An On-Page SEO Checkup of a web page analyzes the primary or secondary keywords in the particular areas of the webpage’s content. This article shall discuss the On-Site SEO Ranking Factors, i.e., the On-Page SEO Checklist. One who often wonders how to improve the On-Page SEO of a website must read this guide.
The areas which we optimize to rank our content against a search query:
- Title of the page
- Permalink/Slug (URL) of the page
- First 10% of the whole range (i.e., the first paragraph of the page)
- Subheadings (H2 and H3 headings)
- Meta description
- Keyword Density
Let’s have a deep dive into these factors.
Your title is equivalent to the H1 heading of the page, and there should be only one H1 tag per page. Your page must not contain more than one H1 tag. Also, it would be best if you didn’t miss it.
Your focused Primary keyword should strictly come as a whole at the beginning of the title. Moreover, your content will get more chances of clicks if the title contains a number/figure. It is because the numbers are essential for SEO and the user-engagement point-of-view.
Also, be aware of the length; the optimal title is 60 characters.
Try to place your entire keyword in the slug/permalink of the page. If it’s a long-tail keyword (i.e., a multiword phrase), try to include most of that phrase. At least 70% of your focused keyword should be in the permalink. Try to make tiny and user-friendly URLs.
It would be best to place your focused word in the article’s or web page’s first paragraph. The principle is that the first 10% of the content must include the focused search query against which we intend to rank in search results.
The keyword must be present in at least one of the article’s subsequent H2 and H3 headings. The number of subheadings that should contain our focused phrase depends on the number of subheadings present. For example, if there are only two or three subheadings, only one should have the keyword to avoid keyword stuffing in the content. On the other hand, suppose ten H2 and H3 tags are present, then at least four must have the focused word.
Try to make headings shorter.
A meta description is that snippet that appears in search results and the page’s title. Moreover, it is only visible whenever a search engine ranks the content against a search query.
Meta description corresponds to the HTML meta tag between the head section’s opening (i.e., ) and closing (i.e., ) tags. The code of the meta description tag is:
Your meta description tag’s content attribute contains the phrases you want to place as meta descriptions.
Meta description recommended length is between 50 and 160 characters (not words). However, most search engines only take the first 156 characters of your meta description while showing a snippet of the article in the search results. Therefore, I recommend you not to exceed more than 156 characters.
Your focused keyword must come at least once in the meta description. It may go twice but shouldn’t be more than two times in the meta description of 156 characters.
Although, Google mentions in its recent guidelines that it doesn’t always take your meta description HTML tag to preview search results snippets. It may take content from anywhere in the article to preview the search result’s snippet. Similarly, Bing does the same in this regard.
Therefore, the meta tag isn’t too much to care about, but we should always prefer to optimize it for the cause of other search engines.
Google Snippet Preview with Meta description and Title: As you can see in the above image, Google has not taken the meta description we set in the page’s meta tag; instead, it took it anywhere from the content of the web page.
Keyword Density refers to the percentage of the times a keyword appears on a page divided by the number of words on that page. For example, if you use your keyword ten times in an article of 100 words, your density will be 10%.
Keyword density must not exceed 4 percent. Try to make it between 2 and 3 percent to avoid keyword stuffing.
You must take into account this factor as the over-optimization of a particular word (i.e., density exceeding 5 or 6 percent in the entire content) may harm the SEO of the page. In addition, the search engine considers keyword stuffing as spamming on the page.
I hope this guide on On-Page SEO Checklist will help you have an excellent On-Site SEO Checkup.
