Chapter 3

On-Page SEO

Build Content to Get Found Organically

You’re almost halfway through the SEO guide! So what’s next? Once you’ve done keyword research, know what your target audience is searching for, and have picked out the best keywords and phrases for your business. Now it’s time to learn how to use that information to your advantage. The two best ways to do that are on-page SEO and off-page SEO. First, let’s take a look at on-page.

On-page SEO (what this chapter is about) is optimizing an individual web page’s content and HTML structure to ensure it aligns with user intent and search engine guidelines. On the other hand, off-page SEO (covered in the next chapter) is getting links and other external signals.

Let’s dive into the key areas of on-page SEO, beginning with content creation.

Creating Quality Content

Your content is the core of on-page SEO. Let’s apply all your hard work to your keyword research from the last chapter! Here are a few guidelines for creating high-value, optimized content:

Analyze search intent and SERPs

Start by reviewing the top results of your keywords: Content-length: is it long-form or short-form? Media types: are there images, videos, infographics, or interactive content included? Formatting: are you using the correct layout, headers, and visual elements (images)?

Note: Don’t be mistaken, we’re not telling you to copy the content on these pages. As you’ve learned in Chapter 1, that would fall under black hat SEO and would do the opposite of help.

Avoid Outdated or Unethical On-Page SEO Practices

Your content should always have the human user’s best interest in mind. We keep repeating this in every chapter because it’s such an important concept to internalize. Content ranks on the first SERP because of the need for it on the web by humans.

As we just mentioned, we checked out Black Hat SEO in Chapter 1, but we want to dive into common mistakes we see often with on-page SEO, and then the correct way to handle each situation. Here are some outdated tactics to avoid:

AI-Generated Content

Avoid using AI or automated content tools to generate entire forms of copy without human oversight. Content should be created using responsible AI use, delivering genuine value and insight. Thinking back to Chapter 1, we talked about ranking factors. If you recall one of the major factors was original, user-friendly content. If you think there’s a robot out there that can outsmart Google, you’re wrong.

All of your content should be created by and for humans.

Note: To help check to see what content might be AI-generated, use tools like ZeroGPT or Ai Detection to see the percentage.

Short Content

There is a time and place for shorter web pages but as a general rule– longer, high-quality content pages tend to rank higher. This is why it’s important to do your research and analyze SERPs for your specific keywords and see what type of content search engines want from you. If your topic is complex, try to dive into the content instead of multiple short pages. Instead of separate pages for similar topics like “chiropractic benefits” and “chiropractic safety,” consider a comprehensive page that covers all aspects.

Keyword Stuffing

Cramming a bunch of keywords on a piece of your content just isn’t going to cut it. Keywords should appear naturally within the content. Overloading keywords distracts readers and can lead to technical SEO penalties. Use keywords sparingly, and focus on readability.

Duplicate Content

I’ll give you a free SEO guide if you can guess what this one is… oh, wait! Another older practice is taking a piece of content, duplicating it, and making minor changes to the text to focus on regional areas or some other factor. For example, check out this image:

While there are a lot of rumors about whether or not search engines will penalize you for duplicate content, the truth is they won’t make you rank lower, but they will hurt you in other ways. If Google crawls your page and sees one, or more pieces of content duplicates of another page, according to Google, they will be crawled less frequently and will only show the original piece of content on SERPs.

Long story short, don’t be lazy. All of your content should be original.

Cloaking

Ensure that the content visible to search engines is the same as what users see. When you don’t comply with this, the term search engines have given it is, “cloaking”, which was categorized in Chapter 1 as a black hat SEO tactic. An example of this would be to create a bunch of keywords on your web page with a white font while your background is also white– hidden to the human eye, but there for search engines to see. Cloacking, or hiding content to manipulate rankings is against Google’s guidelines.

Tip: Google has information about spam policies, similar to what we covered, to help people stay away from these practices.

What Your Content SHOULD Have for SEO Success

Now that we’ve covered what to avoid, here’s what to include to create SEO-optimized content:

Clear, Relevant, Well-Written Content:

First and foremost, you have to make sure to focus on the actual content you’re putting on a web page. Content should be easy to read, formatted in a digestible way, with relevant content. If the page doesn’t align with the user’s intent, re-evaluate your keyword selection or adjust the content.

Great Readability

Ensure that your content is accessible by:

• Text size and color – Your font should be easy to read by everyone, on a background that makes it pop. For example, if your background is black, a white font is a lovely option, and vice-versa.
• Bolding, italics, and underlining – If there is a word that you’d like to stand out to your web page visitors, add some flair by bolding or underlining it, but use it sparingly.
• Headers – We’ll dive more into this soon, but you’ll notice in this guide that we break our content down by creating sections using headlines.
• Paragraphs – You’ll also notice that we use a lot of paragraph breaks. It’s easier to digest and keep your place when content isn’t in one big bunch.
• Bullet point and numbers lists – When you have a list of information to get across, like this, give bullet points a try!

When we use WordPress to create our client websites, we use this awesome plugin called Yoast SEO (it’s a must-have for anyone who uses WordPress). It gives general rules to you for readability and will tell you where it sees room for improvement. Yoast also has a bunch of keyword tools to help you out.

Header Tags

The use of headers is very important for the readability of your page, but also to indicate important information throughout your content. Use headers to structure your content, generally H1 to H6– H1 being the “most important” header information, and H6 the least. Subheadings (H2 to H6) are great for organizing information, guiding users, and signaling hierarchy to search engines.

Tip: You do not, and most of the time will not use every single sub-heading category, and that is 100% okay! Even in a long guide like this, we’re not using H5 or H6 header tags.

Proper Grammar and Spelling

If your content is full of misspellings and grammatical errors, search engines will notice it and see it as a poor user experience for those who visit your site. Search engines may lower rankings for content with frequent errors. Tools like Grammarly and Google Docs help ensure clarity and correctness.

Tip: Search engines love questions since people ask a lot of questions on search engines. Adding sections answering common questions or FAQs is a great added bonus to most pages.

On-Page “Technical” Elements for SEO Success

These technical aspects may require some knowledge of web development:

Meta Titles

Meta titles define your page title in search results. To optimize:

• Include the primary keyword.
• Place the keyword early in the title for visibility.
• Keep titles concise, ideally under 60 characters.

If you have a WordPress site and installed the plugin we just recommended, Yoast SEO, you’ll be able to edit your page title straight on your WordPress dashboard like this:

This title is what will be showcased in SERPs like this:

It usually will show up in web browser tabs too like this:

Meta Descriptions

These are under the same family as title tags. They’re on the back end of your web pages and are a brief description of what your web page is about. Provide a brief description (under 160 characters) of the page. Meta descriptions are essential for click-through rates but don’t directly affect rankings. Use them to set user expectations and information for the page. You’ll also be able to edit these easily on Yoast SEO like this:

You’ll also see these on SERPs like this:

URL Structure

A URL is the web address for pieces of content on the web. A well-organized URL is short, descriptive, and includes keywords relevant to the content. Avoid long or complex URLs. So what things can you do to get the most out of your URLs? Read on.

Clean and Clear Page Naming

One of the first things we do anytime we make a new WordPress website is, go to the settings and change the way URLs are automatically created. WordPress sites are set up to create URLs weirdly. Usually something like this:

Page Organization

It is important to set up your URL organization from the start. It helps you, users, and search engines stay organized with content and it makes working with analytics on the tail end much easier. This might look like a cluster of pages like: “example.com/seo-guide/chapter-1” “example.com/seo-guide/chapter-2“

URL Keywords

Another opportunity to use your keyword in the URL. Keep this reasonable and relevant.

Internal Links

In Chapter 1, we discussed how important it is to have a crawlable website. Internal links improve site navigation and signal page relevance. The best way to start is by creating navigations that link to and from the most important pages of your website, which is usually a website navigation bar. We’ll talk more about this next chapter.

External Links

Also known as outbound links, external links are hyperlinks that lead from your website to another site. They play a significant role in SEO by connecting your content to authoritative sources, which can improve the credibility of your page in the eyes of users and search engines.

Tip: Reputable links can significantly enhance your content’s credibility, trustworthiness, and positively impact your SEO. Be careful when selecting external links to include in your content. It is important to avoid linking directly to a competitor in your industry and/or area. You don’t want to give your competitors unintentional leads!

Anchor Text

Another common way to internally link your pages is to create links in the text of your content. An example for us might be linking to this SEO guide in the copy of the SEO Services page of our website.

Image Alt Text

The alt text describes images to visually impaired users and helps search engines understand the image context. Think of them kind of like a caption. This is an opportunity that many people miss and can help set you apart. This is another chance for you to naturally plug your keywords, not cram them. When the alt text is a sentence or two that describes the image very well, Google is more likely to favor it.

Technical On-Page SEO

Some more on-page SEO factors are more technical and usually require at least some web development skills or a web developer. But if you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins you can install to help out here if you’re not too familiar with the backend of your website. These are the most important technical SEO factors you should focus on:

Website Speed

Slow load times harm user experience and SEO. Try to get your load speed under three seconds by optimizing image file sizes, using caching plugins, and selecting a reliable hosting provider.

Mobile Optimization

With most users on phones, it would be beneficial to ensure your site is mobile-friendly. Use responsive design to adapt the content layout for mobile screens automatically.

Sitemap

A sitemap helps search engine crawlers navigate your website by listing all of your pages in a single file. While some argue that not all websites need a sitemap, having one won’t hurt, and it can benefit SEO by ensuring crawlers find all pages.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file guides search engine crawlers on which pages to avoid indexing, doing the opposite of a sitemap. This can be useful for hiding pages that are script-heavy or slow to load from being indexed. Most average users won’t need to adjust their robots.txt file, but it can be a helpful tool for specific SEO needs.

HTTPS

Google introduced HTTPS as a ranking factor in 2014, giving sites with SSL certificates a slight boost in SEO. We recommend absolutely every website do this. Beyond the SEO advantage, having HTTPS helps with user trust – websites without SSL display a “NOT SECURE” message, which can discourage new visitors from entering the site.

Congratulations! You made it through the longest and most difficult chapter. This next one is still incredibly important, Chapter 4: Link Building.

Frequently Asked Questions