Top 5 On Page SEO best practices

A simple list of what can be considered as a great checklist to ensure your users are spending more time and feeling engaged with your content includes:

1. Title tags: Research and implement those star keywords
   No matter how important or valuable you think your keywords are, you need to consider what customers are really searching for on search engines and make relevant amendments.
   Titles have a direct impact on click-through rates (CTRs) and search rankings. In order to ensure that you are making your titles search-friendly and click-friendly consider keeping titles below 65 characters and include at least one of your target keywords or phrases so that it is easier for searchers to identify that your results are relevant to their query.
   
2. Monthly change of Meta description
   Spend time to change those meta descriptions each month based on testing and click-through rate analysis. Those ~160 character snippets summarizing your page’s content contain valuable phrases which are mirroring your potential viewer’s searches. They directly affect CTR and A/B testing is of paramount importance.
   Descriptions can help increase CTRs and are directly informing a viewer about what could possibly be within the page they will navigate to. As with title tags, make sure you are using target keywords or phrases in the meta description. You can use this tool from Dejan SEO to preview what your search result will look like before finalizing which one you will be using.
3. Image optimization
   Images can bring in organic traffic via search engine image results and SEO friendly images reduce the strain on load time. Images definitely need to be optimized.
   Image optimization should consider the following: descriptively naming your images in in plain language, intelligently improve the Alt Tags (text alternative to images when a browser can’t render them properly), strategize the dimensions and image angles, reduce those file sizes, and, understand the file type that suits each situation best (JPEG, GIF or PNG).
   Your images can be considered the rock stars of your site. It is essential that you manage your images appropriately to ensure that they are providing great user experience to your visitors and doubling as a cultivator to the traffic that can be generated.
4. The importance of H1 and H2
   Header tags are a communication between your website and search engines. The content of these headers is recognized as more important to the rest, working its way down from H1. Utilization of both short-tail and long-tail keywords ensures that this targeted text is recognized as significant by search engines.
   H1 and H2 have the most SEO value and here’s why: The H1 tag should be relevant to your content and correlate with your page title; the H2 tag can be defined as a subheading and should have similar keywords to the H1. Ensure that the tags are grammatically correct and readable, since Google may assume that a line of keywords alone is a manipulation strategy by the page.
5. Keep those URLs to the point
   Both humans and search engines find it difficult to read long URLs, a.k.a. “web addresses”. Make sure you are keeping them to the point, short and precise. It is suggested that they are no longer than 80 characters and to contain the important keyword(s) as close to the start of the URL as possible.
   Some of the benefits of URLs include: they improve user experience, they can be a ranking factor and give some weight to the authority of the overall domain, and can even act as their own anchor text when they are copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, social media networks, etc.

Your website needs to be seen by more than just your personal network; this is why you should incorporate a search engine optimization plan in your strategy from the very beginning. SEO must be coupled with the consideration of your visitors’ user experience, since these end-users – or searchers – are the numbers which will be maximizing your page views. And ultimately, these searchers will be the ones who will take relevant business actions.