness and quality. For this reason, it will be more beneficial to produce long content while preserving the article’s readability.

However, as Screpy experts, there is something we need to highlight here. You need to provide full and sufficient information about that subject for a higher SEO ranking no matter what you are creating. That is, when creating content, you should meet the readers’ needs with the full information about that subject. Perhaps, it takes 1000 words, sometimes 300 words, sometimes even 5000 words. The important thing is to meet the needs of the user without compromising the quality of the text.

See More: Why Content Marketing is Important

Add Visuality To Your Content

Another important thing to be mentioned about the content is the richness. You should enrich the content you have prepared with images and videos and add harmony through visuality. Thus, you can create content that is more effective and can be easily consumed by people.

Image Optimization

Completing the optimization of the images in your content is another important column of on-page SEO work. This is because you will be able to attract users to your site from visual searches and will help you increase organic traffic. However, the images you use must be compatible with search engines in order to bring users.

Besides, each image’s URL you add to your site should contain the keyword(s) related to the image’s content. For example, assuming you’re selling a white apple product; You can create it as “white_iPad″. The tag should be alt=” White iPad″, title=” White iPad.”

Besides, you can reduce the file size and improve the page load speed by uploading images in JPEG file format. To upload high-quality photos, you should choose PNG format. However, PNG is larger in size than JPEG and may slow down the loading speed. Here, you need to evaluate in terms of visuality/performance according to the content of your website.

In addition, you can make your images indexable by creating alt tags for the images you use in your content. This will increase user traffic and help you appear in the “Image Search” section of search engines.

Correct Use of Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb is a digital tool that will act as a guide for your site. It is one of the most important on-page SEO steps to increase user experience, especially for e-commerce sites. With a breadcrumb tool added to your website, you can facilitate the navigation of users visiting your site. On top of that, the breadcrumb is also a factor that helps search engine bots to index your website content. E.g; On e-commerce sites, a menu such as Phone > iPhone Phone > iPhone 11 > iPhone 11 64 GB improves the layout of your website. Your website becomes more organized and can be easily categorized by search engines.

Regular Website Updates

Regular site updates are important for on-site SEO studies. Websites that haven’t been updated for a long time may end up being perceived as “AFK” by search engines, and therefore they may be perceived as an outdated sites. As a result, search engines will place these sites lower in SEO rankings. However, regularly updated sites are perceived as up-to-date by search engines and placed in higher rankings.

In this regard, there is a strategy we can provide as Screpy experts. If you cannot update your site regularly or have an e-commerce site that cannot make new product entries all the time, you can make a calender-based-plan. You can set a content strategy and create content at daily/weekly intervals. So you keep your site updated regularly.

Mobile-Friendly Website

After the widespread use of mobile phones and the fact that internet connection is mostly via mobile, websites have become necessary to provide a mobile-friendly structure for users. For this reason, sites that are not mobile-friendly are considered “bad” by search engines, as they will negatively affect the user experience. As a result, they get low SEO rankings.

Keywords Placement and Density

In the early years of SEO, it was possible to achieve high SEO rankings by overusing keywords. However, this has changed over time, and the overuse of keywords has become harmful rather than good for ranking. Considering this, you need to plan the density of keywords you will place in the content of the pages on your website. Remember that excessive keyword situations can cause you to be penalized by Google.

If you want to use keywords properly without penalty, it is sufficient to use them in relevant sentences and in a way that users can reach the information through queries. In short, you should use keywords in the right place, at the right time, and sufficiently. No more, no less!

Fixing 404 Errors

If any page on your website displays 404 errors, visitors cannot access the page’s content. When this happens, for whom the bell tolls? Unfortunately for you, 404 error is not liked by any user and will cause you to get negative points from search engines.

For More: Technical SEO

So, how can you fix the 404 error(s)? The first thing you need to do is to explore the source of the 404 error. 404 errors can be due to many reasons, such as page URL change as a result of category change, corruption/change of plugins. To find the exact problem, you can use various internet tools to fix the problem. If you cannot, temporarily/permanently removing the pages displaying 404 errors from access temporarily/ permanently can save the day.

Add In-Site Hyperlinks

The hyperlinks you will add to your site will help you to offer your users different content related to the content you share. Thus, with the links to be opened in the new tab, you can both increase the time users spend on your page and increase the number of visitors to your site. In this way, you can be seen by search engines as a “high ranking worthy” website.

Add Contact information

Adding contact information to your site is an on-page SEO technique aimed at improving the user experience. You become considered as “safe to interact” by your users adding your contact information to your website. Especially for e-commerce sites or information marketing websites/bloggers, adding contact information is a must for SEO rather than an option. For this reason, when designing your website, you should include your contact information in a way that is easy to be seen. Contact information such as e-mail, telephone, and main store address that will allow users to reach you will instill confidence in users, regardless of what your site is about.

Now we will examine and answer the frequently asked questions about on-page SEO.

For more: Pre-added 300+ SEO Checklist

Test Your Website Issues

You can quickly analyze your site

Analyze!

FAQ

Conclusion

On-page SEO is the name given to general optimization studies to increase the ranking of your website in search engines. Thanks to on-page SEO studies, you increase the visibility of your website, and thus you can generate organic and intense visitor traffic. Content quality, keywords placement in the right place and at the right time, title-tag, meta descriptions are examples of on-page SEO studies. Also, although off-page SEO work is more important than on-page SEO work, off-page SEO almost means nothing without on-page SEO studies. So, the value of Off-Page SEO works is through on-Page SEO studies.

On-Page SEO includes studies that each website must do to increase user traffic and reach a higher place in search engine results.