On-Page SEO: Complete Guide and Best Practices
Whether Google uses click-through rate, dwell time, and other user experience signals in its ranking algorithms has long been up for debate. They have long been used in Google’s ranking systems as a way of understanding website quality and as a measure of authority. As it helps Google (and users) understand what our content is about.
On-page SEO Checklist
For HubSpot customers, our Page Performance tool (under Reports) will allow you to do this. If you’re not using HubSpot, you can try using a free tool like Xenu’s link crawler. It may seem counterintuitive to include external links throughout your page considering we just covered multiple reasons why internal linking is so important for on-page SEO. Write a compelling meta description that summarizes the page’s content and encourages users to click through from search results.
The URL is a minor ranking signal, but you cannot expect to rank on the basis of the words in your domain/page names alone (see Google EMD update). When naming your pages or selecting a domain name, have your audience in mind first. How you choose to optimize your site depends largely on your audience, so make sure you have them in mind when crafting your website content. Like it sounds, “duplicate content” refers to content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain. “Scraped” content goes a step further, and entails the blatant and unauthorized use of content from other sites.
Common questions about on-page SEO
This strategy is less about links… and more about getting your content in front of the right people. I saw that most of the content ranking for “SEO Audit” listed out non-technical steps. Most of the content ranking for “increase website traffic” listed bite-sized traffic tips. When it comes to search engine optimization, short URLs generally outperform long URLs. Once you have 10 keywords jotted down, you’re ready for step #2.
If you’re writing an article about “the best way to brew coffee”, don’t just add a link to a site with the anchor text of “learn more about brewing coffee here“. Outbound links from your site also impact the quality of your content and pages in Google’s eyes. If you have implemented the previous three checklist points, this next step should be easy. The hub and spoke architecture is a powerful way to dominate entire topics, not just individual keywords. Not only does this waste link juice, but it also does serious damage to the experience your users get, which has a knock-on effect on many other metrics.
Have you ever wondered why some websites appear at the first of SERPs? It’s all about page SEO, it’s an important ingredient for online visibility. With smart on page SEO strategies, we can easily rank our website at the top of the result pages. Discover 10 AI-powered hacks to revolutionize digital marketing in 2025.
BONUS: Start on Your Technical SEO
On-page SEO works to convert your existing traffic, making each an important element in marketing. Stellar SEO provides many other SEO services to help complement your marketing goals and achieve better rankings. Stellar SEO also offers guest posting and backlink outreach to fulfill your off-page SEO goals.
The most effective internal links are links to related content—with descriptive anchor text. Readers are more likely to click on them, and search engines will be able to decipher them easily too. Another under-appreciated on-page SEO best practice is internal linking.
- Finally, your SEO strategy must be aligned with the latest Google requirements and recommendations.
- On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing elements on web pages for SEO– but it’s more complicated than you might think.
- If you don’t write your own meta description, Google may extract the text from your page and use it as a meta description.
- How you choose to optimize your site depends largely on your audience, so make sure you have them in mind when crafting your website content.
- By carefully using these insights, you enable your website to move up the search engine results page, ensuring ongoing exposure and significance in the online environment.
- For example, I recently wanted to improve our rankings for our press release guide.
On-page SEO refers to a set of SEO Anomaly strategies, techniques, and processes that help your content appear as high as possible in the results returned for relevant queries. The higher your site ranks, the greater your search engine visibility and the more traffic you’ll likely receive. This search engine optimization (SEO) guide explains on-page SEO vs. technical SEO.