8 Savvy On Page SEO Optimization Techniques for WordPress

In order to succeed with your on page SEO optimization, you first of all need to have done your keyword research. The foremost thing to do is to find relevant and useful keywords, and then build your blog posts around said keywords.

You might want to try and think of what type of keywords your target audience would search for when trying to find products and services similar to yours.

Generating Keyword Ideas for on Page SEO Optimization

There are tools that help you with your SEO content writing. Some of them will help you come up with long-tail keywords, such as “Keyword Sheeter”, which is available for free.

Things to Keep In Mind When Choosing Your Keywords

When you select keywords for on page SEO optimization, you need to take into account the following:

If the keywords have a good monthly search volume
Whether the users who search for them have an intent to buy
How well they suit the blog post
How difficult it will be to rank for them (i.e. competitiveness)
To what extent the keywords can be included in an attractive headline

Helpful Services for on Page SEO Optimization

As for the analysis of the keywords, their search volume, and difficulty, there are services such as:

Google Keyword Planner
SEMrush
Ahrefs
Moz

Brand vs. Conversion

When choosing your ideal keyword it is also a good thing if you keep in mind if you are writing the post in order for people to be informed, or if the purpose is to generate a sale.

In other words we are talking about brand vs. conversion.

Where to Put the Keywords

After having chosen your desired keyword, you then need to include it in your on page SEO optimization by adding it to the following elements:

The page title
Headers to a certain extent
Your meta description of that particular post
In the body of the content

When including the keyword in the body text, there should normally be a keyword to the rest of the text ratio of at least 0.5%, and in most cases higher. Preferably > 1%.

Just make sure you don’t over-optimize!

Something to Help You Out With Your on Page SEO Optimization…

If you are wondering how you are supposed to continuously know if you have met the correct percentage, and inserted the keyword into the right places, then chill.

There are plugins in WordPress that help you with that, such as:

Yoast
RankMath

On Page SEO Optimization of the Title and Meta Description

When your post’s SEO value is “determined” there are many factors which come into play, but a few of the more crucial ones are the page title and the meta description.

Both of these fields need to contain your primary keyword, in order for the post to rank well. The title itself should not surpass 60 characters so that it doesn’t get truncated in the SERP.

A Word of Caution

Please note that even though the title should contain the keyword, this doesn’t mean that the title should only consist of that keyword.

For example, let’s say that you are targeting a dog owner audience and you want to rank for the term “dog food”. In this case the title itself should not be “Dog Food” only, since that will have a negative impact on your on page SEO optimization.

Keyword + Something Else in the Title

Instead it would be a lot better if you put the title as something longer that includes the keyword, such as for example: “Dog Food That Is Totally Delicious”.

The placement of the keyword in the title is also of the essence, and the further to the left you are able to put it the better. That does on the other hand not mean that it has to be FURTHEST to the left, since for example a descriptive power word is at times necessary in order to draw attention.

Working With the Headers

When Googlebot crawls your site and your posts, it is essential that it gets an idea of how your material is structured. That is needed in order for it to understand what your content is about, so that it can rank it appropriately.

It does that by, among other things, taking a look at your different headers:

H1 – This the same as the post title
H2 – The for the most part most frequent type of header
H3 – Sub-header to H2 when a categorization of the text is necessary
H4 – Sub-header to H3. You get the picture…

Improve on Page SEO Optimization With Keywords in the Headers

As already mentioned the main keyword needs to be present in the title (H1). It should however also occur in the headers that are in the actual body of the text (H2, H3, H4).

You can use your chosen WordPress SEO plugin when performing this part of your on page SEO optimization, in order to tell you if you have included your keywords in your headers to a sufficient degree.

The Content Needs to Have Relevance and Be of High Quality

It is important that you do your on page SEO optimization with the relevant keywords, and furthermore do all the other relevant optimization stuff.

But there is one thing that you should not forget…

There are actual people reading your posts as well! You need to keep them in mind, and not ONLY think of including the keywords.

Why?

Because if your content is crap then two things are likely to occur:

People will not come back to your site
People will not share your material

Indirect Negative SEO Impact

Both of these things will have an indirect negative impact on SEO. You will get less exposure, and Googlebot will notice that:

Traffic is not as high as it “ought” to be
People don’t stay for long

In more simple terms it will think: “Meh…”.

Consider This in Order to Create Inspiring WordPress Content

Make sure that you deliver content that aligns with the intent of your target audience. It furthermore needs to be engaging and provide the reader with clear information.

Writing a blog post or article for the web is a lot different from writing for example something that would fit in a science journal.

In order for your material to be digestible online, you need to do to the following with your content:

Break up the text into smaller paragraphs. Remember that a paragraph in a blog post can also be only one sentence!
Bullet points whenever possible. This makes a list easier to consume.
Frequent images in order to illustrate points makes it easier for the reader. Only consuming texts will sooner or later make a lot of visitors tired.
Videos are also great to embed in the blog post!

Images and videos also add to your SEO value. Therefore, by including such things during the on page SEO optimization, you are improving your content for both the reader as well as Googlebot.

Bonus Tip for Creating Engaging Content

As we have entered into an age where data science is becoming all the more important, it is not that surprising that this can have an SEO impact.

These days you can improve your on page SEO optimization by including infographics that are based on relevant data in order to illustrate your points.

Some examples of infographics:

Histograms
Line charts
Tree diagrams
Process infographic
GIS maps
Network diagrams
Timeline infographic

This will add value to your post!

Improve Website Images for SEO

I mentioned earlier that it is a good thing to include a lot of images in order to keep the reader interested. But images can also have an impact on load time.

Website speed is very important to take into account when doing the on page SEO optimization because of two reasons:

Slow websites rank poorly and for good reason
When Googlebot crawls your site it will quickly spend its crawl budget

So What Is a Crawl Budget?

Each time Googlebot crawls a website in order to index its pages and posts, it will have a certain amount of time to go through the material. This is called the crawl budget.

And when it doesn’t have anymore of that crawl budget, it will move on to another site.

For you this means that the slower the page is, the less your stuff will tend to get indexed!

But How Can We Have Both a Quick Site and Helpful Imagery?

There is a need to do on page SEO optimization of your images in order for them to load well. There are three main things that we need to think about:

The images need to be of the right size (ideally less than 100kb)
Next-gen images such as webp or avif should be used instead of jpg, png, bnp etc.
If you are working with WordPress, then the images should have the right dimensions.

A while back I wrote an in-depth blog post about how to optimize images in WordPress for speed by tweaking all of these three things.

Descriptive Image File Names

If possible it is good to try to include your keyword in the file name, together with a few other words. Personally I do find this to be a bit tricky though if we are working with long-tail keywords.

The file name should be as as short and descriptive as possible, and if we are working with a long-tail keyword of let’s say 5+ words, then this would naturally prove “challenging”.

Therefore I would regard the naming of files for SEO purposes sort of a grey area of on page SEO optimization, but that’s just my personal opinion.

Using Hyphens in Image File Names

When naming the file you should also replace any spaces or underlines with hyphens. Hyphens are used in order to indicate space between words, like this: a-really-fun-image.webp

Adding Alt-Tags to Your Images

Adding alt-tags to your images is an important part of the on page SEO optimization process.

The alt-tag of your image serves two purposes:

If the image can not be displayed, then the user will see the alt-tag text instead
Googlebot will examine the alt-tag in order to figure out what the image is about

Your keyword should be included in the alt-tag when performing on page SEO optimization, but it should also be combined with a descriptive text. If you only put in the keyword and nothing else, then this can be regarded as spammy by Google.

The SEO plugin that you are using should give you an indication whether you have used your keyword enough times in your image alt-tags.

Use Both Internal and External Links

Another thing that helps Googlebot understand the page structure of your website would be the link aspect. When you add links in your blog posts there are two types:

Internal – That go to other pages on your domain
External – That go to other pages on other domains

You need both internal and external links in order to improve your on page SEO optimization. And in a way this is kind of understandable.

In order for the post, that you are creating, to add to the collective consciousness of the web it should also point to other relevant sources other than itself. We are hence talking about a symbiosis structure.

Your Link Building for SEO Shows Your Priorities

There is some SEO value in how you direct the internal links between the pages on your domain. If you have a lot of links pointing towards a certain page, then that on page SEO optimization technique will let Google know that you view it as a priority.

The Anchor Text

Make sure that the anchor text is descriptive, both when it comes to the internal as well as the external links. Google will then get a better understanding of the target page and what it is about.

Another key issue with on page SEO optimization, which has become even more relevant with Google updates during recent years, is relevance.

There should be a clear relevance between the part of the text that you are linking from and the page that is being linked to.

Tweaking the Slug

The structure of the slug of the URL should first of all be rather short (ideally maximum five words). At the same time it is a good practice to include the primary key word in the slug during the on page SEO optimization.

Just as we saw above, we also get a situation in this case where we have two best practices that are conflicting (if we are targeting long-tail keywords).

If we are using long-tail keywords of 5+ words, then there is not much room for anything else in the slug.

In such cases I have personally opted for using only the keyword as the slug during the on page SEO optimization. As far as the research that I’ve done, this is yet to have any negative impact.

But how knows, maybe some update will change that in the future.

On Page SEO Optimization for Mobile

During recent years Google has made a switch in order to prioritize mobile friendly first. The website hence needs to loads quickly on mobile devices, and also have a proper mobile friendly interface.

Google has provided a tool called PageSpeed Insights that helps you measure how you can improve your site for both mobile devices and stationary computers.

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

If you are using WordPress, it would be a good thing to perform some research in regards to which themes are mobile friendly.

A simple Google search would probably suffice in these cases.

WordPress themes that are adapted for mobile usage will look good on different mobile devices, and not only when you open the website on a PC.

WordPress Theme HTTP Requests

Something that I have also found myself to be very crucial when choosing a WordPress theme is how many HTTP requests it does.

Having a theme that does too many HTTP requests can easily slow down the page. The theme should ideally not make more than 20, since that is when it starts to slow down the site.

That ideal situation can be a bit hard to achieve if you are not okay with a theme the is way too basic. At least up to 25 ought to be okay.

Now if you have HTTP requests that are in the hundreds, then it might be a good idea to improve your on page SEO optimization by switching your WordPress theme.

Paragraph Length Matters a Lot for Mobile

When I first started out creating blog posts I would write large chunks of paragraphs. Each subject that I brought up would consist of a paragraph containing five sentence or so.

People often do this when creating online blog posts or articles. So it wasn’t like I was the only one guilty of this.

I would say that there are two main reasons why this happens:

In school and university we are taught to write scientific texts, not texts for web usage
When people write blog posts they normally write them on a PC

And if it looks good on the PC, they often don’t check how it looks on a mobile device.

On Page SEO Optimization of Paragraphs for Mobile

In order for the text to be easily consumed on a mobile device, each paragraph should be two, maybe three sentences tops.

There might be times when you need to surpass this, but when you are writing for mobile devices, then try to divide the paragraphs a lot more than you normally would.

This makes it a lot easier when people are consuming the material on their smartphones for example.

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Johan Bengtsson

Johan Bengtsson holds a master of science degree in Economic Growth, Innovation & Spatial Dynamics and a C2-certificate in the Spanish language. He has extensive experience with SEO content writing, as well as the translation industry, within Europe and Latin America.

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