Effective on-page SEO has always been a foundational element to any successful SEO campaign. However, what constitutes good on-page SEO techniques today is a far cry from the ‘good old days’ of keyword stuffing Meta titles, descriptions and keyword tags or stuffing keywords and synonyms in heading tags and your page content.
Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as, “exactly understanding the user’s intentions and giving them the exact answer they are looking for”.
Your primary goal with on-page SEO in 2020/21 is to ensure that your pages provide the best answers for the queries and questions your prospective customers are typing (or speaking) into Google. Because that is what Google wants to deliver to its users.
So putting together great content is key. But your competitors are also attempting to do the same. So all other things being equal, other factors such as on-page usability and user experience, as measured by Google, become increasingly important factors in ensuring that you beat your competitors to top spot.
This guide to on-page SEO, or page-level optimisation as it is sometimes referred to, is designed to help you navigate through the relevant ranking factors that you need to consider when designing and constructing your website and writing your content.
There are a number of different areas to get right. Excelling in one is not enough; to win you need to take a ‘Slight Edge Philosophy” and try and benchmark yourself against your key competitors across all these factors and be that little bit better than them across the board.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. But hopefully, this guide or checklist will help you navigate what you need to do to improve your rankings to generate more relevant traffic that converts.
We’d like to thank our co-authors for sharing their expertise with us all and if you would like to contribute to this or any of our other Ultimate SEO Guide series then please get in touch.
