Effective On-Page SEO Strategies You Must Use for First Page Rankings
On-page SEO has fallen out of favor with many pundits in recent years. It seems to conjure up memories of keyword stuffing and cloaked text, which was certainly very popular practice at one point in time. Link building has long since become the most popular SEO strategy for many webmasters. However, on-page SEO still has an important role to play in ranking any website or page, especially for competitive keywords. In this article you are going to discover several of the most effective on-page SEO strategies you must use if you want to rank on the first page for competitive and profitable keywords.
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A crucial mistake many webmasters make is ignoring the use of image description tags on their web pages. Therefore, one of the best on-page SEO methods you can use is ensuring that every single image on your site has an accurate “ALT” tag. Avoid falling into the trap many beginners make of thinking that stuffing keywords into your image tags will earn you a higher ranking in Google. Instead you should aim to provide an accurate description of what the image shows in one sentence of text. It pays to bear in mind image tags were developed because search engine crawler bots cannot see an image, but only read a description of it. Too many keywords stuffed into an image tag will merely raise suspicion that your site is out to dupe its way into higher rankings.
Another on-page SEO strategy that delivers effective and easy results is internal linking. Websites traditionally rely on navigation menus to sculpt the flow of internal traffic. However, you can achieve far more effective results in terms of visitor retention and search engine rankings by using keyword-optimized internal links on your content pages. Imagine that you have a page about dog training, and you want to send visitors to another page about dog training collars to hopefully make a sale. By linking those two pages together using correct anchor text, such as “dog training collar guide”, you will pass internal link juice to the linked page and help it rank higher in search results.
The last on-page SEO strategy you must use to ensure your site is optimized is achieving an optimal keyword density with your content. Most experts agree that a keyword density of 3-4% is ideal for optimization purposes. If your keyword is used less than this, then it might be difficult for a search engine spider to determine what your page is about. Conversely, excessive keyword density will come across as “stuffing”, which can actually lead to your page being excluded altogether from search results.
On-page SEO certainly is not dead, despite many arguments to the contrary. In this article you have learned three effective and simple techniques you can use to boost your website higher in the search engines, and none of these changes will take you more than a few minutes each to implement. By combining strong page optimization with external link building you can create a holistic link profile for your website, which will help you to rank higher than your competition.