On-Page SEO Checklist

Introduction

Your website's on-page experience will determine how well it ranks and gets organic traffic. That goes for websites and blogs. Blog posts are competitive these days, so you need to do everything you can to outrank your competitors.

Rather than focusing only on search engines, you should make sure that your website ticks the following boxes and creates great content for users.

What is On-Page SEO?

SEO on-page, or on-site SEO, involves optimizing various front-end and back-end components of your website so that it ranks in search engines and attracts new visitors. Content elements, site architecture elements, and HTML elements are all on-page SEO components.

Why is on-page SEO important?

Google understands all about your website and how you provide value to visitors and customers through on-page SEO. Optimizing your site for both human and search engine bots is important.

Your website cannot simply be created and published - it must be optimized for Google and other search engines to rank and attract new visitors.

Unlike off-page and technical SEO elements, on-page SEO is visible to visitors. That is why it's called on-page SEO.

Find and Fix Duplicate, Missing, and Truncated Title Tags

As part of SEO basics, title tags should be optimized. It is often the first thing that any SEO looks at to determine a page's ranking.

Search engines use title tags to determine what the contents of a page are and whether a user will click on the page.

Title tags should be specific enough that users can tell what type of page they're going to land on without having duplicate content on your site.

Similarly, do not use long title tags, as they may be cut off in the SERPs (three dots will appear after the title tag and part of it will be missing). Tags longer than 70 characters will be truncated.

Ensure that title tags aren't missing (if the title tag is blank).

You can find these issues flagged on your site audit report under the Issues section, where you can update and improve your title tags.

Find and Fix Duplicate & Missing Meta Descriptions

The meta description does not affect ranking, but it appears below the title tag in the SERPs and helps users determine what your page is about.

The meta description plays a big role in whether a user will click on your listing over another's and has a positive or negative impact on organic click-through rate (CTR).

Google will display part of your page's content if you don't have a meta description, but this could include navigation text, images, and other elements that aren't appealing. There is a high chance that you may be presenting a description that does not encourage clicks if you have duplicates.

In over 70% of cases, Google rewrites meta descriptions to better match search intent. Make sure, however, that a meta description encourages users to learn more.

Find and Fix Multiple H1 Tags

The H1 tag is a page's main heading, and only one should appear per page. The Issues tab in Site Audit will highlight pages with more than one H1 tag, and you should take the time to resolve these issues to make sure only one is present on each page.

Usually, multiple H1 tags exist since the logo of your site and the main heading are wrapped in one.  In general, H1 tags should feature a page's primary target keyword, so make sure to tag the right content.

Improve Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Page Content

It's important to optimize your page titles and meta tags so that your site can rank not just for your main keyword but also for its variations. You can find keywords with a significant number of impressions and clicks, but a low average position in the performance report in Google Search Console.

It usually indicates that your page is considered relevant for these keywords and that it is ranking to some extent. However, there are no optimizations in either the content or tags to optimize the page.

Don't think that simply adding keyword mentions will make a huge difference. Additional keywords can be categorized as H2s or subsections. Creating a page that is optimized for this will almost certainly result in more clicks and a higher ranking.

Run a Content Audit and Prune Content

Content audits are useful for figuring out which content is performing well as well as which isn't. You should remove content that doesn't rank, doesn't add value, or doesn't belong on your site. The importance of performing a content audit and pruning thin, duplicate, or low-quality content cannot be overstated.

Ensure Images Use Alt Tags

Don't forget to optimise your images. An often overlooked area of SEO is properly naming images with descriptive file names and optimising their size and quality. You should at the very least make sure that the main images on each page of your site are properly described with alt tags. 

Search engines use alt tags to identify images, but they are also useful for those with visual impairments.

Improve Internal Linking

Link building with internal links is probably one of the most neglected strategies in SEO. You can quickly see results if you focus on improving your site's internal linking strategy.

One or two internal links from authoritative pages elsewhere on your website can produce quick results for some marketers.

Find and Fix Keyword Cannibalization Issues

When multiple pages on a site rank for the same keywords, they compete against one another. Among the most misunderstood SEO concepts is keyword cannibalization. It isn't always a major issue, since pages rank for many keywords.

Imagine you have two pages ranking for the term "SEO checklist"- one old, out-of-date page and one new, useful page. If Google prefers the older, less useful page, it may not rank the newer, more useful page. Ideally, you should combine the two pages so you aren't dividing traffic. If your site is suffering from cannibalization, you'll have a hard time ranking for competitive terms because search engines have a hard time deciding which pages to show.

Find and Fix Orphaned Site Pages

It is always a good idea to link to your site's pages from at least one other page. Because Google cannot crawl a page through other links on your site, it is unlikely to insert the authority it would otherwise be able to, and it is unlikely to rank as well as it could.

You will find these pages flagged as "orphaned pages in sitemaps" in your Site Audit Issues tab if you are serving pages in your sitemap that are not accessible via at least one link from another page. The Internal Linking report also highlights this.

Ensure Your Site’s Content is Up-to-Date

Content ages and becomes outdated over time. You can see big results by updating old content, which is one of the easiest tasks you can implement.

Bringing up-to-date outdated content or bringing it up to date with a fresh perspective is time well spent if your page contains outdated information. Since outdated content isn't usually the best experience for users, why would Google continue to rank it if it isn't updated?

Key Takeaways

This SEO on-page optimization checklist will maximize your website's performance in 2022 if you follow all the steps. The following are key takeaways to keep in mind when it comes to on-page SEO:

• A cost-effective marketing campaign can help you maximize your return on investment (ROI).

• Due to the specific and targeted keywords that relate to your business, and optimized website can help you create buzz.

• Having a cleaner, the faster-loading website will encourage consumers to return to your site more often with good SEO practices.

It can be overwhelming to optimize your website for the upcoming year.