Guide to SEO Website Optimization with On-Page SEO Standards

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

A guide to SEO website optimization, more detailed and easier to understand than ever

A guide to SEO website optimization is probably a topic no longer unfamiliar to any SEOer. In fact, when you search the keyword guide to SEO website optimization on Google, you will get no fewer than 8 million results related to this phrase. But Markdao's article today will not stop at showing you how to do it — it will also define the necessary concepts and the importance of those concepts in optimizing on-page SEO for your website design.

Guide to SEO website optimization: 14 basic factors you need to know when optimizing on-page SEO

Compared with the past, website SEO is no longer simple, because search engines — Google in particular — have become more "strict" with the arrival of a series of algorithms such as Google Panda, Google Penguin, and so on. Still, in the end, SEO-friendly web design remains the prerequisite for Google to decide your website's ranking, thereby bringing you closer to potential customers. It cannot be denied that on-page SEO standards play an extremely important role in Google's evaluation.

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your content, images, and website structure according to the rules set by search engines, in order to make the site friendlier to them — especially Google. So if you are an SEOer, you need to understand that on-page optimization should be done first, before building links for your website.

Today, Markdao will cover the important factors you cannot skip when optimizing on-page SEO:

• URLs

• Page title (Meta title)

• Description tag (Meta description)

• Headings (H1 → H6)

• Images

• Keywords

• AMP

• Microformats

• Schema

• Sitemap

• Robot.txt

• Internal links

• External links

• Website management with Google Analytics

In this part 1 of the guide to SEO website optimization, we will introduce the first 7 factors in detail; the next 7 will be covered in part 2 — stay tuned!

Guide to SEO website optimization: a closer look at the basic concepts

URLs, meta titles, and meta descriptions... are factors frequently mentioned in guide to SEO website optimization articles, but what do these concepts actually mean, and where do they appear on your website?

How important is the URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is used to reference resources on the Internet and can also provide hyperlink capability for web pages. To put it more simply, the URL is the address leading to a fixed web page published on the Internet.

Thanks to URLs, Internet users and Google bots can reach your website or web pages, which is why it is the first factor Markdao's guide to SEO website optimization will cover, for these reasons:

• Optimizing URLs is the foundation for raising your website's ranking on search results pages

• Optimizing URLs helps users and search engine robots understand what topic your page covers. If the URL is friendly to both audiences, the visit rate to your page will improve.

An SEO-standard optimized URL should not contain special characters such as @, #, $, %, &, *..., and words must not carry diacritics. Next, it is a plus if the URL begins with the main keyword the page will cover. You should use hyphens (-) in the structure, as this makes the URL friendlier to users and Google bots. The final important point is that URLs should not be too long — ideally around 60 characters — and if there is hierarchy in the URL, known as the slug, there should be no more than 3 slugs in an SEO-standard URL.

One small note: once a page has been indexed, you should not change the URL, as this will lead to 404 errors. But if a change is necessary, don't forget to set up a 301 redirect to the new URL!

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On-page optimization: don't forget to optimize the Meta title

The meta title is the title tag for a web page or a blog post. The note here is that each web page should have only one title tag. The meta title is extremely important because it appears on search results pages together with the meta description, and it is the key factor in whether users decide to click through to your website.

To achieve this, the meta title needs to be optimized. First, your title tag must contain the keyword, because on search results pages, the keyword in the title is automatically bolded if it appears in the Internet user's search query — and it is a plus if the keyword is placed at the beginning. Second, under Google's rules, titles exceeding 70 characters have the trailing characters converted to (...), which would be terrible if the hidden part contained the keyword. Third, the title must accurately reflect the content the page covers, because the Google bot is smarter than you think — if the bot sees that the title and the page content don't match, it will immediately stop indexing. Finally, if the title is placed in the H1, the Google bot will find and index it faster.

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How do you optimize the meta description tag?

The meta description, or description tag, is a snippet summarizing the content the web page or article will cover. Like the meta title, the meta description is also an HTML attribute, located within the meta tag, so it is an extremely important factor that directly affects SEO results.

A web page's description tag is the part not displayed within the article structure, but shown on the search results page right below the title (meta title). When users query the search engine for the information they need, the search engine will bold the keywords in the description tag that match the users' queries. Most guide to SEO website optimization articles hold that the more appealing the description, the higher the visit rate to the website — and that is exactly what Markdao wants to point out to you.

But for the description tag to be appealing, first the summary content in the tag must relate to the content the page will cover, and keywords must be inserted intelligently — specifically, no more than 5 insertions for the main keyword. For Google, the length of a description tag should not exceed 320 characters; characters beyond this number will be converted to (...). Moreover, each web page should have only one description tag.

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How should headings be optimized?

An SEO-standard optimized article is not a long-winded piece with thousands of words — it should be an article with different specific sections, separated by headings. These headings are set up to emphasize the main ideas in the web page or article, and there are 6 types: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 — of which H1, H2, and H3 are the 3 mandatory elements and need to be allocated intelligently.

According to most guide to SEO website optimization articles, H1 is the most important heading, because, as mentioned above, H1 is where we place the meta title, helping readers and Google bots understand what issue the page will discuss. After learning the article's topic, by glancing overall at the H2s and H3s, both audiences will know the main points you want to cover in the article. Thanks to these headings, an Internet user's reading of the article — or Google's crawler's crawl — proceeds smoothly and quickly.

But what does it mean to allocate headings intelligently on a web page? First, for H1, there should be only 1 H1 per web page; H2 should not exceed 4 and H3 should not exceed 6 in an article. All of these headings should have keywords inserted, but inserting keywords here does not mean stuffing many in is better. Next, headings should not be left as hidden text — this can easily get your website flagged by Google's algorithms. Finally, the content within all of these headings must not be duplicated, and it should be written in a way that attracts users to stay on your website longer.

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Optimizing images when doing on-page SEO — is it necessary?

The guide to SEO website optimization doesn't stop at optimizing wording and website structure — you must also pay attention to the images on the site or in the article. Images are precisely the wonderful tool that draws Internet users into your website and keeps them there. In addition, on the search results page, Google returns not only news- and information-related results but also... images, so if you don't optimize this factor, you will unfortunately miss many opportunities for your business.

To optimize images, the factors you need to pay attention to are:

• Image dimensions: The reason image dimensions must not be forgotten when optimizing on-page SEO is that image size has a considerable impact on page load speed — the top factor Google bots consider when evaluating your website. Therefore, images published on the website should be between 360 pixels and 1280 pixels.

• Image aspect ratio: alongside image dimensions, the aspect ratio is also a factor you cannot skip. The most frequently used aspect ratios are square, 4:3, and 16:10.

• The ALT attribute: Google bots cannot read images, which is why you need to add alternative text (image Alt) to the images you publish. The purpose of this is not only to let Google bots read and understand what content your image shows, but also to serve visually impaired users.

• File name: alongside the ALT attribute, the file name also plays an equally important role, because most images found on search engines contain keywords in the file name that match the query keyword. Note that the file name should be concise, no more than 6 words, and like the image alt, the file name should accurately reflect the content in the image.

• File size: although image file size does not affect ranking, you should still compress files when publishing — ideally no more than 400KB while preserving the image quality.

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Choosing good keywords is also an effective way to optimize on-page

In the next part of this guide to SEO website optimization article, Markdao will cover how to optimize keywords sensibly. Every time keywords come up, SEO folks have a fun saying: "keywords are gold for any SEO campaign." In the past, inserting however many keywords into an article for optimization wasn't tightly restricted by Google — thanks to which keyword rankings rose very quickly. But now, Google and other search engines have become smarter, so keyword stuffing has become meaningless and can even cause your website's ranking to stagnate, or worse, get hit by algorithms.

So when optimizing keywords, you need to pay attention to two issues: what keyword density is reasonable, and where keywords should be placed for the best optimization.

On keyword density, as we just mentioned, keyword stuffing is not only rated poorly by the Google crawler but also irritates Internet users. So you need to make sure your content is truly natural and the keywords are distributed sensibly throughout it. Specifically, the main keyword should appear at a density of 2–5%, and secondary keywords should be at a lower level.

On keyword placement, beyond being spread sensibly throughout the content, the Google bot gives preference to pages or articles with keywords placed right in the first characters — within the first 50–100 characters is best. Moreover, other important places where you should insert keywords are:

• The meta title tag

• The meta description tag

• The heading tags

• Image alternative text

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AMP — is it really a complicated concept in on-page SEO?

Realistically speaking, AMP doesn't guarantee you will fully improve your website's ranking, but it adds points to your web design when Internet users search on a phone or tablet. Specifically, when they search on a mobile device, if your website has AMP installed, it will appear in the top positions, outpacing competitors who don't know about this tool.

The reason AMP is increasingly important is that Internet users tend to favor handheld devices — the tools that let them connect with everyone anytime, anywhere. AMP not only makes your web design friendlier to mobile screen interfaces but also helps improve page load speed on those devices, even when the Internet connection slows down.

Installing AMP is not too difficult — every CMS available today has optimized this feature. For example: if you use WordPress, you just need to install the AMP plug-in. Note that after installing AMP, you should check your pages on mobile devices.

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SEO website optimization becomes simpler when done with Markdao

So Markdao has just introduced you to 7 important factors when optimizing a website on-page: the URL, the meta title tag, the meta description tag, the heading tags (H1 → H6), images, keywords, and AMP. However, if you feel you might run into difficulties optimizing these factors, you can absolutely contact Markdao. In a short time, we will help you learn which parts of your website are well optimized and which elements need improvement, so your SEO campaign runs smoothly and delivers the results you want.

In short, we hope today's guide to SEO website optimization from Markdao will equip you with more knowledge for raising your website's ranking. We will return with part 2 and the remaining 7 factors: Microformats, Schema, Sitemap, Robot.txt, Internal links, External links, and Website management with Google Analytics.

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MARKDAO AGENCY VIETNAM

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