SEO
On-Page SEO Techniques To Rank On The First Page – 2018 Edition
4th Mar, 2018 anilagarwal 275 Comments

Want to make your post keyword-targeted, SEO-optimized, and ready to drive more traffic?

Would you like to make it easier for search engines to understand what keyword(s) your blog should rank for?

If you answered “yes” to any of these, then you are about to learn the secrets of making your blog post keyword-targeted.

When it comes to optimizing a website or a blog post, there are two main factors at play:

On-page optimization
Off-page optimization
Today’s article will focus on on-page optimization, and I will be sharing lots of good on-page SEO techniques you should implement while working on optimizing your blog posts.

Now, let’s not confuse on-page SEO-optimization with onsite SEO-optimization.

Onsite SEO refers to the optimization of the entire website with things like sitemapping and setting permalink structures.
On-page SEO optimizes content for a target keyword within a single blog post. This includes using proper headings, proper keyword placement, ensuring content quality, and paying attention to many other factors.
Why Do You Need On-Page Optimization?
Now, when some bloggers hear the term “SEO-optimized articles”, they think this is some kind of bad practice.

But it’s not only not bad, it’s necessary.

Here’s what Harsh had to say about his effort to recover from Google Panda:

Search engines are nothing but a set of algorithms. They look into various factors to rank your page for certain keywords. Now, we need to help search engines identify that target keyword from the post in order to make that post more relatable to readers.

Here is some food for thought:


Why are you not ranking on the first page of search results?
Well, there are likely a lot of reasons, but if you aren’t paying attention to SEO, then that’s probably the biggest reason.

So when we do SEO-optimization of a post, we follow a certain set of proven methods to rank it higher on a search engine.

Now, Google doesn’t only consider on-page SEO score when ranking an article. It also takes into account many other factors like social media signals (shares, likes, tweets, follows, etc.), backlinks, domain authority, and many other off-page metrics.

Our goal with on-page SEO is to optimize an article in a natural, but smart way, so that search engines can easily pick out the target keyword and bring our website targeted visitors.

Before you read more, I assume you know about keyword research and how to find keywords to target. If not, check out these posts:

The Importance of Keywords in SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
SEMRUSH Review: A SEM Tool to Research Competitors’ Keywords
Best Keyword Research Tools For SEO: 2018 Edition
According to Searchmetrics, here are the latest search engine ranking factors:

on-page seo ranking factors

As you can see, a lot has changed over the past several years. While you can clearly see from this infographic that off-page SEO is important, on-page SEO should not be neglected.

In particular, the golden rule still applies:

Content is king.
One thing which I would recommend you start doing is adding in videos to your blog posts. Videos will not only increase the amount of media on your posts (which will engage users), it will also make your posts that much more informative and content-rich.

You’ll see an example of what I’m talking about in a minute.

10 On-Page Optimization Techniques For Better Ranking in 2018
Before I share some specific tricks, here are a few non-technical things that you can incorporate today:

Improve user experience.
Make sure your website is responsive and broken links are kept to a minimum.
Ensure that readers coming from search engines spend a lot of time on your site. If they hit the back button quickly, your ranking will drop quickly too.
Make sure your site is maintaining a standard of professionalism.
Use proper copywriting techniques to make people stick around.
Create good content.
Try using benefit-driven sub-headings to be more engaging.
Don’t write fluff.
Seek feedback and improve.