On-page SEO list: 10 things to do to boost your rankings

Your title should inform your readers what is article about.

If you are writing about Google alternatives, use words Google and alternatives in your title. Poetic What's Bing got to do with it will only confuse search bots and your readers won't even have a chance to check what you have written.

Don't be too long and try to include something catchy for a human reader (like Google alternatives - Why you should use them), This will improve your CTR (Click Through Rate - a percentage of searchers who will see your page in rankings and decide to give it a try) what means more traffic.

Different content management systems (CMS) have different options, so a title may be the same as H1 tag (pardon my French), but in many cases, you can use different words for each one of them. In such situation (blogging platforms offer several examples) use a variation of the title (if, for instance, your title is Best Google alternatives, H1 would be Which alternative to Google is best).

URL is a web address of your article. I don't intend to dive into a debate about user-friendly navigations, topics of a specific blog or site and other technical details, but one thing should be clear to search spiders: URL should give them a hint what the specific page is about.

Next address is an example of a good URL:

https://mydreamweddingideas.com/shirts/gold-bride-shirt

It's obvious at first sight it's about gold shirts for brides and it is clearly related to weddings.

Next address is an example of a bad URL:

http://blackandwhiteandmore.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-6.html

You need to open it to see what is this page about. This takes an additional step, that means some time and energy and both is considered as a waste of resources. Search engines are working by the business model of low input and the highest possible output. So try to use an URL which will make sense at first sight.

At Wizzley we have two options for URL. It may be set by default from your chosen title. This is good, although not always the best option because titles often contain so-called stop-words (a, the, and, for, of, who, ...) and additional words which may mean something to human readers, but nothing to search bots.

A better option is to choose a custom URL, where you can focus on only crucial keywords. Feel free to check an URL of this article.

The web is loaded with copied and spun content. If you want to defeat the competition you should offer something nobody else has. Uniqueness is much easier to achieve than other SEO factors like age of domain or authority of the web page.

But originality is not enough. You still need a focus. Writing about SEO is not good enough. Writing about on page SEO is better, but making a list of on-page SEO activities is even better.

The relevance of your content is an absolute must of both sides of today's SEO. If you are writing about nofollow links, you should at least mention page rank (authority), because these two terms are closely related and one is relevant to another.

If you are not sure, what is relevant to your chosen topic, just enter the search term in one of the keyword tools and it will give you hundreds of related terms. The title of this article is, for instance, On page SEO list so related terms would be SEO checklist, search engines, web page optimization, etc. This relevance should extend out of your article by relevant clickable links.

You'll find several relevant clickable links in the content of this article.

Searchers use search engines to find answers. Give them the answer and explain a bit around. One fine example of a such approach is Wikipedia. It offers explicit answers, yet its main attraction is a huge amount of (relevant) info on the presented subjects.

In general lengthy (if properly focused) articles are favored in the eyes of search engines for several reasons. One of them is the amount of so-called long-tail keywords and another is probably that spammers don't write lengthy stuff. They are too busy running after the next bright shiny object.

Giving your readers an opportunity will prolong their time spent on your content. This gives a signal to search engines that your article is probably interesting.

It also gives you a chance to further promote your brand, products or services. You may even land a guest post.

An addition of elements like we can use at Wizzley (polls, duels, and especially comments) is a very important step in this direction. An addition of internal and external links falls in this category as well. Engage your audience and enjoy higher rankings.

While I prefer so-called writing evergreen articles which can bring you traffic for many years, there are still many things you can do to improve the presented info. Everybody who writes in the field of medicine, fashion, parenting, etc., knows that even if you stick to classic knowledge, a lot happens every year. For this reason, it's good to go through your articles and update them if anything is to be updated.

Even if there's nothing new, you'll probably find a typo, better image or video, an opportunity to add a keyword or related link to or from other articles. In 2003, Google patented "Information retrieval based on historical data", what simply means they probably intend to use freshness factor in their rankings.

Moz's experiments confirmed that theory. My experience with updating one of my blogs (not adding new content, but improving already existing posts) confirmed that as well.

Images are a must in a modern web article. Even if readers often don't see them, they have names too. According to search bots, they carry several important information for them, but we'll focus on two only: name of the file (picture is in most cases uploaded into an article as a file) and so-called alt tag.

Example of a useful (for bots and people) and SEO friendly file name would be:

on-page-seo-improvement.jpg

Example of a useless (for bots and people) and SEO unfriendly file name would be:

im356978a.jpg

The alt tag is an additional name which can be added at uploading and is actually a short description of an image. It should tell bots (who can't see pictures as humans (yet) what a specific image presents.

Example of a useful and SEO friendly alt tag would be:

important-on-page-seo-ranking-factors.jpg

If you don't use alt-tag, an image would be considered as SEO unfriendly by bots.

At Wizzley an alt tag is the same as a picture title which is another element, but its use exceeds the purposes of this article. For this reason I wrote a full article about image optimization for web.

An addition of a video (there are special modules for video at Wizzley) is another sign for search spiders who are trying to evaluate the relevance of your article. Having a video or several videos in your article gives you several benefits.

Apart from the name of the video (another option to add important related keywords) it will also prolong visitors' time spent reading your article. There are other benefits as well, including improvement of your chances to get article indexed, but we'll leave these for another occasion.