Appearing on the first page of SERPs is the prime goal of every website owner, and since 90 per cent of users doesn’t even go to the next pages, visibility of the website, on the first page, also becomes important. So, to achieve that good ranking of your website and to improve its visibility among its rival websites, it becomes necessary to work on the SEO of the website. For that matter, most of the experts advise on starting the on-page SEO along with the development process of the website, such that all the web pages of your website are optimized before it is launched, and in future, you do not have to put extra efforts in its promotion.
But what is On-Page SEO?
On-page, SEO is a practice of optimizing every page of the website, in terms of the content of the website as well as their HTML code, in order to get high ranking in the Google searches. Since the SEO algorithms keep on changing, you need to keep up with the changing technologies and strategies of the SEO as well.
Here is the latest on-page SEO checklist for a website which you need to follow to get good results in terms of the ranking of your website:
1) Meta Tags
Meta tags are snippets or small describing elements which tells the Bot what the web page is all about. For the SEO of a page, you must include and define all the meta tags in the HTML code of the web page. These tags are not visible to the end user of the website, but to the search engine. So these are really important for the ranking of a website. The meta tags used in SEO are:
• Title tag: This is the same title tag, which appears on the browser tab, and is written in the head tag of the HTML code. The same title also appears on the SERPs. It has to be keyword-friendly, and every page should have a unique title. By default, the character length for a title is 50-60 characters (600 pixels).
• Meta Description tag: A Meta Description is the summary of your content on the web page, having a character length between 140 to 160 (920 pixels). You must write SEO-friendly and unique content for the description, having the important keywords in it.
• Meta Keywords Attribute: This attribute includes every keyword which is relevant to your content on the webpage.
• Alt tag: Alt or alternative tag is used with the images, and it is really important that you use this tag in every image on your site. The bot cannot read the images, but it can read the Alt tag. So the Alt tag helps the bot to understand the content of the image.
From the SEO point of view, the mentioned tags are the most important ones and must be included in every page of a website. There are other meta tags, including Robot Meta tag, Canonical tag, Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards), Responsive Design Meta Tag, which are used only when required.
2) Heading Tags
The Heading Tags are used in HTML for defining different sizes of the headings on a webpage, starting from H1 (the biggest) to H6 (the smallest). While using the Heading tags, you must write content-relevant headings including the appropriate keywords, as these help the search engines to analyse what your content is all about.
3) SEO-friendly URLs
A keyword-friendly URL of a webpage helps the bots as well as the humans to understand the theme of the landing webpage and improves the site’s search visibility. The maximum URL length is 512 pixels.
4) The Content
“Content is the king”, this has been repeated millions of times, but it goes only to unique and relevant content. For better SEO of your website, you must update the content in the form of blogs or articles, regularly. Never forget to add important keywords to it and maintain the proper keyword density. Since you will be updating the content regularly, the bot will get to know about it and will crawl your website faster.
5) Optimize Your Images
Optimizing the images of a website is the most important step to be taken during the process of SEO. Image optimization includes adding a caption to the image, resizing it without compromising its quality, and most importantly, using the alt tag along with it. Like the other content, the image must also be unique and relevant to the context of the web page.
6) Speed
The speed of a website is the major factor in increasing the bounce rate. Since people have got access to the faster internet, nobody wants to wait for a website to load for too long. The average load time for a website or a webpage must be optimized to 3-4 seconds, and not more than that.
7) Mobile-Friendly
According to the latest researches, people are more active on their smartphones, and it is the only device providing maximum engagement. Mobile-friendly websites rank better in the SERPs. So make sure your website is mobile friendly and easily accessible.
8) Free Reporting Platforms
Tracking the traffic on your website is a really important part of SEO. Google has provided free reporting platforms, Google Analytics and Google Console, to track the performance of the website on the Google searches. Google Analytics helps you to track the location of a user, the page on which the user has been active, as well as which type of traffic it is, i.e., referral, organic, paid (display and search), direct, social, etc.
On the other hand, Google Console helps in tracking the source of the backlinks you get, the status of Sitemaps as well as Robots.txt, the performance of the clicks, impressions, CTR, average position of the search queries, webpages. With the help of Google Search Console, you can also track the country and the device from which the traffic is coming. It can also check the errors like the 404, blocked pages by Robots.txt and shows which page is indexed and which one has been crawled.
9) XML Sitemap
The Sitemap of a website helps the crawlers to follow all the webpages of your website through their links. So from the SEO point of view, it is important to create and update the sitemap of a website as to index your website, the Search Engine must see all your webpages.
10) Robots.txt Is accurate
A part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), Robots.txt tells the web robots on how to crawl and index a particular webpage. It is created through the webmasters, and every time the search engine is about to visit your website, it will check the Robots.txt file.
11) Site Architecture
A better site architecture of a website helps the crawlers to move from one page to another quickly and make a copy of every page. Those copies of the web pages are stored in the index, and whenever the users search for something, the crawler checks it in the Index.
12) 404 Pages
The 404 appears when a user enters a wrong URL, or the website does not have a page with the same URL, it had given to the text, on which a user had clicked. Getting the 404 pages is not bad, as it does not always appear because of the fault of the website owner. But at the same time, it can be a turn off for the site visitors and can hurt the SEO of the website.
First of all, you need a great design for your 404 webpage. To prevent the visitors from clicking that back button on receiving the 404 error, you must add several informative links on the 404 page, such that the visitor does not leave the website. The reason being, if the visitors go back to the Google searches due to the occurrence of the 404 error, and click other links in the searches, it indicates Google that your content is not adding any value and if it happens repeatedly, your ranking is hurt badly.
13) SSL Plugins
Most of the people are not sure that the data they post on various websites is secure or not. It happened only a few years ago when Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal. But still, only 1% of the websites have implemented this SSL certificate on to it. The HTTPS brings extra security between the browser and the server, adding an additional layer for the security of the data like the credit or the debit card information. This helps the site visitors to trust the website, and share their personal information on it.
14) Structured Data
Like the SSL, most of the marketers are not aware of Structured Data, or we say Schema.org, and only a smaller percentage of website owners are using them. With the help of Structured Data, you can control how your website, and its other entities, must appear in the SERPs. The Structured Data helps the search engine to understand the content of your website and display search results in a specific format. You can manage this result format and show the highlights, like good reviews as the snippet, for the search results. This makes the search results look richer, and this is why these richer results are also called rich results or rich snippets. Since Structured Data helps the search engines to understand your content better, it helps with the ranking of your website.