On Page SEO for Beginners: How to Get Started from Scratch in 9 Steps

Although search engine optimization has become the most realistic tool to gain sustainable traffic, finding the right strategies to build on page SEO is the biggest game changer that can break or make the visibility of your business.

No, this is not a joke. Not only is it true that most websites do not have a single visit in an entire month, based on a recent report by Ahref, the web pages currently gaining up to 1,000 monthly visits are not up to 1 percent of the entire website pages online.

Now, the question is, after all the work and effort you put into building and growing your website, have you found the right on page SEO strategies to get it to deliver on the kind of visibility, sales and business turnaround you expect it to deliver?

If you’re like most SEOs and website owners, I know you’re yet to find these . And in this guide, I’ll be taking you through the proven on page search engine optimization strategies that can finally transform your business.

But, before we get started, let’s explain some concepts…

What is On Page SEO?

On page SEO (search engine optimization) simply refers to the internal search optimizations implemented on your website.

It is a collection of SEO strategies you implement within your website pages, in order to make the site more visible on the search engine for particular search terms, key words or target audience.

This SEO strategy involves the use of keywords, search terms, common topical phrases and other information in a strategic way, to drive specific search engine results for a website.

Is on Page Search Engine Optimization Important for All Websites?

If you’re a new content creator, there are chances that you may not understand the importance of either On-Page SEO or Off-Page SEO but notwithstanding, the importance of on page Optimization for every website cannot be overemphasized.

In fact, on page SEO optimization is one of the key SEO strategies you’ll need to put in place if you want to build a successful website.

To be more categorical, if you want your web page to show up on the search engine, you need to optimize it for the search keywords you want to rank for.

And the first step towards getting this right starts with setting up a proper on-page optimization.

That said, you might be asking yourself this question…

How can I Really Do an On-Page SEO for my Website?

To do an on page SEO for a website, you need to identify the right keywords, use the keywords to optimize your website starting with the meta tags, title tags etc., create relevant and valuable content and of course set up internal linking correctly, among other strategies.

I’ll be discussing these strategies in details, in the following paragraphs..

Choose the Right Keywords

A lot of SEOs will mention that keyword optimization is dead. But truth be told, people will always use specific phrases to search for terms on the search engine today, tomorrow, forever.

So, even when you think that the influence of keywords in SEO has reduced (or let’s say evolved), compared to what it used to be, the use of proper keywords is still very relevant when it comes to search optimization and this involves both On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Now, one of the first simple on page on page SEO strategies you need as part of your game plan is to clearly identify the specific keywords you want your website to rank for.

To get this sorted out properly, find out; what are you trying to achieve with your website? Is it to get clients to get over to buy a particular product or services?

When you’ve sorted out the goal you want to achieve with your website, you can now go ahead and choose the keywords that will get you to achieve these goals.

Now, let’s break this down a bit…

Supposing you want to be selling romantic novels on your website, your key goals would be to get people searching for romantic novels to land on your website.

In order to achieve this, you will need to gather important search terms that people will likely type into the search engine, while searching for romantic novels online.

After that, you can now put them together on strategic location throughout your website then begin the optimization.

Keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, Semrush, Google Keywords tool etc. can be very helpful here.

Install an SEO Plugin

Installation and setting up your SEO plugin is one of the simple on page SEO strategies that cannot be ignored if you really have plan to get a better ranking for your website.

Although you can still optimize some websites built on CMS like WordPress out of the box, without need for a plugin, using an SEO plugin takes you a step further and you get to achieve much more.

For example, search engine optimization plugins like Yoast SEO, Rankmath, etc. Do have specific optimization options that are not available in your default WordPress installation.

They also have other technical SEO functionalities like the XML site maps function, Google Search Console and Analytics Integration among others. And with these plugins, you have a better leverage to optimize your website’s meta tags and titles more accurately.

Getting most of these options from the default WordPress installation is near impossible in most cases.

This is why installing and using an SEO plugin to optimize your website will improve the overall visibility of your website.

Optimize your Meta Title & Tags

Your meta titles and tags are snippets of texts that define a page’s content. They help search engines like Google to index your content properly while also helping humans to decide whether your content is relevant to them or not.

For your website to get a better ranking, you need to optimize your meta title and meta tags for both your search engine robots and your human users. This is a crucial on page SEO strategy you must keep in mind.

Now, the following are ways you can optimize your tags properly…

Title Tags: While optimizing your web pages, try to make sure that your title tag describes the post properly with the right keywords you want to rank for. Make sure that this description is optimized for both search engine spiders and your readers.

Meta Description: Meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is all about. To get the best out of it, you want to make your meta description as optimized for the search engine as possible while still using powerful adjectives that describes it in a compelling way for humans.

H1 and H2, H3… Tags: These are also referred to as header tags. They are HTML tags that indicates the headings in your post.

They are supposed to be used as headings and sub heading throughout a web page so as to give the page (or post) the right structured arrangement for good user experience.

To optimize your header tags properly, make sure they include the different keywords related to your main Keywords.

Optimize for Search Intent

In the past, it was easy come up with a content idea, find keywords, create content, post and go to bed. And then before you wake up it’s ranking well on the search engine.

Right now, a lot has changed. With the recent Google Algorithm and HCU updates, there are now a lot of factors to look out for when it comes to page ranking.

So, beyond Keywords optimization, there’s still a lot you need to do.

For example, before writing a post, you need to understand the user’s search intent for that particular post you’re writing about.

So for instance, if you want to write a post like: “how to make money online“, you cannot merely do a keyword research and head over to write your post. You need to understand the average user’s search intent so you can get your post to fulfil that.

By this I mean that you have to understand exactly what the user wants to see, when they type in the keywords; ” how to make money online“, into a search engine like Google. And then get to fulfill it as expected..

For example, when searching for a keyword like “making money online for beginners”, a user might be prefer to see a detailed “how-to article”. on the search result page.

If this is the case, Google will prefer to show up posts with a topic like “comprehensive guide how to make money online for beginners” over other posts like “an advanced guide on ways to make money online.”

With situations like this, it can look rather difficult to rely on your Keywords optimization alone.

Knowing exactly what the user search intent for a post is all about will save you the stress of writing posts that will be ignored by the search engine.

Improve Your Website’s Speed

Over the years, web page speed has become an important website ranking factor for pages.

In fact, the faster your website loads, the easier it becomes for a user to get across to the website.

Slow loading websites are bound to increase bounce rates and search engines like Google do penalize such websites.

To get a better on-page SEO experience, you need to have a fast loading website.

If you’re on WordPress, you can begin the journey to increasing your loading page by putting in place major optimization plugins to get your website running faster.

Talking about optimizations, there are a handful of caching plugins that can be very handy here.

Also, there are image optimization plugins SmushIt and others that can be helpful to your website speed when used properly.

You need to get your hands on these plugins, test run and have them installed on your website then optimize them to get a faster loading experience for your users.

This in the long run will improve your on page SEO to a very large extent.

Optimize Alternate text for images

Most amateur bloggers do not optimize their images at all. And this is not right because Images do rank on Google search.

Yes. There’s a high chance that the image used in your post can rank very well on Google image search, if you optimize them with the relevant keywords.

So, optimizing your image for SEO is one of the important on page SEO strategies you don’t want to ignore.

Instead of adding images to your post without changing or updating the data, it is very important you fix the Alt text for these images as they can also boost your on page SEO and drive direct traffic to your post.

Create Relevant Content

After following through the above listed steps, one of the biggest on page SEO strategies that will improve your on page search engine optimization is going to be your content.

I will want to refer to this step as the mother of all SEO strategies because without content that’s highly targeted, well written, relevant and clearly optimized for the search engine, 60% of all your on page SEO Optimization is almost useless.

Content is one of the the most potent part of Search Engine Optimization and for things to work out right, you must get your content right.

Putting the above listed steps into consideration, you need to research and create a timely and high quality content that is relevant to your audience’s needs.

Ensure you use smart SEO and Content Marketing Strategy to create content in a simple and straight forward way that will be easily appreciated by your audience and optimized enough to rank on the search engine.

Build Internal Links

Internal links are links between individual and relevant pages on your website.

Getting your internal links set up properly is one of the best kept on page SEO strategies that can lead to improved search results for your content.

So, while creating a piece of content on your website, you want to select and link to other existing and relevant content or pages that are relevant to that particular content on your website.

Also beyond that, you want to consider creating a cornerstone content so you can gain link juice benefits and side traffic to your new page from those other existing and highly ranking pages on your website.

Change Permalink Structure

A permalink is the the web link to your blog post or web page.

Usually a lot of new website owners do not give a thought to the structure of their permalinks this until it becomes very late.

It is important that you use the right permalink structure for your website. And by right I’m referring to a short, clear and descriptive permalink structure.

Reason this is necessary from the beginning is because changing your links after the website is live or after publishing several blog posts on the site can lead to broken links or a number of other issues.

For context, if you’re writing about a topic like; “how to create a blog, make money online and become a super rich billionaire “.

If you choose a permalink structure that includes the month, day and title of your blog post, this is what your link will look like www.abc.com/how-to-create-a-blog-make-money-online-and-become-a-super-rich-billionaire/2020/10/17

Now if you take a look at the above link, you’ll realize that it is rather too long and cumbersome. And it will not create the best visual experience for sharing purposes as well.

So, instead of having your permalink structured this way, choose a structure that does not include the publishing date.

After that, you also want to edit your URL links before clicking the publish button for any post.

PS: Note that if you’re publishing a website like a news blog that updates frequently, you may still want to keep a structure that includes the date of publication. But either ways, you can still publish a news website without including the date and day of publication in your URL.

Also, DO NOT change a website’s permalink structure if it already has live content unless you are planning to set up a 301 redirect for existing links.

Final Words

In conclusion, optimizing your on Page SEO can be a bit technical but the rewards are always enormous. And you can get it right if you follow through the steps you just learned today.

You can also get our SEO experts to optimize your web pages and get more visibility for your website, if you plan to get the best outcomes from your efforts.

Now, it’s over to you. What’s your biggest challenges when it comes to setting up your website for better search engine visibility? Drop your comments below!