One of the biggest troubles for any blogger is increasing their website traffic.
Structuring a perfect SEO optimized page is not at all easy. It takes a lot of time and optimizing skills to become good at increasing your organic traffic.
If you are looking for an easy to follow On-Page SEO guide, you have come to the right place.
Before getting into details on optimizing your web pages perfectly for search engines, we’ll first talk about what’s it all about and few dumbest on-page SEO mistakes most people make.
Whether you are running an eCommerce website or a blog, you need to master the art of on-page optimization.
3 dumbest on-page SEO mistakes to avoid at all costs.

1. Over optimizing your content: Never stuff keywords in your blog posts especially when you are writing small articles that contain 500 to 600 words. That’s the surefire way to get penalized by Google Panda. I would recommend you to use no more than 5 to 6 times (your keyword) in a 1000 word article along with the usage of relevant keywords to rank better in search engines.

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1. Writing crappy short articles: Most beginners make this mistake while optimizing their blog content. They write short and mediocre stuff and heavily use keywords on short content. It won’t work. Short content won’t rank well in search engines especially when you are competing a high crowded niche like Technology, Internet, News, Marketing, Fitness etc. Aim to write 1500 to 2000 word articles by using long tail keywords for better on-page SEO results.


2. Avoiding the on-page SEO cheat sheet: Following on-page SEO techniques isn’t hard if you have a cheat sheet. Most bloggers don’t follow one, that’s the reason why they fail to bring more traffic.
 

Don’t worry, if you are making the above 3 mistakes, I’m going to cover them in detail in this guide so you can use the on-page SEO techniques to boost your blog traffic.
Here are 5 on-page SEO strategies that will increase your search traffic.

On-page SEO techniques to boost your search traffic

Most people think and do on-page SEO completely wrong. On-page SEO is not about stuffing keywords all over your web pages. It’s all about using the language your audience wants!
Creating content that your audience type on Google search results.
Once you get that mindset, you will be extremely successful in utilizing the power of proper on-page SEO to increase your website search traffic.
Before doing any on-page SEO on your content, focus on giving your audience the top priority. Don’t use keywords that are just intended to increase traffic. Your overall priority should be providing value to your blog audience so that they will read your stuff and trust you. It not only increases your brand awareness but also sales.
One extremely powerful way to find what your target audience wants is Quora.
Step 1: Go to Quora (it’s a question and answer based platform used by thousands of intellectuals) and type in your favorite search terms that you want to cover on your blog.

Step 2: Pick the questions that you are mostly interested in. In the above screenshot, I highlighted the really interesting questions for the keyword “SEO tips”.
Step 3: Start creating content around it that is answers all your audience questions or problems. That’s it! See, how simple it is?
This not only provides your audience a great reason to read and share your content but also gives you more chances on winning Google’s game on increasing your website traffic using the proper on-page SEO techniques that you are going to find below.
Whether you agree it or not, proper keyword research is the key to increasing any website traffic. But most people don’t increase their traffic because they identify wrong keywords (in other words short tail keywords such “best cars” instead of searching for long tail keywords like “best cars in India under 10 lakhs”).
Write detailed content with lots of useful information if you want to boost your organic traffic with on-page SEO techniques. Short posts don’t cut the edge and they really don’t add any value either to your audience or search engines.
Luckily, finding long tail keywords to increase your website traffic has been never easy. There are a lot of tools and methods to find long tail keywords including long tail pro keyword research tool, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner.
I would recommend you to start using Google’s Keyword Planner for finding long tail keywords if you are new to keyword research. Once you get the idea of doing proper keyword research, you can then move on to Long Tail Pro or SEMrush for betterment.
Here’s a simple step by step tutorial to find keywords using Keyword Planner.
Step 1: Open Google’s Keyword Planner (you need AdWords account which is free to open this up).
Step 2: Enter any keywords that you are trying to rank for (and also include the countries where your target audience are, I generally include both US and Indian audience while doing keyword research).
Step 3: Choose the “long tail keywords” that contain more than 3 keywords in it. It’s much easier to rank high in Google search results by using long tail keywords.
First of all, run a free website speed test. I recommend you to try Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find out your website loading time and performance. All these tools are free and they provide incredible information about your website speed.
Whether you know it or not, your website speed highly affects your overall search engine traffic. If you are not getting the traffic you deserve, it might be mainly because your website loading time sucks.
Here are few simple tips to increase your website speed.

• Always use a reliable hosting service. If you are a beginner and want a reliable, fast and affordable hosting, I highly recommend you Bluehost. They also offer you a free domain name for 1 year along with the anytime money back guarantee! Know more about it here.


• Use less plugins. The more plugins you use the more burden it will create on your servers, hence your website speed drops. So make sure to keep your plugins usage under 15 for better performance.


• Your website speed majorly depends on the images. Make sure to always optimize each and every single image you use. Don’t use more than 100 KB images, it often impacts on your overall search engine rankings.
 

I don’t recommend you to start using tools to automate your on-page SEO process, it’s one of the surefire ways to get penalized by Google crawlers. But you must need an on-page SEO cheat sheet to properly optimize your content every single time.
I don’t recommend you to follow hundreds of things to make a perfect on-page SEO cheat sheet though here are few essential things you should do every time you optimize the content.

1. SEO friendly blog titles: Your title is the biggest on-page SEO factor. If it’s not optimized for at least one primary keyword, you won’t get the traffic you deserve. So use your blog titles smart!


2. Meta description: Mention your primary keyword at least once in your meta description. I strongly advise you to start using WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin as it easily allows you optimize well!


3. Optimized URL’s: Use no more than 3 to 4 words in a URL. The lengthier your URL the bad it is for you in the search results while trying to rank for a keyword. Keep them short and relevant.


4. Put keywords in first 100-150 words: If you want to utilize the proper on-page SEO techniques, this is a must. Always use your primary keywords in the first 100 to 150 words on your content. This gives more weightage while search engine bots crawling your content.


5. Use LSI keywords: Instead of stuffing the same keywords, start using synonyms of the keywords you want to rank for. Search engines have advanced algorithms that help you rank even if you use LSI keywords throughout your content.


6. Alt tags in images: Image optimization is one of the best on-page SEO techniques one can ever use. Never forget to add at least one image on your blog posts and always make sure to use your main keyword in the alt tags of the images.
 

Use the above 6 points as a must follow on-page SEO techniques cheat sheet and you will have more chances of ranking higher for any long tail keyword!

Must read: Top 10 On-page SEO Factors that Will Drive Massive Traffic from Search Engines
Here’s the #1 simple tip to boost your search traffic: use the right SEO tools!
On-page is made easy by having access to the proper SEO tools. Here are 3 essential tools I highly recommend you to check out if you want to implement the right on-page techniques on your blog or websites.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Whether if you are a beginner to WordPress or someone who is looking for the BEST on-page SEO tool, try this out. WordPress SEO by Yoast is not only a free WordPress plugin but it offers exceptional features to make on-page optimization extremely easy even if you are a newbie.
Basically this plugin offers you to enter a primary keyword and tells you whether your web page is properly optimized for search engines or not by looking at your site title, meta description, body of the content, URL, image alt tags etc.

SEMrush
I love using SEMrush. It’s not only my favorite tool that helped me increase my search traffic by 15% in just 30 days but also helps me find better keywords that I can use while doing on-page SEO optimization.
Using SEMrush, you can do

• competitor’s analysis
• checking any website traffic
• analyzing the backlinks of any site
• creating site audit to fix your website issues
• finding highly profitable keywords
• comparing the domain results of any of 5 competitors
• and so much more

Long Tail Pro
As I said earlier in the post, your on-page SEO majorly depends on keyword research. Without finding and using the right keywords in your content creation, there’s no way you can increase your traffic.
Here’s where Long Tail Pro comes into rescue, it’s an amazing keyword research tool for finding golden keywords in any niche.
Here are few advantages of using this tool for keyword research for better on-page SEO.

• Search Multiple Keywords at Once
• Generate up to 800 results per seed keyword
• Competitor Analysis on top 10 Google Results
• Check Rankings of sites in Google, Yahoo, and Bing
• Pre-filter keywords
• Automatically find Domains
• Google or Bing Title Competition

Final thoughts on using on-page SEO techniques

Increasing your website traffic from search engines is NEVER hard if you follow the right on-page SEO techniques. Your SEO success majorly depends on the things you do on your web pages. This is where on-page SEO plays a big role.
If you start implementing all the on-page strategies and tips mentioned in this detailed guide, you will definitely start noticing huge traffic spike from search engines.
So what are you waiting for? Start following the tips mentioned above and let me know if you ever have any questions. Please share this on-page SEO guide with others so they can benefit in increasing their traffic.
I’d also love to know if you have follow any more on-page SEO optimization strategies you use on your blogs.