Beginner’s Guide to SEO Search Engine Optimization

Use tools like Surfer SEO or Frase.io to automatically calculate the perfect length for you based on real SERP data. Over time, as you practice writing more, you’ll get a general feel for writing at a good reading level. That means a middle school student should be able to understand the sentence structure and vocabulary of your content. As a general rule of thumb – The average piece of content should be written at an 8th-grade reading level. You need as little duplicate content on your site as possible to avoid keyword cannibalization issues and other SEO issues. The last step is simply to use a tool like RankMath Pro to generate and add the FAQ schema to your site.

  • Now, I know creating image alt tags can take some time and seems like a tedious process, but luckily there are AI tools that you can use to automate this process completely.
  • As computer vision models advance, search engines will better understand and surface relevant images and videos.
  • Check any internal links to this page for bounce backs or other errors.
  • You can mark the product page, book, event, article, recipe, breadcrumbs, pictures, videos, star rating, carousel (especially for mobile results) and a few more.

Heading Optimization

on-page seo

The importance of internal linking is well established, but there can be confusion over how this looks in practice. There are also sub-headings that go from H2 to H6 tags, although using all of these on a page is not required. The hierarchy of header tags goes from H1 to H6 in descending order of importance. A similar tactic for local SEO Anomaly businesses was to create multiple pages of content for each city or region from which they wanted clients.

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on-page seo

As Google improves, it gets even better at understanding what users are searching for and how to meet their needs. This means you have to ensure your content is up to snuff to beat the competition. Showing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (or EAT), optimizing your title tags, and writing good copy are all elements of good on-page SEO. You have to strategize about how all those elements work together– and how to make sure they work for people as well as search engines. It may also be useful to check your content against other pages ranking for your chosen keyword. For example, if competitor content has a compelling and friendly tone, you can mirror this to meet the expectations of your audience.

To show your page in the search results, Google must first know about that page. It has to be indexed by Google, meaning that this page has been stored in their index. And for that to be possible, you must ensure you’re not blocking Google from indexing your post or your whole site. So check if you’re not unintentionally doing that (we still see this happening!), and ensure your site is indexed. Keyword research is crucial as it identifies what people are searching for, their questions, and the phrases they use to find answers.

Follow these tricks of the trade and before long your site will be showing up in search results and attracting lots of attention. Remember that many of your visitors will not enter your site through your home page. This means that your site needs to be easy to navigate — no matter which page a searcher (or search engine crawler) lands on.

The Topical Keyword Tool helps you verify that the keywords you’re focusing on will give you authority & relevance for your actual category. Use On-Page.ai’s AI to determine the contextual relevance of your links (just like Google) and identify weaknesses in your link profile. As long as you’re regularly running scans, you’ll always have clear instructions with exactly what to do to either gain higher rankings or defend your top position. Whether the changes in Google are small or big, you’ll never be left out of the loop. This is especially gratifying when you get to the top, because you know your competitors have an enormous barrier to climb, if they ever want to compete with you.

Below is an example of an instance where Spotify showed different content to users than to Google. A popular WordPress plugin, Yoast SEO guides you through the process of optimizing your content, including meta tags, readability, keyword density, and other crucial SEO elements. Regularly review the performance of your SEO strategies at scale and make iterative improvements. Use analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t, adapting your tactics as necessary based on data-driven insights. This could involve refining keyword strategies, tweaking content formats, or revising internal linking structures.

That does not mean you should cross the line and start doing keyword stuffing. If you cannot have a keyword at the beginning, it’s not the end of the world. On-page SEO is important because it gives search engines several signals to help them understand your content. Barbora works for SEO tool Spotibo as a search engine specialist and marketer, trying to help users to make on-page web analysis easier and faster. Her biggest passion after SEO is traveling and riding a motorcycle.

on-page seo

Image files that are too big take ages to load (that can mean a few seconds in the SEO world). Therefore, you should optimize the image sizes and find the ideal balance between size and quality. To test the page speed, you can use PageSpeed Insights from Google. Besides the speed score, you’ll also get tips and hints on how to improve the site speed.