As marketers, we have a duty to stay ahead of Google’s seemingly endless algorithm updates. If we don’t, we run the risk of not showing up in important keyword searches.
However, keeping up with all these changes is no easy task. Luckily, when it comes to achieving success with SEO on your website, there is one rule of thumb that remains a proven technique: optimizing websites with relevant, targeted keywords.
If you have a well-optimized site you will start to see results, such as better quality visitors, higher conversion rates, and ultimately more customers.
In this article, we will discuss how to add keywords to your website once you have completed your keyword research.
Already have your keywords ready? That’s perfect. Read on to see what on-page SEO is, what sections of your website you should add those keywords too, and how to avoid search penalties.
On-page SEO is the set of techniques to improve the positioning of your site’s pages. It is a discipline that encompasses using keywords, optimizing the user experience, and using internal and external links, as well as adding featured snippets and checking that pages are mobile-friendly.
In general, search engine optimization (SEO) includes creating, promoting, and optimizing the content of a website. On-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to the improvements to the information on specific pages of your site that are made to achieve higher search rankings.
Of course, on-page SEO is not the only thing that determines where your site will rank in a search. That is why it is important to consider and know well the differences between on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
What is the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
To be brief, we could tell you that:
- SEO on-page SEO is what a site “tells a search engine”.
- SEO off-page is what “other sites say” about a site.
But what does each refer to, what might sites say to search engines? On-page SEO (or “what a site says to a search engine”) is about optimizing individual web pages for search engines:
- Understand the topic and keywords of the pages.
- Connect each page to relevant searches.
On-page SEO encompasses the content itself, as well as the HTML source code. Both elements can be optimized for search. To understand it more fully, we will address these two aspects of the on-page SEO structure below.
On-page SEO refers to the external ranking signals that the engines receive, such as links from external sites that include links to pages on your site.
Although there are certain things you can do to improve off-page SEO, it is an aspect that does not depend solely on you. The opposite is true for on-page SEO, so improving it can significantly help your inbound marketing efforts by allowing you to attract the right visitors to your website.
You must optimize your pages so that search engines understand who you are, what you do, and what topics you write about. Again, when you improve on-page SEO, you will help improve your website’s organic ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword-related on-page SEO optimization
Although you might think that these are aspects that only concern those who write content, the truth is that they should be the most important concern for any type of content creator, from writing to images and HTML programming. Therefore, to take care and improve on-page SEO related to keywords you must take into account the use you make of them in the:
- The title of the publication or post
- The name of the URL
- The H1 tags. Many times they are the same ones that give the title to the post, but it is better if you check it.
- The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of the content on your page.
- The meta-title and meta-description tags.
- The names of the images, as well as the alt-text or alt-text tags to the images.
In addition to these aspects, it will be very useful to take into account the semantic keywords or semantic keywords, as well as the topic clusters, since they are elements that will help search engines to position your site and content within your company’s line of business.
Semantic words are not necessarily secondary keywords, but they are words that help to better delimit the topic you are talking about. On the other hand, topic clusters are mentions of general topics within which your content is included. This article, for example, belongs to the SEO topic cluster, but its particular topic is on-page SEO.
Non-keyword-related on-page SEO optimization
Now, the second element that makes up the on-page SEO is not related to keywords and is basically made up of the following components:
- Internal links or links
- External links
- Content extension
- Multimedia elements
Taking into consideration external and internal links is something that will allow search engines to place your site within the rankings relevant to the topics it deals with (along with other aspects of on-page SEO related to keywords and topic clusters). For this reason, we will discuss both types of links in more detail below. Of course, before doing so, it is worth mentioning that external links should not be confused with off-page SEO.
Although both refer to links from external sites, the difference between them lies in the fact that on-page SEO external links are the hyperlinks that redirect your readers to external sites, while off-page SEO external links are the links that external sites take from your site’s pages. We will give you tips on this later on.
Start by performing an SEO audit on your website.
Recommend that you create the new content you will add to your site with specific keywords in mind (one or two keywords per web page). However, if you already have a considerable number of web pages published, in this case, the first step should be to perform an SEO audit on the current website.
The SEO audit will give you an idea of the level of SEO optimization of your website in general. This way, you can update and optimize the current content for search starting with the web pages with the highest traffic.
Perform a detailed SEO audit. Check if your site is being blocked by search engines, make sure your XML sitemap is working, monitor site performance, detect and remove duplicate internal content, as well as check the popularity and reliability of your site.