By In the SEO industry, on-page factors means the factors that are related to the actual page. These are the factors which are the actual code of the website. On-page factors are factors that include HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other elements. The meta-tags that are written on the page, the other tags used in the HTML content, the keyword density of the words used, the title of the page, and the heading tags of the page etc.
These factors are the first to be scanned and ranked for even before you worry about off-page factors. To rate your website for authority, Google first crawls your page and sees the coding of the page before looking into the backlinks and other references that are to your site. So, the following is the guide to creating a good On-page optimized site. Before going ahead, if you did not read my last post about Path to Be an SEO Expert, you must check it out
Take care of 301 redirects:
The first thing to leverage is the 301 redirects of your page. Google treats the websites “www.ABCD.com” and “ABCD.com” as separate sites. If you have improperly managed redirects, then your site gets penalized by Google. Even before opening your site, there will be two versions available to the users. This creates a bad user experience and Google penalizes your site for duplicate websites.
Also, a user will have to enter either www.ABCD.com“or “ABCD.com” manually each time they want to access it. They will have to keep in mind whether it was the first one or the second. This is a bad thing for your site even before opening it. So, keep that in mind.
Have a well maintained “sitemap.XML”:
If no one told you, then note it down that sitemap.xml will be your most useful tool if you have a website which is constantly updated. “sitemap.xml” is as the name suggests an xml file that has the sitemap of your site.
Now, the use of this awesome file might elude you for a while, but it is crucial to keep the search engines up-to-date with your site’s pages. Your site might contain several web pages, and keeping track of them will be impossible for a search engine if they do not know what pages exist in your website.
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Hence, every webmaster is required to create an xml file that contains the list of pages of your website. A search engine can only crawl pages of your site which have been linked to from other pages (be it your own or other sites). So, be sure to either make your sitemap yourself or you can make that online from sites such as “https://www.xml-sitemaps.com” or have the CMS software do that for you. If you wish to do it yourself, have a look at the format below.
The urlset tag encapsulates all the urls that your site contains. It is followed by URL tag which states that what follows are the details of the URL. The lastmod attribute indicates when it was modified the last time. The changefreq attribute tells the search engine how often the page is modified. Priority attribute tells the search engine how much priority does the URL has compared to the whole website.
TITLE, TiTlE, TITle, title, TitlE:
Without a doubt, the first factor on the basis of which your page is ranked is the title of your site. That is the first thing that is noticed by both the users and the search engine. The keywords that are used in the title of a site has the highest priority and websites are ranked based on those keywords. Be sure to have a title that is relevant to your site. Be sure to have the keyword that you wish to target and if possible make it catchy.
Something that immediately gets the user attention. But one thing to note here is that the length of the article or webpage title should not exceed 70 characters. Anything that is greater than 70 characters does not get crawled by Google and is also not good for user experience. Here are a few titles of a few famous sites:-
Facebook – Welcome to Facebook — Log in, sign up or learn more
LinkedIn – World’s Largest Professional Network | LinkedIn
StumbleUpon – Explore more. Web pages, photos, and videos | StumbleUpon.com
As can be seen that these are one of the most famous sites and they target their keywords along with the name of the site and the number of characters are within the 70 character limit.
Importance of Meta tags:
The Meta tags of HTML are the tags in your web page which contain all the meta information that is required only for the search engines. It has no value for a normal user. Our job as an SEO is to make pages which are search-engine friendly and exploit how the search engines work to our advantage. The Meta tags contain Meta information about your webpage such as what the page is about and what keywords should the search engine rate your site. A Meta tag looks like this:-
<meta name=”description” content=”The sample description of your webpage.”>
There are a few important Meta tags that you can use to rank well. The following are a few of them with their uses:-
<meta name=”description” content=”ABCD”>
This tag contains a small description of your site. A small brief intro to your website including the keywords is a great way to improve your Authority. All SEO experts know this and they write carefully crafted descriptions for their website which is small and precise. The description of the
The description of the webpage should typically be between 70 and 160 characters. Any less than 70 character will not contain any information about your webpage and any more than 160 characters is too much information for Google. The description that you write is the content that will be shown in the SERP pages.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”A,B,C,D”>
This tag contains the keywords that you wish to target for your website, separated by commas. Typically it should contain about 20 keywords maximum for efficiency.
<meta name=”language” content=”ABCD”>
This tag tells the search engine the language in which your site is created. This is useful for localization of your site if required.
Check out the Blueprint for SEO Beginners
Faster loading = More traffic:
To add to that, we have Slower loading = Higher bounce rate. With the invention of smart phones, more users are switching to computing on their handheld devices. According to the results that Google has, mobile search is surpassing desktop searches. On a mobile device with lesser computing power and lesser bandwidth than a desktop computer, more importance is given to faster loading. A webpage that loads slower is more likely to be ignored by a user than a faster loading page.
On a mobile device with lesser computing power and lesser bandwidth than a desktop computer, more importance is given to faster loading. A webpage that loads slower is more likely to be ignored by a user than a faster loading page.
Check out: How to increase your website speed on Free hosting Server
A page should be optimized to load really fast in terms of user interaction. A page in which the user can see some content being loaded is better than a page which does not show any progress. This can be achieved by using images that are lower in sizes.
The load time of a page can be reduced by loading the user content before JavaScript elements or other elements which are not required immediately upon loading of the page. The most relevant information should be displayed before lesser relevant content. Ensuring that your page size is less is a way to ensure faster loading times.
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Final Words:
In the SEO market, these are not the only thing that one should rely upon if they want to optimize their on-page SEO, but these are definitely the most important ones that a webmaster should work upon. There is an exhaustive list of techniques that are deployed by experts, the above mentioned being just a few and really important factors for improving authority. These mentioned factors are not the only factors that determine the SERP ranking and the authority of a page, but these are definitely the important ones that need to be taken care of before moving on to other things.
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