Top 10 On-Page SEO Tips for 2014 And Beyond

Tips for on-page seo

The main objective of this article is to focus on the ranking strategies of Google which are different then other search engines. After the few updates in previous year we have experienced that SEO is going to be more competitive & confusing, especially for the new beginners in this industry.

To improve your skills/knowledge you must read various blogs or article about SEO tips & tricks on other websites/blogs. It’s become so frustrating whenever you read various methods or particular SEO strategies and after that you begin to implement them. But finally you realize that the methods you learned are not working or result based, and all your methods might be the reason of red flag by Google.

google-algorithm-updates

In the last few years Google has updated various algorithms (to improve search results) including penguin, humming bird, knowledge graph & the mostly the Panda which has changed SEO forever, "Google Panda Algorithms". Due to all these updates lots of websites have lost their ranking on SERP (search engine result page). And it could be a best opportunity/scope for you to get your site on top position in ranking on SERP if you do your SEO in the way which Google consider from webmasters/SEO.

So here you’ll get best tips for Search Engine Optimization to improve your results and that would be also helpful for you regarding further more Google updates in future.

Now Content is treated as a King in SEO, its main focus here and we’ll talk only the topic related to on-page SEO. Because it belief that if you have quality content in your website then the back-links that you get will naturally as Google considers.

All the topics about On-page SEO are mentioned here:- 

1. Keywords : Focus On The Content Topic

The recent update of Google “Humming bird” was not just an update, it has changed the whole search algorithm way. First you must know about the new trends of searches on search engines. Ideally, you should have an idea about your target communities or people that what type of keywords are they likely use to search & reach you is one of the crucial step for a successful SEO campaign. 

Keywords : keep focus on your content

Use of “keyword’s synonym” is a best way to reduce the unwanted density of keyword in your content. 

For example: - If you have a website about Dogs then I would like to suggest you do not try to use the keywords such as “dog”, “dogs”. Instead of these single keywords you can focus on keywords related to your post such as “small dog breeds”, “dog food recepies” & “Dog obedience training”. 

For instance, if you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc.

You can use Google Keyword planner tool which is a free online tool.

2. Content Quality : Write Descriptive and Meaningful Articles

Write Descriptive & meaningful content

It was an old time when articles were easily get ranked on SERP either they were descriptive/meaningful or not. But nowadays, your content should be descriptive or meaningful which must be able to fulfill the user’s requirements. 

The best way to write descriptive/meaningful content is, mention a list with types & features and advantages and also add FAQ (frequently asked question) in your content. 

3. Urls : Keep It Readable

URL stand for “Uniform Resource Locator” which is a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) subset specially used to specify where the valid resource is available and the mechanism to retrieve it. You can get better CTR with a readable URL in SERP. In SERP among all the URLs a readable URL has the high probability of being clicked in comparison of other short or non readable/formatted URLs.

URL is a readable text form which replaces the number (IP address) that is used by computers to communicate with the servers. It is very beneficial to describe a website or a webpage among the visitors & search engines. 

URLs Should:

• Only use hyphen symbol to make separate words in URLs only if necessary for readability. They should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words. 
• Overuse of hyphens in URLs can be seen as spammy. So when possible. It’s best to use caution and limit hyphen use in URLs.
• Don’t ever use more than 2,048 characters; otherwise Internet Explorer would be unable to load the page.
• If possible don’t use the parameters. And if it’s necessary to use parameters, then keep limit should be two or less of them.

It is consider as the key to ranking well if you keep your web URLs relevant, compelling, and accurate. If it’s necessary to separate two or more words in your URLs then only use hyphens, for readability. And don’t ever try to use other symbols such as underscores, spaces etc to make your words separate. 

4. Increase Audience : With Unique and Fresh Content

The prime aim of online marketing is to increase the quantity of audience/traffic on your website. It could be done only with the freshness, quality or uniqueness of the content; that means target the topics which are untouched & still are not targeted by others. 

Increase your audience with fresh content

As result, the influence of your circle will increase in social media sites including Google+, Facebook , Twitter, StumbleUpon etc. A fresh content helps not only to increase the readership but also the crawling frequency of the webpage and website’s depth. You have a mindset that your website content is about to create trust & awareness and this kind of mindset would be very inspirational for you to write about some more topics.

5. Bounce Rate : Engagement of Visitor’s On Your Website

Bounce rate is considered as single page visit on your website or blog. It becomes less if the user spent more time on your website. Make sure that your webpage content should be meaningful & quality content.  Increasing the user engagement for a long time-period on your website reduce the bounce rate and thereby increase the chances to get better ranking on SERP.

Bounce rate of your site

To increase user engagement following ways are mentioned below:- 

• Quality of content
• Webpage design & layout
• Better website navigation/link presentation
• Font style & line spacing arrangements 

All these are the most important factors which can effect massively on the time, bounce rate and user engagement statics.

6. Titles & Headers : Create Meaningful and Attention Garbing

Title tag is the most important text to describe any online document or a webpage. It is the second most important factor of On-page optimization in SEO. It has three key places including SERP, browsers and external websites. 

Title-Tag-Optimization-Guidelines

The rule of creating title tag and header are still not changed but there are some changes made in Google title tag algorithm. So if you are planning to optimize your webpage title tag on the basis of your webpage content then your title should be relevant to your content. 

It’s very important to choose the right keyword that you want to mention in your title tag & header, only consider an exact matching term having highest search volume and create a meaningful title tag. 

Whenever you make a title tag, try to aim your title tag in 65-70 character because on SERP (search engine result page) the Google display the title tag less than 70 characters. And the title having 70+ characters lengths are truncated and sometimes you get the different text from the webpage in place of the title tag you search. 70 characters limit is an ideal guideline for length or limit for any webpage title.

7. Description : Should Be Focused To Increase Click-Through Rate

Meta description is a HTML attribute which is generally used to provide brief clarification of the webpage. It is basically used to provide a snippet of a particular webpage that display on SERP.

Meta description is not important to increase keyword ranking, but it’s most crucial to increase the CTR (click through rate) of a webpage on SERP. It can contain any length, but it’s good to keep your description limit less then 170 characters. 

Generally search engines truncate all those snippets which have length longer than 160 characters. All those sites that have better CTR, Google might intend to push them up on SERP.

8. Page Load Time : Most Important To Reduce Bounce Rate

To make a good experience of a visitor with a website, page load time plays a vital role. Sometime we add more content in the website, give better design & features but instead of all these things the user tends to care more for speed (page load time). 

Additionally, when it comes about ranking on SERP, it's becoming a major factor. High page load time is also helpful to reduce the bounce rate of webpage. 

Reduce webpage load time

Here is the List of Tips How to Reduce Your Web Page Load Time:- 

• Minimize HTTP Requests - It means that reduce & manage all those items which have need to be loaded such as images, scripts and style sheets.
• Use CSS sprites whenever possible - It combine all background used images and make one image of all of them, it help to reduce the list of HTTP requests.
• Reduce 301 Redirects - Don’t overuse of 301 redirects; it redirects the browser to a new URL and the browser requires waiting for the http request to comeback. 
• Use a CDN - Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is beneficial to increase website load time, and user can download all the information from website in a parallel way.
• Put all your CSS in one external file and connect each page to the <head> section via link instead of loading it in HTML page. It loads faster & also helps in caching of external page.

9. Keyword Stuffing : Avoid It and Ignore It

Keyword stuffing : avoid it

Keyword stuffing means repeat same keywords in your content is consider as unethical technique of SEO, search engine can banned your website either for temporarily or permanently. It was an outdated method which was used in the previous years to get ranking on SERP. But now all those sites, employing this trick don't get ranking on SERP by Google.

Example of Keyword Stuffing: -

White is a word on a white webpage that is white because the background is white. White is a color. White is not black. White is always white and lighter than green. There also is bright white, dark white, off white etc.

Important Note: - in this example we have shown a webpage content, which is about white. There are total 39 words in this content in which 10 times white words is repeated.  Now the density of white word is around 27% that is very bad for a webpage. So don’t do this type of keyword spamming in your content and keep your keywords density 3-4% which is an ideal ratio according to the guidelines of SEO. 

10. Advertisements : Too Many Ads Can Get Penalized

Advertisement on your site can penalized your site

How much ads & the places where you advertise them? Well advertisement of ads on your website is not a big issue but if you display too many irrelevant ads or inappropriate ads on your site then your site could be penalized. You should avoid such kind of advertisements that generate popup on your site because It interrupt & decrease the ability of crawling of your site via Google bots.

Here we have mentioned the roundup of 10 best on-page SEO tips for 2014 which will be helpful in future also. I hope this will help you to make your on-page SEO section more strong.

If you have any suggestion, please mention in comments and help us to make this post more informative.

Contributed by Deepak Rawat