5 On-Page Techniques Which Are Crucial for Your SEO Campaign

Being in this industry for the last 5 years and having developed and structured numerous websites, I believe there’s not a lot in the game of SEO which is constant. It’s an ever-changing industry where you always need to be on your toes and keep yourself updated with the latest happenings to survive.

If you refuse to adapt to change and still insist on using the age-old optimization techniques (which used to work half a decade ago), then I am sorry to say this but you are on the wrong track.

However, it’s never too late. In fact, it’s better late than never.

An ideal SEO campaign equally focuses on the two cores of optimization which are on-page and off-page SEO respectively.

Here’s an interesting analogy: Consider backlinks as the fuel and your overall on-page structure as the car. You are required to keep your car in a good condition and supply it with fuel from time to time to ensure that the ride is smooth and you reach your destination safe and sound.

That being said, let’s talk about the five crucial on-page techniques which you need to incorporate into your SEO campaign if you’d like to see results, especially the results which are stable in the long run.

The best part? These are the easy wins which can help you see the results you desire (provided your link profile is good) in as little as two weeks.

Don’t Neglect the Title and Description Meta Tags

This is the mistake which I see many people making. They don’t put enough time and researching crafting an eye-catching title and an intriguing description. If you are one of these, then I hate to break it to you but you are missing out a lot.

“When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy

When people search on Google and are presented with the top 10 results, all they see is a title and 160 character description. It’s your job to write a convincing title and a description that raises the curiosity of the viewer to an extent that they are compelled to check your blog or website out to read the remaining story.

It’s a known fact that once your site breaks into the top 5 positions in Google for a particular keyword, the CTR and user experience (dwell time, pogo-sticking behavior etc.) becomes one of THE most important factors that decide whether your site deserves to climb to the first position or deserves to be pushed down further.

I hope I have emphasized the importance of a worthy title and description tag. Never neglect them guys.

Use Your Keywords Sparingly

Seriously guys! It’s not the year 2012 anymore where you can stuff your content with keywords and get away with it. Google doesn’t take kindly to content which reads like it was written for bots rather than humans.

While writing an article, always remember to restrict your main exact match keyword to just three (maybe a little more than that, if you have a lengthy guide based article).

Instead of stuffing your exact keywords, make a habit of using LSI keywords instead. That way, you can cover a large number of user queries and rank for numerous long tail keywords at the same time. There are many keyword tools (both free and paid) in the market which you can use to research worthy long tails.

Here’s an excellent article on keyword research.

The best way to optimize your content is to research the keyword density of your competition and go with an average number. Make note of the top 10 web pages ranking for your keyword and use SEOquake extension to determine the keyword density for the two-word and three-word phrases as well as your main keyword.

Use a Silo Structure

Siloing your website is a great way to get some link love to internal web pages and money articles (the ones which are designed to generate leads, affiliate income etc.)

This is something which should be carefully planned before you start building your website. It is always advisable to cover a wide portion of your niche instead of fixating to a micro niche. Silo structure really helps with this.

For example: If you have a niche website on sports where you review all kinds of gears like shoes, tracks, gloves and other equipment from sports like basketball, volleyball, soccer etc., then make sure you create a separate silo for each of those sports and ideally create a main page for each silo and link to all the pages belonging to that silo from that main page and then link back to the main page from each of those internal pages.

What this does is create a closed group on your site which talks only about a particular subject, thereby providing you the advantages of a micro niche site and you get to leverage the authority of your domain and get a kick start if you want to start a new category.

Here’s an excellent article on silo structure by Perrin Carrell.

Make Sure Your Website Is FAST!

In the age of smartphones, the patience and attention span of visitors is decreasing. They want answers to their questions and they want it now!

No wonder why Google is working so hard on improving their knowledge graph algorithm.

Users begin to drop off a site when its response time is longer than 2.5 seconds according to latest usability research

Speaking of that, you need to make sure your website loads blazingly fast and is light in weight. Here’s a little checklist for you:Install a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket (if you are on WordPress self-hosted).

1. Avoid using Jetpack for traffic stats as it takes a toll on your server. Use Google Analytics instead.
2. Avoid installing plugins for tasks that can be accomplished with a little coding. There’s nothing to be afraid of if you take a backup and follow the tutorials online. You learn by practicing, not by avoiding.
3. Optimize your images and make sure to reduce the image size to as low as possible without jeopardizing the quality. My favorite tool for this is tinyjpg.com
4. Avoid using excessive scripts and concatenate them whenever possible.
5. Make sure your web server can handle traffic bouts because if it can’t do that in the first place, all the other tips above won’t matter. I suggest using a CDN like Cloudflare or MaxCDN.
6. If you have lengthy media rich content (with many images and videos), then opt for conditional loading. This allows the content to load only when it is in the viewport of the user.

Make Sure Your Site Looks Great on Mobile

Almost 70% of searchers are from mobile and the number just keeps increasing. You need to make your website mobile ready if you want to stay ahead in the game.

If you don’t nail this, then all the other optimization techniques will go down the drain as nobody will be able to read and grasp the content on your website in the first place.

It’s a known that Google is prioritizing mobile over desktop and it has a different algorithm in place when it comes to ranking mobile search results. I believe loading time and the user interface are one of the key points that the algorithm takes into consideration.

If you are sticking with the premium themes, then you probably don’t need to worry about this as they take care of responsive design. Although you might want to frequently check your website from mobile and make sure everything works as intended (especially if you use a page builder like Thrive, Elementor or Divi.)

Wrapping Up

There you have it guys, the five most important on-page factors which I believe are necessary for you to follow if you want to nail the game of on-page SEO. As always, please feel free to comment below if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them.

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Author Bio: Sameer Panjwani is the Founder & CEO of Mondovo.com, an online marketing toolset that helps you track your rankings, monitor your site stats, and research your competitors. A man of many talents, Sameer is currently on a mission to help 1 million businesses grow organically through his products and services