On-page SEO is the method of optimizing the factors on the website pages to improve its search engine rankings on Google. There are several factors on a web page that can impact its performance on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). I have covered here the major factors in the order of hierarchy:

Major ON- Page SEO Factors:

1. Content :

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” – Bill Gates

It is the most important SEO factor and the most hard to master as well. Content gives people a reason to visit your web page. Providing resourceful and engaging content is the best way to optimize your website for search.

Know more about getting targeted traffic through content.

2. Best Practices:

• Good content provides value to its users. To the point where informative content drives traffic to your website.
• Plagiarism is an evil, and it will never help you. You should always give credit to who first publishes the content.
• Avoid keyword stuffing and use synonyms and related words for the content.
• Your content should be accessible by crawler and bots.
• It should be linkable, i.e. it should be directly accessible, reproducible and shareable.

3. Title Tag:

Title tag defines the theme of the website. It is the description that is displayed on the search results. The title is a key traffic driving element to your website, thus it is very important to optimize it for the best results.

Best Practices:

• It should range between 55 to 60 characters.
• Beginning of the title tag has most, thus, it should have the most targeted keyword.
• You can use hyphen to separate keywords.
• Use ‘|’ pipe symbol to put brand name.
• Unless people can easily recognize the brand, it is better to start with target keywords.
• Avoid using special characters

4. URL of site:

If you are building the site from scratch, then it is most suitable to use proper SEO friendly URLs. URLs showing proper hierarchy of content with content topic are considered feasible from an SEO standpoint. But if it is an already established site, then it is risky to change URLs, since you will lose any authority the page might have built in the past.

5. H1 and H2 tags:

H1 and H2 tags show headings and subheadings on the page. You can identify heading tags by either looking at the source code of the site or by using a SEO plugin like MOZ toolbar. There should be only one H1 tag per page, people consider multiple H1 to be considered spammy. You can use H2 tags as much as you want. You should be careful where you place important keywords in the heading tags as the gives search engine a signal that the page contains the information user is looking for.

6. Meta Description:

Meta description is what is displayed as a site’s description in search results. If there is no meta description, then google will pick the content from the first paragraph of the content as meta description. It is good to write a custom meta description so that it can include a call-to-action with proper keywords in the appropriate number of characters. It should be between 150 to 160 characters and one should avoid using special characters and quotations.

You can also see the visual guides by Rand Fishkin and Brian Dean for quick reference.

Want a more detailed guide? Look Here.