On Page SEO Checklist — 13 points
By Corey Hinde — Marketing and SEO Consultant
What is On Page SEO?
On page search engine optimization (SEO) refers to all of the things you can do on your own website, to maximise the chances of your page ranking well on search engines like Google.
Why does this matter?
Generally, the idea of SEO is to improve your rankings, for the most important search terms for your business, so that you generate more website traffic — with the expectation that this will help your business outcomes.
Higher rankings >> more website traffic >> more customers >> more revenue and profit.
The other key part of SEO is building good, relevant links to your website (backlinks). We are not covering that topic in this article.
We will soon though.
Backlinks and other related activities are sometimes called “off page SEO”.
On Page SEO Checklist:
Let’s start working through the list of things you can do.
If you need a hand, feel free to reach out and ask.
1: Ensure your Title Tag (Meta Title) contains your Bullseye Phrase.
Your bullseye phrase (BEP) is the most important word or phrase you want to rank on search engines for. This is possibly the most important step you can take.
See this image?
This is what you’ll see in Google.
The URL, the Meta Title, the Meta Description.
We believe that the Meta Title is hyper important.
We feel that Google gives us this hint, by making it large, and blue.
Don’t forget — there are as many as 200 or more data points (things), that Google and other search engines will look at when deciding upon what to rank up the top. That’s a lot of things to take into consideration, so SEO people like us try to figure out which ones are the most important.
It starts with that Meta Title.
Learn more about Bullseye Phrases (and SEO) in this blog article HERE
2: If possible, include your Bullseye Phrase in your URL.
Having your URL (website) with the target words or bullseye phrase helps rank higher.
Your main URL might be well established and hard to change, but pages below that can contain your bullseye phrase. For example yourpage.com/nextpagedown.
3: Include BEP in your H1 or main heading on a page
The top heading on your page, usually designated as an H1 heading, is crawled by Google, therefore will help you rank higher.
Generally, a well structured article will have 1 big heading (H1), then several subheadings (H2), and more smaller sub headings as well (H3).
This is a solid format that makes the articles easy to read, and also easily crawled by Google.
Google, and people, like easily read, easily scanned articles, rather than text rich blocks that are hard to work through.
Headings help in this regard, and a related H1 helps Google as well.
Don’t forget to include images, diagrams, and even video embeds to break up the content.
4: Include BEP in your Meta Description in a natural way.
The meta description should help Google, and people, understand what your article or page is about.
Therefore, it’s a great spot to include your Bullseye Phrase as well.
You will see discussions about the Meta Description NOT being an SEO factor in 2021 as well -we still advise you optimise the Meta Description because it will help you get more clicks once people see you in the search engine results — and that’s what we REALLY want.
5: Ensure your content is not too academic.
Google, and people, like articles that are written to around early teenage years comprehension level, or even earlier.
Web pages and articles are not the time to go deep geek and show off your technical and academic writing ability.
Keep it simple, and you’ll rank higher.
6: Bullseye Phrase in first 100 words.
We want to give Google a nice clear early indication on the page, what the content is about.
Best practice in 2021 is considered to have that bullseye phrase (BEP) or other key phrase, within the first 100 words of content.
7: Use related content on the page.
Hopefully you can see that all of these items are related, and tell a story to both people and Google, about the page content.
This goes for the deeper content on the page too. Keep it on topic, and related, and tie the subheadings and paragraphs in by ensuring the content flows and relates.
8: Internal linking on page.
This is often forgotten, but is very useful.
Internal linking means linking to other pages on your own website. This can help readers learn more about a topic, and keep them on your site longer.
This also helps Google to learn more about your site, and the topics covered, so it can link things together, and rank you well.
For example — this page here:
https://goodoil.marketing/blog/seo-for-beginners/ — is a very useful resource for people looking to increase their SEO skills.
It’s a classic internal link — from a page on my site, to another page, regarding the same type of content.
Google (and other search engines), like this.
9: Outbound Links.
Linking out from your site, other sites, especially high authority sites, is a good thing.
It helps Google paint a picture of what your site is about, and helps show authority for your site too.
10: Grammar and spelling.
Google wants to rank websites and pages with good “user experience”, and part of that includes grammar and spelling.
Remember — Google will generally like content that people will like as well.
11: Depth and word count.
Pages that are extensive, and cover a topic fully, tend to rank well on the important search engines like Google and Bing.
It makes sense right?
Search engines want to give people results that keep them happy, so that they use that search engine again in the future.
Side point — do you have articles or pages that you can revisit, and expand upon? This is something that is well worth doing.
12: Fast / secure / Mobile friendly.
In 2021 people take these factors for granted, but its well worth mentioning.
Search engines like fast websites. They like secure websites. They like Mobile friendly websites. Make sure your site ticks these boxes.
Check your website speed here with GT Metrix
Check your website for mobile readiness HERE
Check website safety / security HERE
13: Image Alt Tags and Titles
Alt tags help search engines understand your page.
Often, websites will have no alt tags, and image titles that are not actual words — eg a collection of numbers.
SEO consultants know that optimising these is an important task.
In fact, with our SEO Unlocked course, the alt tag optimization is one the key tasks we teach.
The SEO Unlocked course is based on “what are the things we’d do, given a one month intensive on a site” We only include the high impact actions in that course, showing how important we feel Alt Tags are for your SEO.
You can check your Alt Tags using THIS TOOL — you’ll find any missing alt tags, which you can then repair.
Cheers everyone, hope you enjoyed the article.
Corey Hinde | Marketing Director | SEO
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