Onpage SEO Checklist in 2021 to Help Optimise Your Site

Onpage optimisation is a crucial part of SEO. If you can’t provide your web visitors with an excellent on-page experience, you are less likely to rank well on search engines and attract a significant amount of organic traffic. With tough online competition these days, you have to do the best you can to set yourself apart from the pack and rank well for important keywords.

To help you achieve your online marketing goals, we at Springhill Marketing have put together a quick onpage SEO checklist in 2021. Consider these tips to ensure that your website’s various onsite elements are optimised for major search engines.

1. Identify and fix faulty title tags and meta descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions tell search engines what a webpage is all about. Also, they are the only spot on search result pages where you can promote your website for free. If they are missing, truncated, or duplicated by another title tag or description, it will be difficult for your web pages to get a good search ranking.

Also, a missing meta description forces Google to display a part of your webpage’s content in its place. This may include navigation text and other unattractive elements that may dissuade web users from clicking through your site.

Therefore, your first course of action is to find and fix problematic title tags and meta descriptions. Conducting a site audit is a big help in this regard, as you’ll see in your site audit report the meta tags that require your immediate attention.

2. Remove multiple H1 tags

The H1 tag is your content’s main heading. To optimise your web pages, you have to make sure that there’s only one H1 tag per page. Also, see to it that it contains the page’s focus keyword. Perform a site audit to ensure that your site’s logo isn’t wrapped in an H1 tag and prevent multiple H1 tags.

3. Optimise your meta tags

If your meta tags are not optimised, you’re missing the chance to rank for your focus keywords and their variations. This is why you need to check your title tags and meta descriptions and ensure that they contain the keywords you want to rank for.

Also, check out the performance report in Google Search Console. Then, find the keywords on each page with a considerable number of impressions but have few clicks. This indicates that your page is considered relevant. However, it isn’t performing well because you’re not targeting related keywords with your content or meta tags.

4. Add keywords to your URL

Similar to meta tags, your URLs can help search engines understand what your web pages are all about. They also assure web visitors that they are on the right page. Therefore, you should edit your URLs to ensure that they don’t merely contain random letters and numbers. You must also add relevant keywords because they can help boost your organic click-through rate (CTR).

5. Keep your URLs short

As part of your onpage SEO checklist for 2021, make sure to trim your URLs. A study of 11.8 million Google search results revealed that web pages with short URLs tend to rank higher than longer URLs. Therefore, keep your URLs short to achieve the best results.

6. Incorporate your focus keyword in the first 150 words

Research showed that Google prioritises the first 100 to 150 words on your webpage. This is why it’s good practice to add your target keywords in this area to obtain a higher search ranking.

7. Check if your images have alt text

Image optimisation is a crucial part of onsite SEO. For this reason, you have to check every image on your site and make sure that they have alt text. The alt text describes the images within a web page. If a web image doesn’t load, your web browser will display the alt text instead. Also, alt texts help Google’s search bots crawl and index the pictures on your site.

8. Link related pages together

Internal linking is a vital SEO practice. It helps connect related content and makes it easier for web crawlers to explore and understand the structure of your site. Be sure to add internal and contextual links to your content to make your web pages more indexable. 

Improve Your Site’s Onpage Elements

No matter how big or small the adjustments you make to your onpage elements are, they will contribute to your site’s SEO when done correctly. Therefore, if you want to obtain better search rankings and edge out the competition, follow the onpage optimisation tips discussed above.

If you need expert assistance when optimising your site for search engines, our SEO team here at Springhill Marketing is happy to help. Please speak with us today and let us put together a bespoke plan for you.