If you want to learn more about SEO for your digital marketing journey, a good place to start is on-page SEO. In this guide, we’ll cover what it is, why it is essential and how you can optimise your content for SEO.
What exactly is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO simply means optimising your website (and each page on your site) for search engines to ensure a higher ranking and drive organic traffic to your website. Optimising your website for SEO makes it easier for a search engine to find out what your content is about. In doing so, a search engine can easily recommend your content to its users, which is exactly what you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy.
The on-page part of SEO refers to the aspects on your website that you can optimise, including the content (text or images), HTML tags (title tag, meta tag and header tag), internal links and addresses or URLs. It does not include external links and other signals that point to your website to drive traffic.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic (that is unpaid traffic) to your website. As search engines and their algorithms evolve, they look for more specific indicators that will tell them if your content is relevant and valuable to their audience. Because search engines are competitive businesses, they want to outshine their fellow search engines by giving users the best possible experience. If your on-page SEO factors indicate that your content is a good match for a search query, your content will get shared by search engines and more people will find your content.
Ways in which you can optimise your content for SEO
By optimising your content on every page, you’ll have the best chance at ranking highly in search engine results, which is precisely what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy. Here are some ways in which you can use keywords to optimise your content on every page.
Use your target keywords
Once you’ve picked your target keywords, use them at the start of your content (or as close to the beginning as possible) and use them frequently without being unnatural about it. While your keywords are incredibly important to signal what your content is about, you shouldn’t stuff them into every sentence. Overuse of keywords will make your content useless for humans, and that will not improve your ranking. Remember to include your keywords in your headings and sub-headings (at least one of your sub-headings).
Tag headings and subheadings
Use (H1) for your main heading and (H2) to tag subheadings. These tags help search engines to understand the structure of your content, which makes it easier to categorise and recommend it to users. If you leave out these tags, your entire strategy won’t crash and burn, but it can help you to make incremental improvements in your rankings by giving search engines just another factor to signal useful content.
Need help with your on-page SEO strategy? Visit our website to find out about WSI OMS’ digital marketing services.