What does On-page Optimization actually means in easier terms?
“Anything that you do on a web page/website using White-hat SEO that directly (or indirectly) increases SERP is called On-page Optimization.”
and lot of other things about On-page Optimization Techniques and they are crucial and go a long way in optimizing a web page to rank high on Google.
But there are few more On-page SEO techniques that are not very well known. These things are lesser known but still can have a huge impact on your organic rankings.
So should we start? Here we go:
“Anything that you do on a web page/website using White-hat SEO that directly (or indirectly) increases SERP is called On-page Optimization.”
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| On Page SEO |
You might have already read about:
- improvising meta tags/description
- responsive design
- faster loading webpage speed
- effective keyword density
- shorter and easy URLs
- proper image optimization
- header tags
- Internal linking
and lot of other things about On-page Optimization Techniques and they are crucial and go a long way in optimizing a web page to rank high on Google.
But there are few more On-page SEO techniques that are not very well known. These things are lesser known but still can have a huge impact on your organic rankings.
So should we start? Here we go:
SEE ALSO: How to Display Most Commented Posts in Blogger
Number 5 – Embed Interesting Content Related Videos
Videos are an easy way for any human to understand something. Human mind is wired to remember visual information more effectively compared to text.
Now the question would arise in your mind like how is embedding video in an article help in On-page Optimization, isn’t it?
You can add an image and put keywords in its alt tag and increase keyword density but what can you possibly do to an embedded video?
Well! The answer is NOTHING.
But…
We all know that Google records every piece of information about the user. Information like IP addresses, country, browser, a position at which the mouse pointer is kept or moving on a webpage, how much time he spends on a website and a lot of others.
The indirect answer lies in the above lines, and that is the time a user spends on a webpage/website.
In Example #1, suppose you write a 1000 words article, 100 readers visit that article and read it for 2 minutes each. This tells us that the average time spent by a reader on that web page/article is 2 minutes.
Now read attentively…
in Example #2 if you embed a 3-minute video in that 1000 words article. 10 users (out of 100) watch that video for about 2 minutes. All 100 readers spend 2 minutes each to read that 1000 words article and then exit. So now what is the average time spend by a reader on that particular webpage which has a video embedded in it?
“(4 X 10) + (2 X 90)/100 = 2.2 minutes”
Google gives a lot of importance to websites on which user spends the most time and then eventually rank that site higher in SERP. Embedding a video increases the average time spend by a reader on a blog and does give it a natural and pure white hat SERP boost.
After you finish writing an article and just when you’re about to hit the ‘Publish’ button, do check on Youtube or any other popular video site for an interesting video directly related to your content. If you wrote a List of Top 5 Smartphones, it’s recommended to embed review videos of all those 5 Smartphones. This will not only increase the average time spent by a user on your web page but also make it look more lucrative.
I know you would be having some doubts regarding this part, I do request you to first leave a comment below (because we tend to forget our queries later) and then continue reading the next phase of this blog post.
Moving on…
Number 4 – Reading Level
Did you ever have a chance to read some legal document? How is it? Is it easy to understand or very hard?
It’s hard, very hard to understand, all those alien words and the type of sentence framing and vocabulary a normal person isn’t used to. I bet you’d have to sit with a dictionary to understand it and still have some doubts.
Consider if all blog posts were written in such language, how many articles would you read? And which articles would you understand? Thus in such scenario, we have something called Reading Level.
Reading Level tells us how easier (or hard) is it to read certain type of text. There are different kinds of users utilizing the internet ranging from primary school students aged between 6-8 years to retired senior citizen aging more than 65.
If you’re using (or used) ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin,’ you probably might have seen something like ‘Flesch Reading Ease Test’ and that’s what I’m talking about.
Flesch Reading Test determines the ease to read a certain piece of text. Higher the score an article gets in Flesch Reading Ease Test, the easier that article is to read. A score of 60-70 is considered ideal and is easily understood by 13-15-year-old kids. To get a better understanding of this concept, it's recommended to read this Wikipedia article.
If you search something on Google, it has an option to rearrange search results according to ‘Reading Level.’ Though not a major ranking factor but Google naturally does arrange results according to Reading Level, it’s very important to take Flesch Reading Ease Test Score into consideration while writing an article.
WordPress users can use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin to measure reading level score and other important On-Page Optimization factors. Blogger users can take advantage of Readability-Score.com to measure Reading Level of their blog post.
Recently I even published an article about a tool called Grammarly which helps to weed out grammatical, vocabulary, punctuation errors and spelling mistakes from an article. This will help you to publish a near-to-perfect blog post. It helped me get a score of 99 out of 100 from 72 out of 100 just with a few clicks.
Now let’s move on to the next On-Page Optimization Technique, shall we?
Number 3 – Sitewide Link
Most of you might know that giving sitewide (sidebar) link to another website or even receiving such links is considered highest level of Spam by Google.
Why?
A sidebar link is what I call as deceptive link. It may look like just one link, but it’s not.
Consider a website ‘A’ has 100 pages, and it give sidebar link to website ‘B,’ website ‘B’ receives not one but 100 backlinks from Website ‘A.’ Since all those 100 pages have a sidebar, Google considers this as a link from every webpage of A.
Then why I have mentioned Sitewide Link as another lesser known On-Page Optimization Technique?
Here’s the answer…
If we think a little deep and narrower, what can happen if we add a link to a webpage of the same site on the sidebar. Like Website ‘A’ links an internal article in its sidebar. Putting a sidebar link pointing to one of the internal webpage is also a sort of interlink and Google 100% supports interlinking.
Using this, you can put link to an internal article(s) on the sidebar which helps you a lot. Here’s the same strategy on my site’s sidebar.
Recently I had linked to an article on one of my other website and made some changes to that article. Later on within a week, organic traffic to that article increased from 250views/day to almost 700views/day, that’s almost 280% increase. Isn’t this strategy awesome?
If you ask me, then yes it is, all you have to do is just internal link to an article on the sidebar.
Number 2 – Comments
The second most part of a webpage that has more content (meat) after the blog post itself is the comments.
Readers do leave comment on a blog post, if they truly appreciate it. Most of the comments are either one-liner or pretty generic but few readers leave a long and valuable comment.
I hope you all know that Google bot reads a blog post as well as comments on it and can differentiate between a blog post and comments. Blog posts and comments help Google understand the context of the article.
So what can you do to help comments play an important in On-Page Optimization?
Answer is, Add Keyword(s)!
Your readers may not add the keywords in their comments you are targeting, so this is what I’d suggest you to do.
Keep the comments on moderation, once you have a long or valuable comment on hold, add one or two keywords you are targeting in that comment. No! do not keyword stuff but add keywords in such a way that it would feel natural to any human. Just add keyword once or twice in the comment and make it look pretty natural.
I would request you to not keyword stuff it because it could do more harm to your site than any good at all. If you cannot make the comment look natural once you add keyword(s), I’d suggest not doing it.
Using this technique, I’ve seen almost 30-40% increase in organic traffic for the article’s comments I modified.
Now let’s move on to the integral part of this post, the #1 On-Page Optimization Technique and it is…
Number 1 – Enticing Blog Post Title
Here’s the big daddy of all On-Page Optimization Technique. Every article written under the sun about On-Page Optimization Techniques will have blog post title in it, so why miss it.
It’s obvious for you to know that post title should be max 70 characters long as Google only reads the first 70 characters in a post title while indexing.
But…
Do you know how much characters of that post title are actually seen by the user? Since we write article for humans and not bot, it’s very important to understand how much is actually shown to the human eye.
Thanks to SEO Moz for developing a tool that represents the exact way any search result is seen by user. I read about this tool first on Anurag Balagam’s site SEOUnplug.com
Click here to access the tool developed by SEO Moz.
Now what this tool does is represent the title that will be displayed the same way in Google Search Results. It allows you add your keyword and a title with that keyword in it and how many characters will be displayed in Search Results.
What more can be done to a blog post title once you know how many characters will be displayed?
Place keywords appropriately.
It is advisable to post keyword at start or after two-three words in the title. I could write the title of this post in two different ways, and they are:
Title #1 – “On-Page Optimization Techniques: Top 5 Lesser Known Strategies” or
Title #2 – “5 Lesser Known On-Page Optimization Techniques to Understand in 2015”
Nonetheless, I’ll always suggest you to write post titles in such a way that your reader understands it and not for search engine bot. Your article title is like an advertisement to your blog post, so the more enticing it is, greater the CTR it will generate.
Well, talking about CTR, there’s one super secret technique I’d liked to share which I observed and learned from Imran Uddin’s site AllIndiaYouth.com that they applied during Friendship Day Event.
He added characters like ‘{Geek]*’ or ‘[New]’ at the start of the blog post title. Adding such characters do not magically improve CTR but it does looks different to the reader, and he usually clicks on it if it appears on the first page.
Now most of you might not know but if a website gets high CTR, then Google automatically increases its ranking position by 3-4 places. This technique works only when the article is ranking on 1st page of Google. One of my friend tried this same strategy, and his SERP increased from 9th position to a whooping 3rd position.
Isn’t this cool? Yeah, it is.
Conclusion
For all the basic On-Page Optimization Techniques, I’d suggest you to read this post by Brian Dean.
I do believe I was able to provide a unique and valuable article about On-Page Optimization, that would help outrank your competitors by using these white hat techniques.
I’d love to hear your response on this post for which I have been researching for over a month or so.
I’d feel great if you take some precious time and leave your valuable comment below.
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